I slid into the backseat of Hol y’s car, but as we pul ed away from the curb, I noticed Lusa standing not far away, interviewing one of the pedestrians who’d been on the street. The man pantomimed thrusting his hand out like he was shoving it through something—or, more than likely, into a beast. Then he splayed his fingers as if to demonstrate suddenness and pointed to the hole.
Oh, I didn’t even want to know what kind of fal out I’d be Oh, I didn’t even want to know what kind of fal out I’d be dodging from this one.
“No comment,” I said, and hit the END button on my cel phone. It immediately buzzed again. “I need an antireporter charm,” I muttered. Yeah, and if I managed to create that, I’d make as much money as if I created a spel to reduce chocolate to zero calories. Of course, I was searching for a way to break glamour, and that charm appeared to be just as improbable.
“What do you think I should do, PC?” I asked, looking at my Chinese Crested.
The mostly hairless gray dog glanced up at his name.
Then he grabbed a stuffed penguin and dropped it at my feet.
“Yeah, I don’t think that’s going to help, buddy.”
He stared at me, his big brown eyes hopeful. When I didn’t move, he nudged the penguin closer with his nose, and the crest of white hair on his head—the only hair he had aside from the puffs on his tail and feet—bobbed with the motion.
“Oh, al right.” I tossed the toy across the room, and PC
took off, his nails clinking on the hardwood as he scrambled for the penguin. When he reached it, he stood there, squeezing it so it squeaked. Then he took off again, prancing around the one-room apartment with the toy. What he didn’t do was bring it back—we hadn’t quite got that retrieve and return thing down. I shook my head. Little goof.
My phone buzzed again, and with a sigh I hit the button to turn it off completely. I wasn’t likely to score a new client without my phone, but clients weren’t the ones cal ing right now. Tossing the phone on the counter, I turned back to my computer. I’d spent the last hour searching the Web for spel s and charms that could detect glamour. So far I’d run across some sketchy-sounding potions that used exotic—
across some sketchy-sounding potions that used exotic—
and probably fake—ingredients, and I’d found a couple of folklore-based glamour-piercing tricks, which, assuming they worked, would be even less feasible than my using my grave-sight whenever I left the house. After al , walking around peering through a stone with a natural y bored hole wasn’t exactly inconspicuous.
But I didn’t like the fact I’d run up against glamour two days in a row. I wasn’t a big believer in coincidence, and with first the glamoured feet and then the construct, plus the fae from the floodplain showing up in the Quarter . . . Yeah, I’d feel better with a glamour-piercing charm.
Not that I was finding one.
I closed the search browser. I was just going to have to fashion my own charm. Yeah, because I have such a successful history of spellcrafting. At least none of my charms had exploded recently.
As I closed my laptop, the electronic buzz of my TV
turning on hummed through the room. My spine stiffened. I’d reactivated my wards when I came home, and the door that separated my over-the-garage efficiency from the main house hadn’t opened. I should have been alone.
I whirled around, groping blindly for a weapon as I turned.
My fingers landed on the hard plastic of my cel phone—
which wasn’t much of a weapon, but it was better than nothing.
Thankful y, it was also unnecessary.
Roy Pearson, a thirtysomething former programmer—
being deceased complicated the whole holding-down-a-job thing—knelt in front of my television. He was focused, his gaze locked on where he slowly depressed the channel button one click at a time. I might as wel not have been in the room for al he noticed.
“Roy, you can’t just materialize in my bedroom and turn on my TV!”
The ghost looked up, his concentration faltering, and his finger passed through the front of the TV’s control panel.
finger passed through the front of the TV’s control panel.
With a frown, he shoved his thick black-rimmed glasses higher on his nose and his perpetual y slouched shoulders sagged more than normal. “Sorry. I wanted to see if I was on again.”
I dropped the unneeded phone-turned-makeshift-weapon back onto the counter. “Shock news doesn’t age wel . I think your interview probably got trumped today,” I said as I walked across the room to change the channel for him.
A few days ago I’d helped Roy give Lusa at Witch Watch an exclusive—and heavily censored—interview about his part in the Coleman case a month ago. Roy had final y been able to tel the story of how he’d died, and I’d completed my part of a bargain with Lusa that kept a damaging tape of me from being aired—win-win situation.