The Enchantment Emporium

Chapter Three

It took her a moment to realize the sound dragging her up out of sleep was her phone and a moment after that to find it in the bed.
"Alysha Catherine."
Only the aunties ever used both names. Half asleep, it was impossible to narrow it down any further. "Auntie...?"
"Bea, Alysha Catherine. It's Auntie Bea."
Auntie Bea was one of the David is too powerful to be trusted group. Allie felt her lip curl.
"Don't curl your lip at me, young lady. Why are you still in bed?"
She took the phone away from her ear and peered at the time. "It's twenty after five."
"It's twenty after seven."
" Calgary," she sighed. "Time difference."
"That's no reason to be lying about."
Allie considered it a very good reason to be lying about and thought about mentioning that had she still been working in Toronto, her alarm wouldn't have gone off for another ten minutes and so she'd still be in bed and Auntie Bea could just fuck off and die, but two time zones weren't distance enough for something that stupid. She sighed. "What's the problem, Auntie Bea?"
"Have you figured out what your grandmother is up to?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"I just got here yesterday evening."
"And you're still in bed?"
"Twenty after five," Allie repeated, yawning. "Good-bye, Auntie Bea."
There may have been a protest, but Allie barely heard it as she closed the phone. No one should have to deal with an auntie at five twenty in the morning.
Or at five twenty-three.
Or five thirty.
Her body, still on Ontario time, insisted it was time to get up...
Five forty-five.
... and refused to be convinced otherwise no matter that the room was dark and the bed, although empty, was comfortable.
"Fine."
Auntie Vera called as she got into the shower. Auntie Meredith called during her not entirely successful attempt to make coffee with the space age coffeemaker she found in one of the kitchen cupboards. Allie wasn't willing to agree with her father that the aunties were frightened, but this level of annoying meant they were definitely worried.
Dmitri's youngest sister, Ashley-one of the pre-ritual mass of cousins-called just as she pulled her jeans out from under the bed and discovered that a lemon meringue pie didn't exactly fit in the watch pocket.
"It's just Kristen's being all like totally annoying, and I could come out as soon as school's over so that you won't be alone."
"If I'm still here," Allie pointed out, using the legs of her jeans to wipe up the mess.
"Why wouldn't you be? I heard Auntie Catherine left you a junk store."
"How do you know about the store?"
"I heard my mom and Auntie Carol talking. Your mom told Aunt Ruth and Aunt Ruth told Auntie Vera and Auntie Vera told Auntie Carol and Auntie Carol..."
"I know how it works." She dumped the pie still clinging to her jeans in the toilet and caught the charmed penny as it fell. As long as the penny was not currently holding a pie, anyone in first or second circle could provide baked goods. Dead or alive, Gran wouldn't appreciate her plumbing clogged with pastry. "If I'm still here, Charlie'll be here."
"Charlie never stays."
Ouch. But true enough. Allie rinsed the penny off in the kitchen sink and carried it to the fridge. Charmed change kept most Gales alive through college and university. "We'll see."
But they both knew it meant yes.
"You're my absolutely favorite cousin ever! Gotta go. First bell. Bye!"
And it was all of six thirty-two.
She looked at the penny lying in solitary state on the second shelf, set the phone down beside it, and closed the refrigerator door. Charlie liked to send hers on taxi rides, but Allie preferred to keep hers closer to hand, just in case.
She toasted and ate a bagel-Gran had left a bag in the freezer-drank a bad cup of coffee, stared out the window at the traffic passing below, and reminded herself that she'd made the decision to come west so she could just cope with how weird it felt and get to...
Coffee slopped over the side of the mug as she jerked back from the glass.
Shadow.
Big shadow.
Big fast-moving shadow.
Too big. Too fast.
Heart pounding, Allie leaned forward. The street ran essentially east/ west and the long shadows thrown by the early morning sun ran parallel, so it could have been nothing more than a small plane flying north/south. A traffic plane. Up there to report on the traffic. Unfortunately, a traffic plane didn't explain the pigeons she could see crammed under a newspaper box across the street.
Or the way the trailing end of the shadow seemed to be lashing.
Her fingers were not trembling as she retrieved her phone. The spilled coffee had been hot, that was all. There were six missed calls and a text message from Katie.
Spnt nght cxng A Ruby off H2O twr. Come home.
Tempting.
Allie took a deep breath as she snapped the phone closed.
But no.
She didn't know if it was smart or stupid or just bloody-minded to step outside the store, to cross the sidewalk to the curb, and to look up. At some point between the time she'd left the window and arrived at the curb, the pigeons had come out from under the newspaper box and flown to perch along the low stone parapet of her building like nine small, feathered gargoyles. Eight of them were staring at whatever it was pigeons stared at. One of them watched the sky.
Allie tipped her head back, following its line of sight. As far as she could see, the sky held nothing but a bit of cloud the heat would burn off before too long and the distant, familiar silhouette of a bird of prey. She'd seen more kestrels in Toronto than out at the farm; they nested in most major cities in Canada, adapting to cliffs of concrete and steel, feeding well off the fat-and-oblivious birds who'd dulled their survival instincts with French fries and cigarette butts.
Squinting, one hand raised to block the sun, Allie tried to get a better look at the hawk, only certain it was a hawk by the way it moved. Predators were unmistakable in the air. Unfortunately, it was just too damned high for her to pick out details.
"Hey, Blondie! Nice ass!"
She turned just in time to see a muscular young man leering out the window of a passing pickup before he was swept away on the tide of morning traffic. Too far away and moving too fast to toss a charm after him. And besides, it was a nice ass and a little moderately skeevy appreciation never hurt.
