Iron (The Warding Book 1) (14 page)

“Jason just emailed me. He got a job at a museum in NYC,” she said, beaming. “He’s moving back to Riverview in a few months!”

I made an appreciative noise. Jason, Jenni’s little brother, was the same age as my sister Emma at six years our junior. He and Jenni had been pretty close all through our lives, where Emma and I had been anything but. The sibling bond was another of those family intricacies that was pretty much lost on me. “Good for him. Bet your mom will be excited.”

“Oh yeah, I see a huge Fisher family reunion in the immediate future.” She laughed and gave me a saucy wink. “I bet Jason would be pretty excited if you came too.”

I groaned, letting my head fall back. Jason had had quite the thing for me in his later teenage years, though that childhood crush was an awkward phase of my life I’d rather have forgotten about completely. When I said as much, it seemed to hit a nerve. Jenni’s eyes went all squinty in the way they did when someone said something off-color, making me wonder if she was playing at being offended or if I had stepped in it. She said, “Jason’s a good kid. Polite, handsome, and apparently set up with a really good job on top of it all. You could do far worse. Are you saying there’s something wrong with dating him?”

Shit. She really was offended. I held up my hands in the patented gesture of “what do you want me to say” and said, “There’s nothing wrong with him. I’m sure a hundred girls out there would be lucky to have him. The problem is the idea of me dating him.”

“And why is that?”

“It just squicks me out, okay?” I caught my bitchiness too late, once again. I backpedaled. “I mean, he’s your
little
brother. We grew up with him and Emma tagging around behind us. I remember him crashing our sleepovers in his ThunderCats footie pajamas for Christ’s sake! The whole idea of it would just be far too… Weird.”

She laughed. “Well, okay. When you put it like that, I guess I get it.”

Before the awkwardness could re-descend—or she could back track to ask questions about the pretend self-defense class I was supposed to be taking—I said, “So, get this. I get in this morning and hear those two bitches in HR gabbing while they’re getting their coffee. It sounds like that new girl they hired is supposed to ‘shadow’ Karen for the next week and a half. And they want to call Karen in for a ‘meeting’ next Friday, which just so happens to be payday.”

Jenni’s eyes lit up with a familiar mischievous fire. She never could resist some juicy gossip. It didn’t hurt that Karen was the snotty bitch who had treated me like a lackey for the first three months I had been with the company. Jenni was not forgiving to those who had made her bestie cry into her ice cream, once upon a time. She broke out in a particularly smug grin, cooing, “Oooo! Sounds like someone is about to get fiiiiiiired!”

We made some vicious, catty speculations about Karen’s general character throughout lunch and Jenni had me laughing so hard my eyes watered. The hour passed too quickly. I hadn’t felt so much like myself in longer than I cared to remember. We were lingering over our nearly empty drinks when my phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number, but it was a local area code. While Jenni flagged down our waitress for the check, I propped the phone on my shoulder and dug around in my purse for my wallet. “Hello?”

“Hi, Caitlin?”

I froze. It was Mairi. I had to remind myself to breath. Damn, that elephant was persistent. Apparently an hour of being a carefree, ordinary person again was all I got. I swallowed the sour lump in my throat and made myself sound casual, “Oh, hey. What’s up?”

“Can you meet me tonight?” Her voice was so calm and even that I couldn’t get a bead on what was going on. She seemed to sense my hesitation and clarified, “To look for the Lynx.”

“Tonight? Oh, uh—yeah, sure; sure.” My insides felt like they had turned to acid. My stomach churned and made me regret the heavy dose of crushed red pepper I had begged the waitress to put on my sandwich. Jenni’s head was tilted to the side in the puzzled way that ensured there would be more questions waiting when I hung up the phone. I couldn’t figure out how to draw more information out of Mairi without asking things I would rather Jenni didn’t hear.

Instead, I pulled the check from her hand and started counting out bills, trying for all the world to act like that phone call was the most normal thing ever. “I get out of work at 5. Is that okay?”

