Loose Changeling: A Changeling Wars Novel (8 page)

“It's on the car!” I screamed.

Kailen jerked the wheel again, and I slammed against the passenger door.
How the hell did
he
manage to get his seatbelt on?

I shoved myself away from the passenger door and looked back again. The hound rolled on the street behind us. It had left its mark, ten jagged silver lines, across the back of Kailen's car. Before he could swerve again, I pulled my seatbelt on and clicked it.

For a moment, the only sounds that filled the car were the sounds of our heavy breathing. Jane had stopped squeaking, clinging to the edge of Kailen's pocket. If I had to hazard a guess, she felt a little like I did. The eggs and toast and sausage—all of which I'd relished only a moment before—now churned in my stomach. If Kailen told me indigestion was a side effect of manifesting my Fae nature, I was going to punch him.

He roared down the streets, applying his foot to the gas pedal liberally, and hit the on-ramp to the I-84 going sixty-five. We left both the hound and the inn behind.

CHAPTER SEVEN

I cleared my throat as the trees and buildings passed on either side. “I'm not even sure where I should ask you to begin,” I said. “Back at where you were saying every Fae has Talents, or where you said ‘grushound’?”

Kailen slammed his hands on the steering wheel. “This was supposed to be easy,” he said. “I respect Faolan. I admire him. When he came to me with this job, I wasn't going to turn him down. I was supposed to be like a courier—fetch package, bring package back, get paid. Instead”—he took one hand off the steering wheel and began to gesticulate—“I'm killing hobgoblins, running from a grushound, and trying to teach the most stubborn woman I have ever met how to use her magic.”

“I'm right here, you know,” I said, crossing my arms. I felt ridiculous, one sleeve missing, the other untouched.

Kailen ran his free hand through his hair. “I said before you were like a gun in a game of Russian roulette. Forget that. You're more like a loose electrical wire, swinging about in a storm. No one gets to decide whether they want to play. What were the Aranhods thinking?”

I closed my eyes and put my hands on the dashboard, pressing against it, as if I could physically push my problems away. “Stop the car.”

“In case you’ve forgotten, there’s a very large, very dangerous hound on our tail.”

“In case
you’ve
forgotten, you said you’d tell me what’s going on. Tell me, or stop the goddamned car!”

He breathed out a long sigh. “Changelings aren't just dangerous; they've been outlawed for hundreds of years.”

My mind went blank. I couldn't think of any retort, only, “What?”

“No one is allowed to create a Changeling. It's against the Fae laws.”

“I...why?”

“It’s the Aranhods’ duty to explain your heritage, not mine. It’s complicated. But what this means is that most other Fae have it out for you.”

“Well then, why don't you just drop me off at the Aranhods right now? Why are we driving around town? I don't like this any more than you do. Believe me, I don't.” I would have run out the door at the first stoplight if I weren’t sure that Kailen was the only thing standing between me and certain death.

“You're forgetting something very important,” Kailen said. He cupped his hand next to his breast pocket. Jane crawled onto his palm. He held her out to me. “You can't leave this unfinished. You have to change her back. Every day she remains a mouse, the worse things get.”

I took her, though my skin crawled from the feel of her tiny little feet against my hands and from the memory of catching her and Owen in bed together. “Okay, fine. Tell me what to do.”

“Remember what I told you before—form the concept in your mind and then pack an emotional punch behind it. You've been doing it already, though unconsciously. Think about Jane as a human.”

“And the emotional punch?”

“It has to be strong, as strong as the one that turned her into a mouse.”

Great. I didn't just have the visual memory seared into my brain, I remembered how I'd felt upon finding Owen in bed with Jane. Shocked, angry, hurt, each emotion hitting one after another, then blending together into a big ball of shocked-angry-hurt in my chest. How could I match that? I breathed in deep and closed my eyes, trying to ignore the climbing indigestion and the feel of Jane in my hand.

I pieced together my memory of Jane—mousy brown hair, brown eyes, the thin covering of hair on her upper lip. I added the clothes I'd seen discarded at the side of the bed. She still looked too much like a mouse in my mind. I wasn't sure why it was so hard for me to think of her as human. Owen had. Owen had seen her as a woman, one attractive enough to take to bed. Before I'd burst in, he'd sounded like he'd been having
fun
with her. When was the last time Owen and I had had that sort of fun? I couldn't even remember.