It took her a moment's search to find the kestrel again, a tapered black cross rising still higher against the blue.
How high would that passing shadow have had to have climbed in order to look like a small hawk from below?
Wondering where that thought had come from, and really wishing it had stayed there, Allie moved closer to the building until she found herself standing with one hand on the door. According to the sign taped to the bottom of the nearest window, the store was open 10 AM to 6 PM Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday. 10 AM to midnight Friday. Closed Monday and Tuesday.
It was Thursday at seven forty.
Two hours and twenty minutes to search for clues...
"Oh, dear God, I am turning into Nancy Drew."
... before she was expected to open and become a crucial part of the local community.
The store didn't look significantly better than it had yesterday although, in all fairness, it didn't look any worse. It was a bright, sunny morning, but the light spilling through the windows seemed unwilling to move very far away from the glass.
"All right, then." She took a deep breath and flicked on the overhead flu orescents, banishing some but not all of the more interesting shadows. Piled high on tables, spilling off of shelves, in boxes opened for rummaging-the amount of crap gathered together in this one place was overwhelming. What were the odds of finding a clue to her grandmother's disappearance in that amount of crap?
"I am so screwed."
If she'd dragged half a dozen cousins to Calgary with her, they might have a chance to bring something resembling order out of chaos.
Actually...
She flipped open her phone.
And closed it, frowning, half an hour later wondering what the odds were that every single cousin she'd called was busy and expected to remain busy for the immediate future. Betsy, after a winter of almost no teaching gigs, had been called in to finish out the school year in Odessa. Uncle Don had fallen out of the mow and broken his leg, leaving Carol and Theresa to deal with the fieldwork. Sandi, ready to give up acting and become an accountant like her mother, had actually gotten a part as Chava's understudy in a revival of Fiddler on the Roof. Bonny was giving serious thought to bringing a member of the county road crew home to meet the aunties.
"If they approve him, they'll get plowed out first all winter."
"They already get plowed out first," Allie reminded her.
"But this way, they won't have to put any effort into it."
Allie had her doubts that the aunties put any effort into it, relying instead on reputation, but she wished Bonny luck and snapped the phone closed.Until the younger kids finished school, it looked like she was the only member of the family unemployed and/or emotionally uncommitted.
"Well, don't I feel special."
On her own, the store would take her months to catalog and, unless she stumbled over her grandmother's diary, months longer to start piecing together any relevant information even if she used the cataloging software she'd acquired at her last job.
And that was ignoring the time she'd have to put into running a business to pay the bills.
Not to mention ignoring whatever had flown over the store at dawn.
Actually, ignoring whatever had flown over the store at dawn seemed like a great idea. Any weirdness going on in the airspace over the city of Calgary was not her concern.
"Here's a thought," she said to the obligatory velvet Elvis fronting a box of bad art. "Why don't I assume Gran knows what she's doing and, if she's not dead, she'll fill us in when she's good and ready?"
Velvet Elvis offered no opinion.
All things considered, Allie was actually pretty happy about that.
Instead of a cash register, Gran had a heavily charmed cashbox containing four hundred and seventeen dollars and twenty-seven cents on a shelf under the counter. Next to it, three ledgers that looked liked they'd been picked up at a yard sale given by a Victorian mortgage broker. In mint condition, they'd be worth serious money to a collector although Store, Extras, and Yoyos scrawled in black marker on the oxblood leather had likely devalued them a bit.
On the wall behind the counter was a seven-by-three grid of cubbyholes numbered from one to twenty-one. Some of them held...
"Mail?" Allie stared down at the envelope she'd pulled from cubby number one. The name looked vaguely Eastern European and the address was definitely the store's. Gran seemed to have been allowing the homeless to use the store as a mail drop. Surprisingly community minded, Allie allowed, putting the envelope back in the cubby where she'd found it.
Next to the cubbyholes, a locked cabinet.
Turning to pick up the keys from the counter, she screamed.
The translucent young man, face and hands plastered to the glass as he peered into the store, jumped back, mouth open, eyes wide.
Heart pounding, Allie took a deep breath and then another, and reminded herself that most of the lingering dead were harmless. Granted, some of them had issues they took out on the living, but this redheaded twenty-something she could see traffic through seemed more the former sort. He'd been at least as startled by her as she was by him.
She could almost hear the aunties telling her to ignore him.
Although, if peering into the store was part of his regular morning routine, then it made more sense to pump him for information. He might have seen something, or heard something, or-depending on how long he'd been dead-actually been part of something to do with Gran's disappearance.
When she got to the door, he was still standing where he'd landed, leaning forward slightly, gaze tracking her movements. That was good. The revenants with a little lingering self-determination were easier to talk to.
When she opened the door, the young man solidified.
Allie stared at him. Frowned. And closed the door.
Definitely translucent.
Open, opaque.
Closed, translucent.
Open...
"What the hell are you doing?" He looked ready to bolt.
She touched his shoulder and felt substance, although it gave a little under her finger. "You're not dead."
"I'm not what?" he demanded, jerking away from her touch.
"Dead."
"Why would you be thinking I'm dead?"
"Give me a minute." Closing the door again, she searched it for charms and found a clear-sight drawn on the painted steel frame that held the glass. So what she saw through the glass was the young man's true appearance. But he wasn't dead. Interesting.
This time when she opened the door, he rattled out, "Are you Alysha Catherine Gale?" before she could speak. "Your grandmother said I could trust you."
"And you are?"
"Joe O'Hallan."
The other signature on the will. That could mean she was supposed to trust him in return. It could mean nothing more than Gran had found him conveniently available at the time. It was hard to say.
