But calling her for help beat calling in Wulfe, the witchblood (or something magic using, anyway) vampire.
Elizaveta, black magic and all, was preferable to Wulfe. Besides, it was daytime, so I had no choice.
Then I called Adam.
“I heard you gave up your position as organizer,” he said.
“Was that what I was?” I asked. “I thought I was message girl. Yes. Abbot wanted me to get the fae to supply a list of the attending fae, by name, and what their powers were.”
“Ah,” he said. “And you told Abbot it wouldn’t fly.”
“And he said then there would be no talks,” I agreed. “So it wasn’t so much that I resigned as it was that if I continued in my position, there would be no talks.”
“And you wouldn’t have a position,” Adam said dryly.
“Exactly,” I agreed. “But I think he fired me anyway.”
“Sounds good to me,” he said. “It will be a lot less work.”
“Might shorten the life span of everyone living in the US by a decade or so, but less work is good,” I agreed.
He laughed. “The fae would never fill out paperwork for a meeting,” he said.
“Or supply real names,” I said. “Or fill out the sheets with lies. Better all the way around to establish what is possible and what is not possible before all hell breaks loose.”
Back when the fae first went into the reservations, the government had required the fae to give names and tell them what kind of fae they were. I don’t know about the other fae, but I know that Zee gave them the name he was going by right now—and the human-made category of gremlin. That probably fit him as well as anything else, but it trivialized the kind of power he could manifest. The one thing I did know was that none of the fae who filled out those forms were Gray Lords.
“So if you weren’t calling about that,” Adam said, “what are you calling about? And does it have anything to do with the reason my people tell me that the fire suppression system in your shop has been drained?”
“Yep,” I said. “The shop was cursed.”
“I will be right there,” he said. Then he said, in a low tone, “Did you call Elizaveta?”
“It was either her or Wulfe,” I said.
“And it’s daytime,” he agreed. “I’m leaving now.”
8
“It started with this?” asked Elizaveta, holding up the air filter.
She had been stalking around the garage for five minutes, muttering about the puddles everywhere. I was actually surprised that there wasn’t more water—but she hadn’t been here during the deluge.
Tad was in the office calling (with his poor sore fingers) the clients whose cars we had doused with water. We were offering them the repairs free of charge, but not delivering the cars until tomorrow or the next day, depending on how long cleanup took us. A problem, I could hear Tad explaining, with the new fire suppression system.
I’d found a spot near the wall that separated garage from office, and Adam had taken up a station next to me, where he proceeded to ignore Elizaveta’s doings and answer texts and e-mails on his phone. Or maybe he was planning world domination—with Adam’s phone it was hard to tell.
Zee took my other side, leaving the garage at large to Elizaveta.
My cell went off again. But the caller ID was blocked and my policy was that I didn’t pick up on blocked-ID calls just after I got off the hook for a nonpaying government job I didn’t want.
“Yes,” I said. “The air filter was the first thing we found.”
She made a noise and began examining it minutely. The bright orange substance had changed to something that looked a lot more like (and maybe was) the caked-on dirt I sometimes find in cars that belong to people who do a lot of driving on dirt roads around here. A lot of our dirt is powder-fine and coats everything in its path.
“So,” I said, “do you think that the cheese-colored magic plague let loose in my shop is the Hardesty witches? I know it’s an obvious question, but I figured I should ask it anyway.”
“Could be,” drawled Adam. “Unless you’ve been out annoying other witches without telling me.”
“The Hardestys are like . . . the Borgia family. There is seldom only one way for them to win,” counseled Elizaveta absently as she continued to examine the air filter. “Their goal always is to consolidate their power. Judging by their actions, if the meetings do not