The grushound invaded my thoughts, lurking behind my image of Jane, nose lifted in the air, black ears pricked forward. My heart kicked at my ribs. A shower of pillows hit the hound, each dissolving into feathers as they did. The Jane in my imagination crouched, her hands covering her head. Before I could stop myself, she'd turned into a mouse in my mind, paws over her ears. I banished the grushound, the feathers, and tried to bring back the image of Jane as a human.

I couldn't.

“I can't do this!” I cried out finally. I opened my eyes, a colossal headache starting at the base of my skull. Jane stared back up at me, nose and whiskers twitching. “I can't concentrate. Every time I try, something else pops up in my head. It's either the grushound, or Owen, or feathers.”

Kailen raised an eyebrow at the last item on my list but didn't comment.

I leaned my head against the window, waiting as the pain dissipated. “This isn’t my life. I get up, I go to work, I relax at home. I like having a schedule, a routine. Turning a mouse back into a human? That’s so far outside my routine that it’s in another galaxy.”

Kailen pursed his lips, his brow drawn low. He glanced over at me, and when he spoke, his voice was soft. “I’m sorry. I know this all must be a shock to you. For what it’s worth, you’re dealing with it better than I would have.”

We exchanged brief, tight-lipped smiles—and then a thought occurred to me. “Maybe you
should
take me in to work.”

The smile faded from his face. “We’ve been over this already—”

“Remember when I asked you about quick, small Fae that like to giggle? I’ve been hearing and seeing things in my office for a week. If someone’s trying to kill me, maybe what I’ve been seeing in my cubicle has something to do with that. Maybe I can find some clues. Besides, work always calms me down and makes me feel better.”

He raised his eyebrow, as if he didn’t believe my story about the Fae in my cubicle, but then he nodded. “Not a bad idea. Only for a couple of hours. Then we leave again.” He pulled the car over into the left-turn lane. I'd stopped paying attention to where we were or where we were headed. After a few more turns, we came out onto a street I definitely recognized, and we pulled into the parking lot of a three-story office building downtown. A large, silver “FG” was emblazoned on the side of the building, next to the logos of two other companies. “If you think it will help your concentration.”

“Definitely.” I found the rhythms of daily work soothing. Though the kitchen at home was my favorite spot there, I still had to share it with Owen and his perpetually messy ways. My desk at work was my very own space—always neat, organized, and quintessentially me.

“I’ll be here in the parking lot,” Kailen said. “Two hours. Be back down here by eleven thirty or I’ll have to come up and get you. And that would be awkward for all parties involved.”

“I can say I have a doctor’s appointment,” I said. “It won’t be a problem.” I practically jumped out of the car as soon as it stopped, my mind already on my checklist of tasks, rearranging items until I found the best fit for the largest number of things I could complete in two hours, in order of highest priority to lowest. The sooner I could find my concentration, the sooner I could turn Jane back into a person, meet the Aranhods, find out what they wanted with me, and hopefully return to life as normal.

I breezed through the front doors, swiped my card at the elevator, and rode up to the second floor. It wasn’t until I stepped out of the elevator that I remembered my torn sleeve. I didn’t have another change of clothes. Maybe if I hurried past Anne, the office secretary, no one would notice.

I’d had a few brilliant ideas in my day. This, however, wasn’t one of them. Anne looked up as soon as I opened the door, auburn curls brushing over her shoulders. “Oh, Nicole!” she said, blue eyes wide. “I thought you were sick.” She sat behind a low counter, head and shoulders above the monitor of her computer.

I didn’t hate Anne. She’d always greeted me in a cheery manner, did her work serviceably well, and made sympathetic noises at all the right places in a conversation. But she had a tendency to pry, and the last thing I wanted to encounter this morning was a busybody.

“Sick,” I said. “Yes, well…”

“You look great,” Anne said. “Are you wearing heels? You look like you’ve been somewhere sunny. Got a bit of a glow to your complexion. Sick seems to suit you, if that’s what it is.” She fired off each sentence, one after another, as valiantly as a soldier at a cannon.