"I've come for my drink." Indicating his own body with a grubby hand nearly hidden in a gray sweater at least two sizes too big, he added, "I'm a bit beyond due, but you weren't here yesterday."
Allie ducked her head back and took another look at him through the glass door. Red hair, gray sweater, brown cords with cord worn off in places, work boots with the steel cap showing through the torn leather on one toe. Bit of ginger stubble along a narrow jaw. Purple/gray half circles under worried eyes. Still translucent. "You'd better come inside." Whatever Gran was up to, explanations out on the sidewalk were a bad idea.
Joe appeared solid inside the store and, once over the threshold, a lot less skittish. Given the possible claw marks gouged into the outside of the door, maybe that wasn't so surprising. "Your grandmother said you'd be taking over her stuff."
Allie spent a moment not thinking about the toys in the bedside table. "That's right."
Thin shoulders rose and fell. "I need my drink, then."
That was the second time he'd mentioned a drink. It wasn't completely out of the question that Gran had been running some kind of weird after-hours club. Where weird meant translucent clientele. And after-hours meant eight in the morning.
"Let's pretend that Gran left me no information about her stuff. Which should be easy because it's true." Reaching past him, she relocked the door. "You're going to have to tell me everything."
Ginger brows drew in. "Everything?"
"Everything. Let's start with who you are, what this drink is, and, when it comes to it, where I can find it."
"It's in..."
She raised a hand and cut him off like he was one of her younger cousins. "It hasn't come to it. First, tell me who you are."
"You know my name."
Allie sighed. As names went, Joe O'Hallan wasn't very descriptive. "You want to expand on that a bit?"
Joe stared at her for a long moment and then he sighed. "Look, you don't..."
"Yes, I do."
"Fine." His chin rose."I'm a leprechaun."
"A leprechaun?" She hadn't expected that; given how many Newfoundlanders were working the Alberta oilfields, she'd assumed his accent was east coast. "Aren't you a little tall for a leprechaun?" He wasn't that much shorter than she was. Five-six. Five-five maybe. And scowling.
"Am I? Faith and begorrah, sure, and no one's ever pointed that out before!"
Allie blinked at him. "Bitter much?"
"You started it with the cultural stereotypes." His hands disappeared inside his ragged cuffs as he folded his arms over his chest. "I'm a changeling, okay? I was raised as human, but the babe I got changed for has died."
"Of what?"
"What difference does it make?" Joe rolled his eyes-inhumanly green now she knew what to look for-at her expression. "Fine. Whatever. Probably old age. Point is, without it there, I've no counterbalance to keep me here, so I fade as I'm Called back under the hill."
Under the hill was the mythic reference to the UnderRealm. It was strange to hear one of the Fey use the Human term.
"Your grandmother made a drink that unfades me," he added.
He seemed to be waiting for a response. "She did?"
"Why the hell would I lie about something like that, then?"
Good point.
"Don't you want to go home?" She could feel the ache of her own home pulling at her.
He snorted. "Not even. The food's crap and the music sucks. Oh, and let's not forget..." He scowled. "... my loving family traded me off for a human when I was a babe. And it's not like they even want me, do they? The Court just hates the thought of a pureblood not under their control. They can Call until Finnbhennach comes home."
"Who?"
"White bull of Connacht. Far as I'm concerned, I am home.Your grandmother keeps the drinks in the locked cabinet behind the counter."
He seemed pretty sure she was going to give it to him.
"I can pay for it," he growled as she hesitated. "It's not charity." One grubby hand indicated the shelves of junk. "It's part of the business."
"Of course it is," Allie muttered, searching the ring for the right key. Trust Gran not to mention which community her business had become crucial to.
There were three shelves inside the cabinet crammed with bottles and jars that looked like they'd originally held condiments. All of the aunties had similar cabinets although, back home, they were never locked. The aunties liked to weed out those members of the family they considered too stupid to breed.
Probably why they never labeled anything either.
"Do you know...?"
He frowned and leaned over the counter. "I think it's... uh... no. That one."
"This one."
His pointing finger didn't move. "No, that one."
"This one?" When he nodded, she lifted what looked like a ketchup bottle carefully from the shelf. "You sure?"
"Mostly. It's the right color."
It was the only liquid that virulent a shade of orange. When she passed it over, Joe cradled it for a moment between both hands before unscrewing the lid and draining the bottle. He didn't look any solider but he felt more... there. Slipping a thin hand in past the worn edges of his pants pocket, he pulled out a lump of...
"Fairy gold."
"Yeah, what of it?"
"Well, it's fairy gold," Allie repeated, wondering if he was trying this out on her because she was new. He could move about under his own power, so he hadn't tried it on Gran. "When the sun touches it, it'll turn to earth. Or leaves. Or dog shit."
"You think I'm after cheating you?"
Allie gestured at the fairy gold on his palm, letting it speak for itself.
"You think I'm after cheating Catherine Gale's granddaughter? Obviously, you think I'm a complete idiot." He slapped the pale yellow lump down on the counter and glared at her. "I like my balls right where they are, thank you very much. Just put the gold in the cashbox like always."
"And?"
He blinked. "And? And after twenty-four hours it's coin of the realm. Well, paper money of the realm anyway." Another blink wiped the remaining anger away as realization began to dawn. "She really didn't tell you anything?"
"She really didn't." Allie pulled the cashbox out from under the counter, stared into it, and rolled the fairy gold between her fingers. "So, about my grandmother..." When she looked up, he'd started to fidget. "Do you know where she's gone?"
"Hard to say." His smile wouldn't have fooled a three year old. "Heaven wouldn't want her and Hell couldn't hold her."
