Kitty Steals the Show (Kitty Norville 10)

Well east of the city, downriver. Just a spot on a map.

I frowned. “I don’t suppose you have an address?”

She crossed her arms and pouted. “Addresses, bah. By the way, have you asked yourself whether or not I might be lying?” She was smiling, but it wasn’t pretty.

“I’d be no worse off than I was before,” I said, and she slouched, the wind taken out of her sails. Wings? She didn’t seem to have wings, not that I could see anyway. I sighed. “This has to be right. Thank—” Cormac squeezed my arm and shook his head. You didn’t thank fairies. Hmm.

“Right. This’ll work,” I said, and the queen offered a brief, mysterious bow.

>

I called Caleb. “I think I have a location for you. A place called Creekmouth?”

His voice sounded tinny, distant, like he was in a car. “It’s an industrial park, part of the port system. That’s not good,” he said. “Where’d you get this information? How do you know he’s there?”

“Um … fairies told me?”

He sounded surprised. “And you trust ’em?”

“They owed me a wish.”

“Ah, right,” he said.

“You believe me? Or, you believe in fairies?” I asked.

“I knew they were out there,” Caleb said. “Though it doesn’t do for a bloke like me to run around saying he believes in fairies. The thing you’ve got to remember about them—they’re not human, so don’t think you understand them. You, me, Ned, Marid, all of us—we all started out human and were changed. We might turn out quite different, but you can still suss us out at the heart of it. But them? They never were human.”

“We’ve been having this conference on the paranormal and we missed this whole part of it that isn’t even human?”

“Not my concern,” he said. “Where are you?”

“Hyde Park,” I said. “The Peter Pan statue.”

“Typical,” he huffed. “Walk north, you’ll end up at the Lancaster Gate tube stop, we’ll pick you up in about fifteen minutes.”

“How far away is this place?”

“It’ll take time to get there,” he said. “I’ve got a couple of people I can send to scout ahead.”

It would have to be enough. I shut off the phone and looked around to say good-bye to the queen and her folk, but they were gone.

I blinked at Cormac and Ben. “Where’d they go?”

“Vanished. Poof,” Ben said, flicking out his fingers.

“Just like that?” I said.

“Hard to tell,” Cormac said. “I wasn’t quite looking at them.”

“Yeah,” Ben agreed. “I thought I just glanced away for a minute.”

That shouldn’t have surprised me at all. “We have to get moving, Caleb’s going to pick us up.”

Nightfall gave the mission even more urgency—we’d be dealing with vampires soon. Njal would know that Harald and his mate had left him. Other vampires would call on werewolves who were no longer there.

When we got to the intersection, the lights and traffic nearly blinded me after the relative peace and darkness of the park. I spotted Caleb when he flashed headlights, and we piled into the back of the car. Michael, one of Caleb’s wolves, occupied the front passenger seat. They nodded at us in acknowledgement.

“You all right?” Caleb asked.