I had my ballet flats on, and I certainly hadn’t spent any time in the sun recently. Were these the changes Kailen had referred to, and if so, had they made me so different that Anne hadn’t even noticed my torn sleeve?

Anne took in a sharp breath. “Oh, what’s happened to your sleeve?”

There it was. I opened my mouth to tell her that I felt better than I had that morning and stopped myself. What was the point? “You know what?” I said slowly, the words tipping from my mouth. “I wasn’t sick at all. This morning I didn’t feel like coming in, so I made my husband call you.”

“You didn’t!” Anne said, her eyes bright. Her face said “shock,” but her eyes said “please tell me more.” So I did.

“I’ve never done it before,” I said. I hadn’t. “I wanted to see what it would be like. But you know what?”

“What?” She leaned forward in her chair.

“I’m sorry I did. Leaving everyone else to do my work is not something I pride myself on.” Anne seemed to deflate before my eyes. “I hope you weren't put upon by my absence.”

“No, not at all,” Anne said. She let out a little huff of breath and turned back to her computer. I looked up and saw the door to my boss's office, slightly open.
Well, let's just hope he didn't hear that
.

“I caught my sleeve in the car door on my way in,” I told her. She nodded despondently.

Our conversation apparently over, I headed to my cubicle. As I did, I passed the small and vacant office for head salesperson. I couldn't help myself; I turned my head to look at it, as I did every time I came to work. The desk and chair lay empty, dust gathering on their surfaces. Behind it, a floor-to-ceiling window exposed a view of the neighboring building's wall. Not the best view, but a view nonetheless.

“Still eyeing that? I hear you stop every time on your way to your cubicle,” said one of my coworkers. I peered over the partition and saw Brent hunched over his keyboard, his back turned to me, thinning black hair gelled back. “Landon will never fill the position, you know. He likes to micromanage.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes, it is so, Miss Perfect Prissy Pants.”

“Well that's kind of rude, don't you think?”

He shrugged. “I guess so.” His hands kept tapping at the keyboard.

I slipped past him and found my cubicle. Brent, our accountant, had his good days and his bad days. Clearly I'd walked in on one of his bad days.

I wanted to sigh in relief as soon as I entered my workspace. Everything on my desk had its place. Pens and pencils point-down in the mug next to my monitor. My own Frank Gibbons planner sat on the other side, next to the stapler, white out, and my bin of paperclips. I’d pinned a large calendar against one wall of my cubicle, my business trips written in green sharpie.

I sat and powered up my computer. Just as my background popped up—a grassy field at noon—Anne's voice whispered from behind me.

“Nicole, sorry to bother you so soon, but Landon wants to talk to you in his office. Right away.”

So far, this was not turning out to be the relaxing venture I'd thought it would be. “Thank you, Anne,” I told her, though I felt no gratitude to speak of. I rose from my chair, moved my stapler a little to the right, just to have something to do, and brushed past her. Her footsteps sounded behind me. No doubt she would sit quietly at her computer trying to overhear what Landon had to say. She'd once had the impertinence to hush me mid-conversation when my boss had called in another of my coworkers. I suppressed my irritation. He probably wanted to talk about my absence and scold me for leaving those contracts undone. I straightened my shoulders before walking into his office. Well, I'd faced down hobgoblins earlier in the day. My boss couldn't be much more difficult.

Landon sat behind his desk, one hand on his mouse, his monitor reflected in his black-framed glasses. Gray hair curled around his ears, giving him the vague look of a Roman statue, but with saggy jowls and a bit of a pudge instead of a firmly defined jaw and an even firmer body. “Come in, Nicole. Shut the door behind you, please.”

I did as he asked, taking my place in one of the two chairs opposite his desk. He clicked his mouse a few more times, typed something, and clicked again. A tiny giggle reached my ears.

I cleared my throat. "Did you say something?"

Landon glanced at me. "Just a moment." As he turned back to his computer, the screen flickered and then cut to black. "Damn it!" He leaned down and picked up a plug. "Must have kicked it this time," he muttered.

I cleared my throat again and Landon finally faced me. He plugged the computer back in, pushed his glasses up, then clasped his hands on the desk in front of him. “Sorry about that. Now you know you’re one of my best workers. I can always count on you to be here on time, to participate in meetings, and to bring home the sales.”