True enough as far as it went.
"So you believe she's dead?"
Except for his eyes, he went completely still. His gaze flicked first left then right as though he was afraid there might be eavesdroppers in the shadows. "I believe what she wants me to believe."
The words came out in a rush and so quietly that Allie had to strain to hear them. The subtext was obvious; she'd better believe the same.
Allie sighed. "Am I going to get a visit from a large man in an expensive suit looking for a lot of money?"
"No," Joe told her indignantly. Paused. "Probably not."
"Great. Did she tell you why she wants me here?"
"She had to leave her stuff to someone, right?"
"But why me?"
He snorted. "Why not you? All I know is..." He was watching the shadows again. "... she had me sign that paper and she let me have your name. And then she wasn't here for a few days. And then you were here."
"How many days?"
"Store's been closed since last Friday."
"I got the letter on Monday. She must've mailed it..."
"Before." He scratched at the back of one hand. "Before she was gone. Yeah. Said she couldn't trust the post to get it there after."
"The letter said, if you're reading this I'm dead, so she either knew she was going to die or she knew she was going to disappear."
"Well, yeah." Joe stared at her like she was slightly simple. "She knew things, didn't she?"
"Good point." She'd probably seen Allie accept and her reason for leaving things the way she had didn't need to be any more complicated than that. Allie couldn't decide if that took the pressure off or added some kind of unwanted destiny factor.
I'm your grandmother, Luke.
She dropped the fairy gold in the box, reached out to close it, and saw Joe swallow, prominent Adam's apple bobbing up and down in his throat.
"I'd go get coffee for your grandmother sometimes," he said hurriedly when she paused. "You know, when she didn't want to lock up the store."
Allie glanced over at the closed sign still facing the street.
"But yeah, I guess I'm early today so, you know, I'll just leave you to it." Hands shoved into his pockets he turned away from the counter. And then back again. "Oh, and don't be forgetting to mark that I got my bottle down in the special ledger. The accountant comes in every Friday afternoon to do the bookkeeping, and he gets right shitty if he's got to ask about stuff. He's old school."
"Right. The special ledger." Joe had gotten as far as the door and was shifting his weight from foot to foot as he waited for her to let him out and lock it behind him.
More than Joe seemed to be waiting.
"You know what?" Allie said slowly, feeling her way but growing more confident with every word that she was moving in the right direction. "A coffee sounds like a good idea." She pulled a twenty from the cashbox. "And a muffin if Kenny's got anything edible. And the same for you. I know it's an imposition," she added hurriedly before he could speak, "but I'm flounder ing here. If you don't mind staying for a while...?"
"To help?"
"Yeah."
"Here?"
"Yeah.You seem to know what's going on. More than I do anyway."
It was entirely possible that Joe was older than her grandmother, but just for a moment, the moment between uncertainty and his smile, he looked painfully young.
"How'd you take your coffee, then?" he asked, pulling the twenty from her grip.
"Black."
"The Saskatoon berry muffins are killer."
"Great." Then she rethought it. "That is great, right? You weren't warning me?"
"No, it's great. Coffee and muffins, then. You don't need to lock the door behind me, I'll only be a tick."
He looked solid through the door. Solid, and completely alone. Allie checked off a box in her mental actually-figured-out-what-Gran-wanted column. Feeding one of her strays wasn't much, but it was a start.
"Wait a minute, you can't be Irish."
Joe picked the last of his muffin crumbs off the counter with one finger. "Leprechaun."
"Okay, ethnically Irish, but you said you were raised by human parents."
"In Ireland."
"Oh. Right. Then what are you doing in Calgary?" Allie asked hurriedly, feeling a little stupid for having missed the obvious answer.
"Why not Calgary? Things are happening here. It's a good place to start a new life."
She didn't point out that his new life seemed to suck a bit.
At ten, Allie turned the sign, opened the store, and went reluctantly back behind the counter. All three account books were up on the glass-one for the yoyos, one for the potions and the mailbox accounts, one for the store. "Okay. Let's try an easy question. Did Gran ever explain why she kept the yoyo sales in a separate book?"
Joe shrugged. "Not big on explaining herself, your grandmother, but I'm guessing it's because she's got so many of them."
There was the box of plastic, glow-in-the-dark yoyos on the counter, a box of old-fashioned wooden yoyos enameled in primary colors on one of the shelves next to three stacks of saucers that seemed to have lost their cups, and there was a box of miniature yoyos, each about as big around as a twoonie, on the floor next to a box of old musical scores.
Allie opened her mouth, about to protest that three boxes weren't that many, then reconsidered. "There's more than I can see from here, isn't there?"
"In the storeroom."
She drained the last drop of cold coffee and, as fortified as she was going to get, said, "Show me."
He nodded toward the door. "What if someone comes in while we're gone?"
"That's a risk they'll just have to take."
"Don't you mean a risk you'll have to take?"
Allie thought about the monkey's paw and tips of icebergs. "Nope."
The basement had a packed dirt floor, stone walls patched in a couple of places with concrete blocks, and bare bulbs, dusty and dim, hanging from the underside of the floor joists. Piles of boxes filled nearly the entire space with only narrow passageways between them for access.
"This isn't a storeroom," Allie muttered, ducking under a spiderweb, "this is a horror movie clich waiting to happen."
The stained boxes nearest the stairs were packed with smaller, unopened boxes of yoyos.
"She only brought new ones up when the old boxes were completely emptied," Joe offered, crouched by the trapdoor.
"And the rest of the stuff?"
"Stuff."
"Specifically?"
