“Will you come?” She made a small sound that almost sounded embarrassed. “Maybe I’m just imagining things.”

  I doubted that very much. I’d been working with Mrs. Petryka for almost a month, and ‘given to flights of fancy’ wouldn’t have been the way I would have described her. Neither was jumping at shadows, or overreacting.

  “I’m on my way, Mrs. Petryka,” I said, firmly. Roy was already moving, grabbing his coat and his keys. “We’re on our way—er, Roy from the Council, I mean,” I amended. I should have known Roy would come along. He took his job on the Council seriously, as well as looking out for friends and neighbors.

  “It’s probably nothing,” Mrs. Petryka protested, but I could hear the relief in her voice. “I don’t mean to be any trouble.”

  “You’re not,” I assured her. “We’re happy to help.”

  I shot Roy an apologetic look as we moved towards the door. The call had pretty much ruined our evening, but I could hardly turn an old lady away, especially when she sounded as frightened as she had.

  Roy put a reassuring hand on the small of my back as we headed for his truck. If he was frustrated, he didn’t let it show. But I knew, if someone was skulking around Mrs. Petryka’s home, or trying to break in, Roy would take out on them every ounce of his irritation at our interrupted evening.

  Chapter Seven

  I did have to hang up briefly on Mrs. Petryka on the drive to her house.

  And I couldn’t help but think that if Taliyah found out that Roy and I had come to Mrs. Petryka’s defense on something the police should have been involved in, I would never, ever, ever hear the end of it. Taliyah had already had some pretty choice things to say about the Council’s ‘black ops, lone ranger crap’, and I didn’t want to make the situation worse. Before, we’d kept the police out of things because they’d either get killed, or wouldn’t know what to do, or we did so in order to protect the privacy of any supernatural residents involved.

  With Taliyah as both the Chief of Police, and as reluctant Princess of the Winter Court of the Fae, none of those things were necessarily true anymore, but sometimes old habits died hard.

  Still, I didn’t want to get frozen up to my cheekbones or something, so I gave her a short, terse call to let her know what was going on, and then hung up when she started to tell me that Roy and I should stay out of it. I winced as I ended the call, saying she was cutting out and I couldn’t hear her (which was really stupid, but it was all I could think of). Yes, I was going to pay for that later. But Mrs. Petryka was even older than I was, and in her time, you didn’t call the cops because the cops were usually human. If Taliyah showed up at her house, and we weren’t there, Mrs. Petryka might be frightened, or might even lash out. And that would be bad for all parties involved.

  I just wanted everyone to be okay.

  It was tough, fighting the urge to call Mrs. Petryka back. I hated that little fragile threat of terror I’d heard strung through her voice, and if someone really was poking around and harassing a sweet old lady, then Roy was going to have to wait his turn in the butt-kicking line.

  But we were already turning onto her street, so that butt-kicking was going to happen soon enough. We tore into the driveway, just in time to hear a deafening crash, followed by a series of crunches. My heart slammed into my throat, and I almost tore the seatbelt in my haste to get it off.

  Once I was out of Roy’s truck, I pelted around to the backyard, with Roy almost on my heels, and screeched to a halt as I took in the scene. Roy almost flattened me when I stopped moving, but then stood and gaped along with me.

  The back door to the house was open, spilling long rectangles of light across the backyard. Across from the door was an old, sturdy wooden fence, with a few shrubs in front of it that would have flowered beautifully in the next coming weeks. Would have, because they were squashed almost flat, and there was a hole in the fence, like something large had been catapulted through it at a fairly high speed.

  Mrs. Petryka stood at the back door, her hands fisted in the skirt of her housedress. There was an expression on her wrinkled face that was somewhere between fury and fear.

  “Mrs. Petryka! Are you okay? What happened?”

  She jumped at the sound of my voice. “Fifi! Oh!”

  “What happened?” Roy demanded.

  “Well, they... they broke in through this door, and I threw them out.”

