“Hi, I’m Alex Craft, a private investigator with Tongues for the Dead.” I held out my hand. Corrie’s handshake was firm but friendly, and almost unbearably painful. The heat of his skin did nothing but exacerbate the chil ing ache as his ring pressed against my flesh. Iron jewelry? Seriously? I’d had a lot of practice recently in keeping my face impassive during handshakes, so I managed not to wince or jerk away. When he dropped my hand, he turned to Falin and I rushed on. “And this is—” I hesitated. I’d first met him as Detective Andrews, but now that I knew he wasn’t, introducing him as such would be a lie. I also couldn’t introduce him as Agent Andrews. Corrie was fae-phobic introduce him as Agent Andrews. Corrie was fae-phobic and “agent” was a dead giveaway for the FIB. Final y I said,
“—my associate, Falin Andrews.”
Falin shook Corrie’s extended hand, his glamour holding against the smal quantity of iron in the ring. The old man glanced at Falin’s gloved hand and then gave him a slow, scrutinizing appraisal.
“May we come in?” I asked, trying to get Corrie’s attention away from Falin.
“What is it you want, Miss Craft?”
As in, no, we couldn’t enter. Okay. I could work with this.
Somehow.
I forced a smile. “My current case involves runes I’ve never seen before, and I haven’t been able to find them in my research.” Or at least not in four hours of Internet searching. “I’m told you might be able to help me decipher them.”
He twisted his thick lips and ran a wrinkled hand over the few remaining hairs on the top of his head. “Do you have a copy of these runes?”
I nodded and riffled through my purse until I found the page where I’d sketched the runes. Corrie accepted the paper, and then patted his chest until his fingers found a thick leather cord. He pul ed the cord until a mass of charms emerged from under his shirt. He flicked through the charms, final y stopping when his fingers landed on a silver charm shaped like a pair of glasses. He detached the charm and flipped it upside down before reattaching it. One of the charms around him shimmered and changed.
“I’m always having to change from a nearsighted to a farsighted charm,” he said as he dropped the knot of charms back under his shirt. He smiled, as if sharing some inside joke. “You’l understand one day. Now let’s see what kind of runes you have here.” He lifted the page and studied the runes I’d meticulously copied from the charmed disk. As his gaze moved down the page, his eyes grew wider, his bushy white eyebrows lifting. “Now this is interesting. Very bushy white eyebrows lifting. “Now this is interesting. Very interesting.”
He stepped back, vanishing from the threshold. I waited, but he didn’t return.
I stuck my head inside and peeked around the half-open door. “Uh, hel o?”
“Try to keep up,” Corrie cal ed as he shuffled down the hal and disappeared around the corner.
“Sounds like we’ve been invited in after al ,” Falin said, pushing the door open wider.
If Corrie hadn’t already disappeared deeper in the house, I’d have dawdled endlessly in the entry hal . The wal s were lined with shelves and every square inch was fil ed with knickknacks. But this wasn’t just a col ection of junk—it was a col ection of magical junk. As soon as I passed the ward on the doorway, the press of hundreds of different charms and enchantments tumbled over me, threatening to overwhelm me.
They thundered through my senses, deafening my mind to anything else. Getting out and reorienting myself would have been best, but it was too late for that, and thinking above the magical roar to command my legs to move was beyond my ability. There was nothing malicious in the room, or at least nothing obvious, and not even anything terribly powerful. I felt a train that puffed out magic smoke, a dol that made children laugh, a mirror that reflected the image the viewer desired most, a spoon that kept soup hot, and other smal , frivolous charms. But there were hundreds of them. And they overloaded my senses.
I rarely shielded with more than my bracelet and my mental shield of living vines, but now I had no choice. I squeezed my eyes closed and forced my focus inward—at least as much focus as I could summon. Outside my wal of briars I visualized a second wal enclosing my psyche. This wal I saw as a bubble of unbroken mirrors, the reflective surface deflecting the feel of magic.
As the bubble solidified in my mind, the roar of magic As the bubble solidified in my mind, the roar of magic dul ed and then fel away into eerie magical silence. I always felt blind, deaf, and dumb when I shielded this hard and completely cut myself off from the ebb of the world around me, but for now, it was better than being overwhelmed.