"People bring your grandmother boxes of stuff, and she buys them. Bought them." Allie could hear the frown in his voice as he changed verbs. "Used to buy them.You know, stuff like the last bit of crap you can't get rid of at a yard sale or the odds and sods an estate auction won't touch."
That explained the smell. The storeroom reeked of other people's lives, a melancholy mix of the stale perfumes left behind by withered dreams, lost hopes, and forgotten promises-with a faint hint of cat pee. And mold, Allie acknowledged, as she made her way carefully back up the steep stairs and headed into the tiny store bathroom to blow her nose on a handful of toilet paper.
"Your grandmother told me once that nine out of ten people throw away the answer all unawares like." Joe closed the trapdoor and straightened, arching his back. "She also said nine out of ten people don't know what the fuck the question is." He turned, cupped both hands over his corduroy-covered crotch and scowled at his reflection in the mirror, his ears suddenly redder than his hair. "I hate it when it does that!"
Allie glanced over. "That's why it does it. For the reaction."
"It doesn't bother you, then?"
She shrugged. "I have a lot of cousins; if you freak at a live frog in your lunch bag, next time it's pepper in your pompoms."
"What in your what?"
"Pepper in your pompoms." Allie pointed at the mirror now showing her reflection in full cheerleader rig. "Red and gold," she corrected, and the colors changed. "Most of the Gale girls are cheerleaders in high school. Even Gran."
"Scary thought," Joe muttered following her back into the store.
"We're less scary when we're young."
"Differently scary."
"Fair enough. Auntie Jane says Gran was deadly with a field hockey stick."
"Actually deadly?"
"It's always safer not to make assumptions." She slipped back behind the counter. "No customers while we were gone. No surprise." Although the traffic along 9th Avenue was steady, the sidewalks were empty.
"I should go." Joe headed for the door. "Your grandmother didn't like me hanging around all day."
"Gran's not here." When Joe turned to check the shadows, Allie managed to keep her eyes locked on him rather than join in the search. Just managed. "Listen, if you could stay just a little longer, I could get started checking this place for..." She examined and discarded a couple of descriptive phrases that would have gotten her mouth washed out with soap at a much younger age. "... less than normal merchandise."
"Like the monkey's paw?"
"Hopefully not."
"There's that velvet Elvis." He nodded toward the box.
"I saw."
"It's like its eyes follow you."
"Optical illusion."
"If you say so. The thing creeps me the fuck out."
"Okay, that's..." Her phone rang before she could finish.
"Your mother says Catherine's crucial business is a junk shop," Auntie Jane announced without preamble.
"That's right, but..."
"Ha!" she said, and hung up.
"Auntie Jane." Allie slipped her phone back into her pocket. "Long-distance mocking." His shrug suggested he didn't care. "So, are you staying? I'll throw in lunch."
"Lunch?"
"The meal in the middle of the day. I'm a good cook. I was thinking grilled cheese sandwiches, a bowl of homemade tomato soup..." Gran may have gone wild, but she was still a Gale. The pantry was full of canning. "... and pie."
He rolled his eyes. "Grilled cheese sandwiches aren't exactly hard to cook."
"You don't have to stay." She tried to sound like she didn't care either way and suspected she'd failed dismally. Joe wasn't just a connection to her missing grandmother, he was the only person she knew in Calgary.
"What kind of pie?"
"I don't know yet." She pulled another bill out of the cashbox. "We can start with more coffee."
"I'm not staying all day, mind. I've got things to do."
"Okay."
Joe tugged the bill from her hand. "You want another muffin with that?"
The charms the old woman had put on the windows were still in effect. He could see the reflection of the street-traffic passing, the storefront directly opposite, himself in ballcap and dark glasses struggling to get a paper from the box-but nothing past the glass. His employer hadn't liked that Joe O'Hallan had been hanging around the old woman, his concern only slightly tempered by the evidence that Catherine Gale had barely tolerated the changeling. He really wouldn't appreciate him striking up a friendship with this new Gale and, unless Joe had snuck out the back way, he'd been in there for hours.
He'd trailed Joe for three days back after he'd first shown up, his employer suspicious of anything that might interfere with him building a power base in the city. There was a danger inherent in tracking purebloods-some of them literally had eyes in the backs of their heads, and they very much disliked interference in their business. Where disliked meant if caught, expect to be ripped limb from limb. Leprechauns like the changeling were not only nasty little sons of bitches, but they'd taken to Human weapons like cops took to Timmy's. They might throw a curse of seven years of bad luck but were just as likely to pull a submachine gun from a convenient pocket universe and use the spray of bullets like a scythe, cutting anyone they'd caught trailing them off at the ankles, leaving them to flop around in shock, and eventually bleed to death. He figured all that attitude had something to do with them being the shortest out of the box.
The trick was not to get caught.
He was very good at what he did.
This changeling, though, except for pulling the old fairy gold scam, he appeared to be living Human. And living rough. Not only had trading lumps of what looked to be raw gold for cash gotten more complicated since the old days, but the cash it brought didn't go far. If the glyphs on his scope hadn't allowed him to see what his target truly was, he'd have dismissed him as a mutt dumped to fend for himself. His report on Joe's pathetic existence had been enough to tag him no threat.
In retrospect, that might have been a mistake.
The Courts had to know what was going down by now. No way movement of that magnitude hadn't been flagged. Generally, they didn't give a crap about what happened in the MidRealm, but Joe was still of the blood, no matter how long he'd been gone, and damned near living on top of the epicenter. It was possible, however unlikely, they'd warned him.
It was possible Joe had taken that information straight to the new owner of the shop.
It would certainly explain why he'd been in there for so long.