“Sure. Kaine wants us to start rotating through some of his more likely haunts. Tonight will be a good trial run, so we can get a method down.”

“That sounds… Fun.”

“Great. Are you ready to take down an address?” I didn’t know what to say. How could I respond to that without sounding like a nut-job in front of Jenni? Mairi must have noticed my pause because after a moment she asked, “You’re somewhere where you can’t speak about this, aren’t you?”

This time my burst of laughter was real, though it had a hysterical edge. “Yeah, you got that right!”

I thought I heard a muffled chuckle echo through the earpiece. At least it was muffled; that proved she had some tact. Maybe not every faery got a thrill out of playing Embarrass The Human. There was still a hint of amusement in her words. “Sorry. Next time I’ll just shoot you a text. I’ll send you the address in a minute. See you tonight.”

The phone went silent as the call ended. Thank god Jenni didn’t know that. I pushed out another laugh. “Sounds good, Em. See you later.”

I shoved the phone into my purse. Jenni had sat back in her seat, eyebrows raised but her curiosity visibly dimmed. She had bought it; she thought the call had been from my sister. Thank god she didn’t question the coincidence of us both hearing from our younger siblings in under an hour. I threw in a roll of the eyes and a huffy sigh to seal the deal. “Like I don’t have better things to do than help her look through stupid graduate school stuff.”

“Why doesn’t your mom help her?” Jenni asked, slupring up the last of her soda. “I mean, doesn’t she realize
your
advice about higher education is probably the advice she should run screaming in the opposite direction from?”

I stuck my tongue out at her but shared in the laugh. “I know, right?”

Hopefully the thick layer of foundation was hiding the flush I felt in my cheeks. There were no words to describe the level of terrible I felt when lying to my bestie. We hugged goodbye and made promises to get together for drinks over the weekend. I wasn’t sure where exactly we would do that, as I was quickly ruling out all the decent bars in Riverview with my weird encounters, but I agreed nonetheless. I shoved my hands in my jacket pockets as I made my way back to the office. I had left it only an hour ago with so much pep in my step. That was gone. The energy had been drained right out of me.

All I had wanted was to enjoy a casual,
normal
lunch with a friend and I hadn’t even been able to do that.

Chapter Eleven

It turned out that I was meeting Mairi at the big Barnes and Noble downtown, only a stone’s throw from my office. It wasn’t a place I frequented; I preferred to spend my last buck at the dying mom n’ pop shops rather than the massive two-story corporate edifice that was choking the life out of those shops. Still, it was close and had the added bonus of a coffee shop inside. Both facts were much appreciated once I realized I’d be spending my usual dinnertime hunting for a ghost.

Mairi met me there and waited patiently by my side in the long line so I could grab an overpriced latte and a blueberry muffin. She declined my offer to get her a beverage, which I was secretly glad for. Payday seemed eons away to my nearly empty wallet.

Bookstores have always been a happy place for me. Something about the smell of ink and paper was soothing; comforting yet filled to bursting with so many possibilities. I could still remember how exciting such stores had seemed to me when I was a child. My father and I had often made early morning trips out to them when I was younger. I would inevitably come back to him with a stack of books when it was time to leave, and he would bluster over how I couldn’t possibly need all of them. That was just dad being dad. He’d buy them despite his grumbling and we’d find ourselves back there in a week or two. I had always been a big reader and it was something my parents had encouraged.

The adult in me didn’t approve of the corporate greed of the big box stores but I guess there was a remnant of my inner child frolicking around somewhere in there. I couldn’t help but feel that familiar old serenity descend upon me the minute my feet crossed the threshold. Even standing on a line ten deep for overpriced snacks didn’t seem to faze me. The reminiscing felt good. It made me feel grounded, and that was something I hadn’t much felt lately.

With food and drink were finally in hand, we took the escalator up to the second floor and found a relatively secluded spot by the railing that overlooked the ground. We had a clear view of the door, which I guess would have come in handy if I had a clue who we were looking for. Mairi leaned back, resting on her elbows, and watched the flow of the crowd behind us with typical teenage detachment. When the rumbling of my belly was put at bay, I said, “I’m not sure what I had expected when you told me we were going hunting, but hanging around by the cooking section really wasn’t it.”