  Domovyk were spirits of the house and the hearth. They weren’t physically powerful, and they didn’t have a lot of magic, but they had near total control over the houses they lived in. When Mrs. Petryka said she ‘threw them out’, it meant she’d told the house to eject them, which it had, and apparently with extreme prejudice.

  Roy and I shared a look, and he took off towards the hole in the fence while I concentrated on Mrs. Petryka. If Roy caught up to whoever it was that had done this, they’d be lucky if getting magically tossed through the fence was the worst thing that happened to them.

  The Domovyk took my hands in hers as I stepped over the threshold of the house. She was still shaking a little, and clearly upset by someone breaking in, but underneath her fear, there was an obvious sense of pride. She’d defended her home from an intruder, and she was proud of that fact.

  I was just glad she wasn’t hurt.

  Eventually, Roy came back. I could tell from the set of his jaw and the look on his face that he hadn’t found whoever it was. He shook his head when he stepped up onto the back porch.

  “Whoever it was, they took off. I didn’t see any sign of them.”

  I steered Mrs. Petryka further away from the door. At least it looked undamaged. The house must have opened it to eject the intruder.

  “We called the police on the way over here.” I ignored Mrs. Petryka’s clucking and pushed on. “Chief Morgan isn’t a mundane, Mrs. Petryka. She’s the faery Princess of Winter. She can help you.”

  That seemed to mollify Mrs. Petryka at least a little, though she still kept making little comments about ‘not wanting to make a fuss’.

  “Roy and I are going to check the house over, just to make sure no one is still there. Okay?”

  Mrs. Petryka reflexively smoothed down the front of her skirt. “Oh, he didn’t make it much past the back door. And I’m sure I’d sense someone if they were still inside. But, if you’d like to double check, dear, then I won’t tell you not to.”

  It all sounded so polite, like she was humoring us. But I could hear the gratitude in her voice, and I could see the tight skin at her jaw and the corners of her eyes relax a little. That someone had gotten in at all had scared her, that much was obvious.

  I just patted her hand and looked at Roy. We had a wordless conversation with our eyes, and I nodded and headed for the stairs to the second floor. Roy stayed on the first floor, no doubt to check out the main floor, and then the basement.

  As I took the stairs, I had to wonder if our little unspoken conversation was part and parcel of being soulmates? Just being on the same wavelength and thus, understanding one another? Or did all people who spent a lot of time together have that kind of unspoken communication? I never had, but I’d also never had a relationship that lasted more than four months, six at the outside.

  The upstairs of the old Georgian was exactly as I remembered it. Everything was neat as a pin, dust free, and uncluttered. There weren’t a lot of doilies or knickknacks. Mrs. Petryka seemed to prefer a kind of minimalist lifestyle. But it was cozy. Soft furniture, reading nooks, big airy windows that let in the golden sunlight when not covered by heavy drapes.

  It made it much easier to see if anything had been taken or disturbed. The only thing that struck me as being out of place was a cup of tea on a side table left to go cold. Mrs. Petryka must have been drinking it when she felt someone prowling around.

  It made me furious. Mrs. Petryka was just a harmless, kind woman, who liked sharing her hospitality with people. And someone had tried to break into her home, to make her feel unsafe in the one place she had total control. Domovyks weren’t particularly powerful or dangerous spirits, and they certainly weren’t a threat to anyone else. Thus, as far as I could tell, there was no reason to terrorize her.

  It didn’t help that she was also my client, and I’d started to feel a little protective of her.

  My jaw was tight enough that my teeth creaked as I stalked into the upstairs bathroom to check behind the shower curtain.

  No one was hiding in the bathtub. The medicine cabinet over the sink looked the same as it had that last time I was in here, at the open house. Exactly the same, actually.

  I paused as I remembered the last time I’d come up here—after I’d followed the weaselly guy, sure he was up to something. And then a couple days later, he was dead. I felt vaguely guilty that I still didn’t know his name. Like, if you’d seen someone dead, you should know what to call them, other than ‘weaselly guy’.