He rattled the door of the newspaper box one last time-as an excuse to linger the damned things were near foolproof-gathered up his Herald, checked the sky, and headed west. His orders had been to find out what Alysha Gale knew, but he couldn't do that as long as the changeling was with her. Joe was as suspicious as all hell just generally. In case the Courts hadn't been in contact, the last thing he wanted to do was give him a reason to call home.
If it turned out Joe had told the Gale woman nothing of note, he wondered how they were going to keep it that way. The Courts were possessive of their own; taking out a pureblood would attract more unwanted attention from yet another source.
His right index finger squeezed the memory of a trigger. It was always harder when they looked Human.
The pie was rhubarb-not terribly surprising given the season. Joe devoured a second piece in spite of the two sandwiches and the large bowl of soup that came before it. They ate in the store, sitting on a pair of stools behind the counter, Allie flipping through her gran's recipe book, wiping grease off her fingers to mark the entries that referred to the bottles in the cabinet.
All the Gale girls dabbled-there'd never been a school dance where one of them hadn't spiked the punch-but this was on another scale entirely. Allie had a feeling it might be smartest to trade Gran's recipes to one of the aunties for services rendered rather than risk the kind of disaster that had made her junior prom an object lesson in winging it.
"Joe, when do you start fading again?"
"Four weeks last Monday. Who wants to know?"
She tapped the page in front of her. "The person who'll keep it from happening."
"You?"
"What? You thought Gran was coming back from the grave to mix drinks? Metaphorically speaking, since there isn't a grave or a body to put in one."
He sighed and slid off the stool onto his feet. "Look, I did some stuff for her, but she didn't even like me much, okay? So if you're being nice to me because you think she was my friend, I should just go."
"You should just sit."
Looking a little surprised, he sat. The food as much as the potion had firmed up his edges. Remembering how he'd looked through the door, Allie came to a decision.
"Do you want a job?"
"What?"
"I need to find out what my grandmother is up to. That's why I came here. If there's a clue in the store, I'm going to have to weed through everything to try and find it. I can't do that and deal with customers."
"Customers?"
"We must have them," Allie told him dryly. "Someone has to be buying all the yoyos."
"Why don't you just close the store while you search?"
"Because Gran left it to me to run."
"But if it's yours..."
"Is it?"
His gaze skittered past the shadows again.
Allie nodded. "Exactly. Minimum wage, flexible hours, one full meal a day provided. And I'll pay you cash at the end of every shift."
"You don't even know me," he sighed, and she could almost see him refusing to hope. "I could be a danger to you."
"I trust you."
"Because your grandmother said you could."
"Not likely; I don't trust her." She nodded at his empty plate. "But you had a second piece of pie, and Aunt Ruth isn't too happy about my being so far from home. She's worried about me, and she's worried I'll give some of her girls ideas." Allie'd been able to taste the charm with every bite. She wondered what she'd flushed with her mother's pie.
He shifted as far from the sticky residue on the plate as the circumference of the stool would allow. "What if I had been a danger to you?"
"We wouldn't be having this conversation."
"Okay, then." He looked like he was ready to bolt. "What if I don't want to work for you?"
"Then don't."
"As simple as that, then?"
"Yes."
"Can I think about it?"
"No." When his eyes widened far enough to show whites all around, she sighed. "That was a joke."
Returning to the store after taking the dishes upstairs, she paused by the back door and peered out into the courtyard, frowning slightly at the path beaten into the scruffy grass. "Joe, what's on the other side of the courtyard?"
"Garage."
"Gran had a car?"
"How would I know?"
Given that Gran had a garage, Allie figured it only made sense to see what she had in it. Or if she'd been left in it, tucked under a bench of half-empty paint cans and covered in an oily tarp.
All alone in Calgary, Gran hadn't used the open earth for even basic ritual. Yet, given that the only windows overlooking the courtyard were from her own apartment, Allie didn't see why she couldn't. Except that she was also alone in Calgary. She poked at trio of scraggly bushes as she passed, wondering if Gran had used them to access the Wood. Even if she hadn't, Charlie could and would probably appreciate having an entrance right outside their back door.
"You sound like you're thinking of staying," she muttered, searching the ring for the key to the padlock on the garage door. "Get a grip."
Up on the roof, a trio of pigeons made noises that sounded like agreement.
Gran's body had not been left under the bench of half-empty paint cans.
And she very definitely had a car.
A 1976, lime-green, convertible Super Beetle, restored to mint condition. It was a car that blended into traffic with all the subtlety Allie had come to expect of her grandmother. The registration and insurance were in the glove box and the name on the ownership remained Catherine Amanda Gale.
"Translation," Allie told the silence as she carefully closed the door and went around to the front of the car. "It's not mine. There's a key so I can drive it, but I'm not to be surprised if she shows up to reclaim it."
Even given the half dozen charms she could see without actually searching, it didn't seem like a particularly practical car for a Calgary winter-or occasionally a Calgary July, Allie amended, if the stories she'd heard were true.
That put a check in the Gran's just buggered off column.
Unless she'd been ripped to pieces and stuffed into the trunk when she came out to change the ownership.
Allie paused, fingers around the high, chromed trunk handle, thumb on the release.
Unlikely. But possible.
The chrome warmed under her grip. It was the potential for pieces that stopped her cold, exposing a previously unsuspected squeamishness.
"On three." Deep breath. "One, two... three."
The trunk contained a leather glove, a collapsible shovel, and a bag of kitty litter.