“Secret Keepers love knowledge. They’re drawn to it. Bookstores, libraries, museums—they love them all. Not a lot of people know much about the Lynx but from what we’ve heard, he spends a lot of time trolling them.” She twisted around with lithe grace so she too was overlooking the lobby below. “They have a weakness for gossip too, so it’s a good thing you like coffee. We’ll be hitting up every Starbucks in the city limits. On Kaine’s dime, of course.”

I glanced at her askance. “Seriously?”

She shrugged. “You’d be surprised what you can overhear while people share a cup of coffee.”

“Makes sense, I guess.” I swallowed another bite of muffin and washed it down with another swig of cooling, sugar-laden caffeine. My eyes roved the faces below, but they all looked blessedly normal to me. “So what exactly am I looking for? Does this guy have horns or wings or something?”

“Nope, he’s Aos Sí. He should be pretty normal looking by human standards, like Kaine and Gannon are.”

“Well that’s a start.” Hearing that name soured my stomach. I swore I felt every bruise on my body twinge at the mere mention of it. I crumpled up the wrapper that had held my snack and jammed it in my jacket pocket. She turned her head and regarded me with those freaky eyes and I thought I saw my reflection in them. The fae penchant for having to have every tiny bit of information pried out of them with a verbal crowbar was exhausting. I mentally counted to three to keep my temper in check. “Then what’s the plan here? Do we have any idea what he looks like beyond ‘pretty normal’? Because that’s not exactly helpful.”

She pulled out an old picture, which I took with care. It was worn, the corners rounded and the front faintly creased. The finish of the print was smooth and matte, nothing like today’s glossy computer printed photos. It focused on a man sitting at a small outdoor café, much like the one I had eaten my lunch at. He was dressed in a dark brown overcoat with an orange and brown striped scarf wrapped around his neck; looking down at a paperback book resting against the edge of the table. His eyes were shaded by dark, round wire-framed sunglasses.

There was nothing memorable about his long face and wind-tousled sandy brown hair. He looked like a run-of-the-mill guy catching up on some Steinbeck while drinking a coffee. There were empty tables in the background and leaves on the ground. The whole scene had an autumnal feel to it, which made me wonder what month it had been taken in. For all I knew, it could have been taken on the very same day so many years ago. I felt like I was looking back in time, at something long lost. The thought made me shiver.

“He may look older now,” she said. “Fae don’t age as quickly as humans, but we do age. His clothing will likely be updated.” Her eyes slid across the photo. “I mean… It might not actually even be him. The naiad who gave it to us swore that it was, and she seemed pretty sincere but we don’t have any real proof. We know the Lynx can be seen if he wants to. Kaine thinks this is him, taken years ago on one of the rare occasions when he had his guard down. Those were safer days for all of us.”

I let the naiad comment slide. I had no interest in finding out what that was just yet. I handed her back the photo and watched it disappear into her voluminous purse. “Well, that may or may not be helpful. This is all assuming we ever happen across him in the first place. If he blends in with the crowd like any other suburban soccer dad, what’s the chance I’m even going to notice him?”

“We discussed that at length last night and I think I came up with a solution.” Her smile was shy, like a child awaiting praise. She jerked her head in the direction of the shelves behind us. I followed her lead, falling into step beside her. We walked at an unhurried pace, stopping before the first shelf we came to. She scanned the rows slowly, like she really was searching down a particular title on pressure cooking. Her voice was so soft I almost had to lean in to hear it. “See that young boy to the right, sitting by the wall with the graphic novel?”

My eyes darted right. I saw the young man in question and confirmed it. “Yeah, so?”

Her smile grew bolder. “And that big blond lady across the way, on the left? And the older gentleman in glasses who just came around the corner and is giving her dirty looks for blocking the shelf?”