guise of formal decapitations sort of ruin my appetite.
He nodded at me, accepting the excuse with a patient and steady expression, though I thought I saw regret in his eyes. He lifted a hand in a silent wave and turned away to walk toward a beat-up old Ford truck that had been built during the Great Depression. Second thoughts pressed in. Maybe I should say something. Maybe I should go for a bite to eat with the old man.
My excuse hadnt been untrue, though. There was no way I could eat. I could still feel the droplets of hot blood hitting my face, still see the body lying unnaturally in a pool of blood. My hands started shaking and I closed my eyes, forcing the vivid, bloody memories out of the forefront of my thoughts. Then I got in the car and tried to leave the memories behind me.
The Blue Beetle is no muscle car, but it flung up a respectable amount of gravel as I left.
The streets werent as bad as they usually were, but it was still hotter than hell, so I rolled down the windows at the first stoplight and tried to think clearly.
Investigate the faeries. Great. That was absolutely guaranteed to get complicated before I got any useful answers. If there was one thing faeries hated doing, it was giving you a straight answer, about anything. Getting plain speech out of one is like pulling out teeth. Your own teeth. Through your nose .
But Ebenezar was right. I was probably the only one on the Council with acquaintances in both the Summer and Winter Courts of the Sidhe. If anyone on the Council could find out, it was me. Yippee.
And just to keep things interesting, I needed to hunt down some kind of unspecified black magic and put a stop to it. That was what Wardens spent all their time doing, when they werent fighting a war, and what Id done two or three times myself, but it wasnt ever pretty. Black magic means a black practitioner of some kind, and they tended to be the sorts of people who were both happy to kill an interfering wizard and able to manage it.
Faeries.
Black magic.
It never rains but it pours.
* * *
Chapter Three
» ^ «
Between one heartbeat and the next, the passenger seat of the Blue Beetle was suddenly occupied. I let out a yelp and nearly bounced my car off of a delivery truck. The tires squealed in protest and I started to slide. I turned into it and recovered, but if Id had another coat of paint on my car Id have collided with the one next to me. My heart in my throat, I got the car moving smoothly again, and turned to glare at the sudden passenger.
Lasciel, aka the Temptress, aka the Webweaver, apparently some kind of photocopy of the personality of a fallen angel, sat in the passenger seat. She could look like anything she chose, but her most common form was that of a tall, athletic blonde wearing a white Greek-style tunic that fell almost to her knee. She sat with her hands in her lap, staring out the front of the car, smiling very slightly.
What the hell do you think youre doing? I snarled at her. Are you trying to get me killed?
Dont be such a baby, she replied, her tone amused. No one was harmed.
No thanks to you, I growled. Put the seat belt on.
She gave me a level look. Mortal, I have no physical form. I exist nowhere except within your mind. I am a mental image. An illusion. A hologram only you can see. There is no reason for me to wear my seat belt.
Its the principle of the thing, I said. My car, my brain, my rules. Put on the damned seat belt or get lost.
She heaved a sigh. Very well. She twisted around like anyone would, drawing the seat belt forward around her waist and clicking it. I knew she couldnt have picked up the physical seat belt and done that, so what I was seeing was only an illusionbut it was a convincing one. I would have had to make a serious effort to see that the actual seat belt hadnt moved.
Lasciel looked at me. Acceptable?
Barely, I said, thinking furiously. Lasciel, as she appeared to me now, was a portion of a genuine fallen angel. The real deal was trapped inside an ancient silver denarius, a Roman coin, which was buried under a couple