Against one end wall of the garage, a flight of stairs rose up to a small landing and an unlocked door that led into a second-floor loft. Bales of insulation, some two by fours, and a stack of drywall had been left in the middle of the floor and, at the far end, plumbing had been roughed in for a small bathroom and a kitchen sink. Someone had clearly started to turn the space into a studio apartment. Given the housing crunch in the province, that wasn't a bad idea. Gran as a landlord, however, slid significantly past bad idea into moving to Vancouver so as not to freeze to death while sleeping under a bridge is a much better idea territory.
Heading back to the store, Allie paused in front of the mirror to make sure she'd got all the cobwebs out of her hair and found herself actually looking at her reflection.
Fully clothed.
Standing in the back hall.
Weird.
Joe was putting one of the ledgers away when she reached the counter. He glanced up at her and grinned, obviously pleased with himself. "I sold a yoyo while you were gone. One of the glow-in-the-dark ones."
The sidewalk outside the store was empty although traffic had begun to pick up as evening rush hour approached.
Joe turned to see what she was looking at and shrugged. "They're gone now."
"They?"
"Yeah, couple of kids." He grinned. "Customers."
"I knew we had to have them."
Pale cheeks flushed at being included. "I thought about what you said. About a job."
"And?" He needed it. She needed him. But he wasn't family, and besides, she didn't think she could force the issue on one of the Fey no matter how Human he wanted to be.
"And okay, I'll work here. Flexible hours, though." He might have thought he sounded tough, but the fine veneer of bravado barely covered an emotion too complex to be merely called relief. "I'll come in first thing tomorrow, but I have to go now. I have to get..." He couldn't say home. It was the next word, Allie could almost hear it, but he couldn't say it. "You should maybe think about closing early," he added as she pulled three twenties out of the cashbox and handed them over. "There's a storm coming."
Allie took another look out the window. What little she could see of the sky was clear.
"This is Calgary," Joe snorted. "If you don't like the weather, wait ten minutes." He paused at the door. "You know you're... we're open until midnight tomorrow, right?"
"I know."
"It's just that after dark..."
"I know."
Ginger brows drew in. "Because you're her granddaughter?"
Allie rolled her eyes. "Because you're a leprechaun. Also there's a signed picture of a minotaur over the counter, plus another seven potions in the cabinet, and I suspect the name on the first mailbox isn't in a Human language. Not that hard to connect the dots, Joe. The only thing that's confusing me-about this specifically," she amended, "is why Calgary?"
He shrugged, much like he had the last time she'd brought it up, and said, "Things are happening here. I'll see you tomorrow, Alysha Catherine Gale."
Put like that, it was a binding promise.
"I'll see you tomorrow, Joe O'Hallan."
He'd barely moved out of sight, heading west at a slow run after a quick look up at the sky, when her phone rang.
"Well?" Auntie Jane demanded.
Until Allie found out what her grandmother was up to, there would be only one question. "I've hired someone who can watch the store while I look into things."
"For pity's sake, Alysha, ignore the store."
Allie picked a yoyo out of the box and turned it between her fingers. "No," she said, and hung up.
The crack of thunder that sounded as she closed her phone was probably a coincidence given the three-thousand-odd kilometers and all.
It hadn't taken quite the ten minutes Joe said the weather required before dark clouds filled the sky. The first scud of rain, barely enough to dampen the sidewalk, seemed to be a test run. Then thunder cracked, lightning flashed, and Allie could suddenly no longer see the road through the sheets of falling water.
Closing early might not be a bad idea. It was nearly five, and there wouldn't be any...
The umbrella entered the door first, followed by a dark trench coat and a lot of water. A tanned, long-fingered hand wrestled the umbrella closed, and Allie got her first look at a pair of extraordinarily blue eyes. Not the more common bluish gray but a bright, cerulean blue. A Maxfield Parrish sky-blue.
"Sorry about dripping all over the floor."
"That's very blue."
"Pardon?" His voice was rough. A whiskey voice, Auntie Ruby would call it. Actually, Auntie Ruby was losing it, so she could easily call it a carpet voice, but that was beside the point. It stroked against Allie's skin like a cat's tongue, lifting all the hair on the back of her neck.
"All right. I meant, that's all right. About dripping on the floor." The remarkably blue eyes were in a pleasant enough face with a straight nose-a bit on the short side-over a longish upper lip and distinctly long chin. Not Brian Mulroney or Jay Leno long, but long. The eyes were tucked under nicely shaped brows on a high forehead tucked in turn under medium brown hair that could use a trim although, to be fair, the storm had destroyed whatever style he might have started the day with. He wasn't very tall, had maybe two inches on her tops, but then he smiled and his eyes crinkled at the corners, and Allie forgot all about his height.
She was suddenly entirely aware of the bit of pie filling smudged on the front of her sweater. If she'd known he was coming, she'd have changed. Hell, if she'd known he was coming, she'd have baked a cake.
"I'm looking for Alysha Gale."
"I'm Alysha Gale."
"You're Alysha Gale?"
"Yes."
"You're not..." He frowned, clearly trying to marshal his thoughts and having a hard time doing it. "... old."
That was just strange enough, Allie wrestled cognitive thought back on-line. "Excuse me?"
"God, that had to have sounded inane. I promise you, I don't usually sound inane." He reached in past the lapels of his dripping trench coat into the inner pocket of a distinctly cheap suit. Although the tie was nice. The narrow stripe across the gray was the same color as his eyes.
"Ms. Gale?"
Cognitive thought hadn't lasted long. She stared down at the white rectangle of paper. Oh. A business card. "Graham Buchanan?"
"That's right."
"And The Western Star?"