  He’d looked like he’d been casing the place, looking for something to steal. But Mrs. Petryka wasn’t really one for expensive kitsch. Nothing easy to pocket, other than maybe some of the turnovers she’d covered her table with. That had been why I’d followed him upstairs in the first place. But nothing had been taken then, either.

  It was then that I started to think about the pocket watch I’d found, while showing Calliope around the old converted warehouse. I’d called Sam from the pawn shop about it but he hadn’t answered so I’d left him a message, asking him to call me back, which he had yet to do. My mind still swimming with thoughts about the watch, I wondered why someone would have picked such an odd, out of the way, hiding spot for something so valuable? Furthermore, if the thing hadn’t almost seemed to call to me, emitting some sort of magnetic pull, I wouldn’t have ever found it. But maybe that was the point?

  And maybe that was the point now too? Maybe the weaselly guy hadn’t been trying to take something, but to hide something in Mrs. Petryka’s house? Not that the watch belonged to him, of course, but it gave me the idea, all the same. I held my hand up to the medicine cabinet and, again, felt that odd buzzing hum in my fingertips.

  The medicine cabinet was an old-fashioned one that wasn’t actually set into the wall. Instead, it hung by a couple of hangers along the top and was just nailed to the wall. My suspicions mounting, I nudged the edge of the cabinet up, sliding it against the wallpaper. It moved smoothly, arcing against the wall. And there, behind the cabinet, was a hole.

  Not a big one, certainly. But with the rest of the house in such good repair, this hole stuck out like a moose in the desert. There was no way Mrs. Petryka would have allowed it to remain if she’d known about it. Which meant either she didn’t know the hole was here, or it was new.

  I angled the flashlight on my phone into the little hole, and I could see something shadowy nestled inside it. Had the weaselly guy deliberately put a hole in my client’s wall to hide something here? Hmm...

  Gingerly, I reached into the gap, and my fingers closed over something small and smooth. I pulled it out to take a look at it. In the stark light of the bathroom, it really didn’t look like much at all. I was expecting something like the watch: something small, expensive, easy to hide. Two out of the three were still right, but I didn’t imagine whatever this was was worth anything because it looked like a handmade clay pendent on a strip of leather. The pendent wasn’t even pretty. It was clay, with bits stained dark, and a few symbols pressed into it. I guessed it could be some kind of amulet, or something. A talisman maybe—but a very crudely made one.

  It also stank. Like old blood and wet dirt. And it had the same sort of buzz the watch had had—something that had called out to me through the medicine cabinet and even now, was continuing to hum away while in my palm. Very strange.

  I stuffed the thing into my pocket, and made a mental note to ask Mrs. Petryka about it as soon as I headed back downstairs. I couldn’t imagine her keeping such a strange thing in her house, but maybe it was some sort of Domovyk charm for warding off evil or something? Would Mrs. Petryka have put a hole in her own wall for a protection charm though? I doubted it, but the point was that I didn’t know what it was or why it was here and the best person to ask was the lady who owned the house.

  There was a commotion from downstairs then. Raised and angry voices. I recognized one of them as Taliyah’s and my heart dropped. Great, just great.

  I turned to head back to the stairs, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the hidden things I’d recently found. First the watch, then this bizarre talisman—and both calling to me with a strange electrical energy. Why choose a lived-in home and an empty warehouse in which to hide them? One was easy to get into, the other almost impossible, especially with a Domovyk in residence. Was it even the same person who was hiding things in the first place? Had the weaselly guy put this thing here, or had he been looking for it?

  Taliyah was in the front hall, speaking to Roy and Mrs. Petryka when I came down the stairs. Without her glamor, which she didn’t bother using unless she was around mundanes, she looked like exactly what she was; a Royal Sidhe.

  Gone was the shoulder length bob of graying brown hair. In its place was a waterfall of pale hair, almost the same silver as my own, twisted up into a knot at the back of her neck. Unbound, I knew it went all the way down to her hips. Taliyah’s face was smoother, missing any sign of wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, or laugh or smile lines. She suddenly looked like she was in her mid-twenties, instead of nearly fifty. The badge, the clothes, the folded arms and the scowl, those always remained the same though, faerie magic or not.