"It's a newspaper. I'm a reporter. For the newspaper. Hang on." He reached into the inner pocket on his trench coat and pulled out a folded newspaper and passed it over. "It's last week's, we're a weekly and okay, it's a tabloid, but..." His eyes crinkled again. "It's a job. That's uh, me." One finger tapped the page. He kept his nails very short. "My byline. There."
"Hauntings on the LRT?"
"Some people saw things in the glass."
"Actual things?"
"Probably not."
She liked that he said probably. That he was open to the possibility. That could come in handy later.
"Anyway, I was talking to Catherine Gale last week, about her business, this business, about how it's mostly made up of odds and ends of people's lives, trying to convince her there's a terrific human interest story here..."
Graham Buchanan was a very good liar. If Allie hadn't been watching his eyes so closely, she'd never have realized it. If he thought there was a story here-and he did-it wasn't a story about other people's lives. She had no idea what her grandmother had done to make him suspicious, but-in less than a minute-his willingness to see beyond the expected had gone from being a good thing to a potential problem.
And he worked for a tabloid.
Those idiots would print anything.
This sort of thing never came up at home, and the wild ones, while they sometimes made headlines, they just laughed and moved on, but here and now Allie had neither the safety of home nor the luxury to leave.
"... but no matter how hard I tried, I didn't seem to be getting anywhere. Then she told me she'd be leaving, but one of her relatives would be taking it over and I should talk to her. All she gave me was your name. I don't know why I thought you'd be old." He shrugged, the movement surprisingly graceful under all his damp layers. "I mean, it was just a name. You're..."
"Her granddaughter."
"Of course."
Thunder.
Lightning.
The lights went out.
When the lights came back on a moment later, he'd moved closer. Not a lot, but the puddle he'd been in the middle of was mostly behind him and Allie doubted the puddle had shifted. If he'd hoped to throw her off by his sudden proximity, then she could definitely count on at least one thing he didn't know about the Gale girls.
This close, he smelled amazing.
When she smiled, he blinked and shuffled back a step. "I, uh, I dropped in to set up a time we could talk. If you were willing to talk to me, that is. Just because Ms. Gale, your grandmother, thought you would be, doesn't mean you'd be. Willing. To talk." He seemed confused by his reaction. This was not a man, Allie concluded, in the habit of losing control.
This close, she could see the faint shadow of stubble along his upper lip and jaw. "We could talk now. I doubt anyone's going to brave the storm for a mismatched set of silver spoons and a yoyo."
"A yoyo?"
A nod toward the box on the counter. "They're our best sellers."
"Of course." Cerulean eyes crinkled at the corners, and even though his smile had become a little masklike, it was still a very, very nice smile.
She was going to enjoy finding out what he thought he knew.
As soon as her friends had yelled one final good-bye out the car window and driven safely out of sight, Charlie pulled her guitar from the gig bag, stuffed the gig bag into the duffel bag, and settled the latter on her back. Given that Halifax Stanfield International Airport was thirty-five kilometers from downtown Halifax, and they knew how broke she was, she couldn't really refuse the ride. Fortunately, airport improvements meant airport construction meant a near total lack of parking so they'd merely dropped her off and kept going. It was why she'd chosen to "fly." They'd have hung around the train station or bus station, keeping her company until she boarded.
Three quick steps up and over the curb and she was sinking into loose dirt as she slipped between skinny trees newly planted and into the Wood.
Allie's song was one Charlie'd been following most of her life. She'd followed it out her first time in when she'd very nearly become just another cautionary tale the aunties told about the family oddities.
"Oh, traveling sounds like fun," they'd say. "But it's a lot less fun if you're lost in the Wood and can't find your way home."
No argument from her. Lost was definitely a whole fuck of a lot less fun and had involved near panic resolved by projectile vomiting when she'd finally stumbled into Aunt Mary's kitchen. Allie, home alone finishing a history essay, had cleaned her up, tucked her into bed, and kept the gathering aunties out of the room until Charlie's parents could come to claim her.
Charlie'd asked later how she'd done it, and Allie, just turned thirteen and all knees and elbows, had spit the end of her braid out of her mouth and shrugged, saying, "I stood in front of the door," like it was no big deal to hold off a whole flock of the circling buzzards.
Even for Gale girls, the two years between fifteen and thirteen were a bit of a gap, but that had bridged it.
So following Allie's song should not require the kind of attention she was having to give it to stay on course.
And then a few notes went missing.
Shadows began to gather...
The path began to shift.
"Excuse me?" Charlie touched the old woman gently on the shoulder, hoping her breath didn't smell liked she'd just puked up her last three meals against the rough bark of what looked like a coconut palm. "Can you tell me where I am?"
The old woman frowned, mahogany skin pleating. "Oh, merveilleux. Un autre Amricain touriste perdu."
Not exactly a hard translation, even with Canadian high school French. "Je ne suis pas Amricain. Je suis Canadien. Mais vous avez raison, je suis peu un perdu. Quelle ville est-ce que je suis dedans?"
The frown didn't change significantly. So much for Canadians being universally loved abroad. " Port-au-Prince."
" Haiti?"
"Oui. Haiti." The old woman rolled her eyes, and walked away along the cracked sidewalk, muttering under her breath.
What the hell was she doing in Haiti? The last thing Charlie remembered before the puking was Allie's song spiraling out of her control and the shadows gathering under the trees. Or maybe shadow, singular. She was pretty sure she'd felt focused intent, and that was new. And terrifying. The aunties could kiss her ass if they didn't believe her this time.
Carefully setting her guitar down, ignoring the way her fingers trembled, she pulled the duffel bag around and unzipped the small end pocket. Empty.
Not in the duffel bag. Not in the gig bag.
Where the hell was her phone?