  Taliyah’s true-blue eyes narrowed a little on me, and I fought not to stumble as I came down the stairs. I had the sudden rush of feeling like I’d done something wrong, and everything I’d been about to say, about the talisman, the watch, the intruder, all of it withered to dust in my mouth.

  “You searched the house?” The tone Taliyah was using, no, she was all Chief Morgan at the moment, made it clear that there was definitely a very wrong answer to her question.

  “Yes,” I said, because I wasn’t a liar and it was pretty obvious that I’d just searched the place. “We just wanted to make sure no one was still here.”

  Taliyah sighed, losing some of her icy façade. “Thank you, Fifi. But this is police business, and you need to let me handle it. I know you mean well, but try to keep the lone ranger stuff to a minimum, okay?” She shot Roy a hard look. “You, too.”

  Roy, who didn’t start fights, but had absolutely no trouble finishing them, just reached out a hand to me. “Let’s go, Fifi.”

  Taliyah obviously wasn’t happy that Roy clearly wasn’t agreeing to stay out of all things police related, but she also just as obviously didn’t want to get into an argument in front of Mrs. Petryka. So, she just scowled at him and he scowled right back at her. There was a fine line between Council business and police business.

  “Call me if you need anything,” I told Mrs. Petryka on my way towards the door. “Anything at all.”

  She nodded, still a little pale around the edges. But she seemed to feel more secure, because she didn’t protest us leaving her alone with Taliyah.

  And, really, as far as Roy and I were concerned, there wasn’t much else we could do. Taliyah didn’t want our help, and I wasn’t sure what we could do even if she did. The suspect was gone. We didn’t know who they were, or where they’d gone, or even what they’d wanted with Mrs. Petryka’s house, for that matter. Of course, there was still the talisman in my pocket and I could have certainly turned that over to Taliyah but I hadn’t.

  Hmm, why hadn’t I? I decided it was because I wanted to question Mrs. Petryka about it first. But now was definitely not the time to do that with Taliyah standing there and looking as menacing as a tornado about to hit down. So, I turned and followed Roy back to his truck.

  The ride back was a quiet one, and the entire time, I could feel the press of the amulet against my leg through my pocket, burning like a brand.

  Chapter Eight

  In some ways, owning Hallowed Homes was a dream come true.

  I had a career, a real one, and I was good at it, too. Not to mention, we provided a much-needed service to the community, helping both supernatural and humans alike find their dream homes. I loved what we did, and I had big, big plans for the future.

  Sometimes, being the boss sucked, though.

  Like when I was stuck at work long after everyone else had gone home for the night, hip deep in paperwork that needed finishing but not making much headway. Thank goodness I’d found an excellent accountant, or I’d basically never see daylight between February and April.

  When all the forms started looking alike, and the numbers started swimming before my eyes, it was time to put it aside for the night and focus on something else. I straightened my back out of the hunch I’d been in for over an hour and felt something click in my spine. I needed coffee in the worst way, even though my stomach was roiling from all the caffeine I’d already forced into it. My eyes felt gritty, my clothing rumpled.

  But there was always something more to do.

  The watch and amulet I’d found were constantly nagging at my thoughts, which was part of the reason my attempts to finish the forms were going so badly. I just couldn’t help but think both objects were related—even though I’d found them in completely different locations. But there were still similarities—the constant humming buzz attached to both, for one thing. Also, I did find it curious that both objects had been located in Hallowed Homes listings. Of course, I had to wonder if other things might have been hidden inside locations for which I had no access but for now, I was just focused on the information I did know.

  I glanced over at the heap of forms which still weren’t completed and sighed. But my thoughts couldn’t focus on them for long. Instead, I fished both objects I’d found out of my purse and laid them on the shiny black lacquer surface of my desk.