2 Witch and Famous (3 page)

That was good enough news that I forgot to tell him how stupid just walking up to the coven and listening in on it was. “Fergie, you just made my day.”

He laughed heartily. “Why do you like that TV show so much?”

“Are you kidding?” I said. “A witch who has to keep her magic a secret from mortals? I’ll bring you some haggis from the festival to replace your stolen lunch.”

“Perfect.”

I shook my head. Some people would eat anything.

We hung up and I immediately texted Fergie my new code for the office door.
1873.
The year Niall was born. Also, the code I’d used to shut down the alarms in his gallery, immediately before proving that he’d stolen one of his own paintings just to meet me. It would be very easy for me to remember.

I looked around some more for Siobhan. Further along, there was a magician, doing street magic, making objects appear and disappear. Funny that people could get so much enjoyment from a little sleight of hand, when they would probably have run screaming from
real
magic.

I still didn’t see Siobhan, but I did feel her. There was a tang to goblin emotions that was as distinctive as the taste of the haggis Fergie wanted. Though possibly slightly more palatable. Siobhan was nearby, but so were hundreds of other people.
Where was she?
She’d been late before, but with the information that Fergie had given me, would she even show up? Would she have second thoughts?

I stretched out my senses, searching for her as I bought haggis, potatoes and turnips for Fergie. I carefully placed the take-away container in the bottom of my tote bag. I was finding out that werewolves had almost insatiable appetites. Had Fergie been completely human, he would have been just another part of Scotland’s dire national obesity statistics. Fortunately, as a werewolf, he burned off the calories at an astounding rate.

I walked further down the street, trying to hone in on Siobhan. It wasn’t easy because her energy was moving around quickly, darting in and out of the throng. I stopped at a spot where the crowd was exclaiming over a fire-eater’s act. I stopped to watch it and basked in the energy of the crowd, captivated by the illusion of danger. As someone who had been on the receiving end of real blasts of power, a few flares of flame were nicely relaxing by comparison. It was a strange kind of double pleasure. I was getting the thrill of the performance for myself, and then the reaction of the crowd a fraction of a second later.

It was strange to think that until recently, so much emotion in one place had been enough to make me close myself off, shut myself down, and generally give myself a headache trying to keep it all out. It was, as I had been taught in childhood, just one of the many downsides of being an enchantress who was able to use magic to affect others’ emotions. They—by which I mean the coven, my mother, and every tutor I’d had—had taught me that something like this would kill me or send me mad, cripple me with sensory overload or destroy my mind trying to make sense of it. They’d lied to me. Perhaps some of them, like my mother, had done it to protect me, but far more had been scared.

To everyone around me, I probably looked no different to anyone else. A little prettier than most of the people there, maybe. A little more attractive in some way that they couldn’t quite put their finger on, thanks to the backwash of my power, but otherwise, I was just your average thirty-five-year-old Scottish woman in casual clothes with flame-colored hair and high-cheekbones.

Yet, the truth was that I was an emotional vampire, capable of sucking the living energy right out of someone. I was capable of using that power to work effects that more than made up for the years when I thought I hadn’t been able to cast even the simplest of witch spells as my mother had.

Possibly the best part, though, was that it meant I could walk through the middle of a crowd like this with my shields down, letting the emotions run through me as a would-be comedian juggled knives to try to get the crowd’s attention, the expectation there from the crowd, the concentration from the performer…

A sudden flash of anger cut through all of it. I whirled around just a moment before I heard someone yell, “Stop, thieves!”

I felt them before I saw them, but I saw them quickly enough, too. Two hooded figures sprinted away through the crowd at a speed that should have sent people around them sprawling but didn’t. The ease with which they dodged through the crowd told me they had done this before. Maybe if one of them hadn’t happened to glance back right then, I would have just left it alone. I was an insurance investigator, after all, not the police. The trouble was, I recognized the pale, scale-marred features that stared back at me. Features I’d been searching for almost since I stepped outside this morning.

“Siobhan!” I yelled. It was a wonder that about five women didn’t turn toward me. After all, it wasn’t exactly an uncommon name in Scotland, and Edinburgh was a large city. As it was though, only one reacted, and she did it by running faster.

I took off after
my
Siobhan and her accomplice, pulling in emotion from the crowd to fuel my body’s hot pursuit, even as I reached out mentally to encourage people not to interfere. The last thing I wanted anyone doing was trying to grab a goblin. Goblins varied a lot, but the one thing it was easy to say with certainty was that any human trying to grab one would get a nasty surprise. Especially if they tried to grab Dougie. I knew from experience that he liked blades. Even Siobhan...

Well, it was simple. The term “goblin” was slang for any fey dangerous to humans. An old word that had somehow come to mean something far more specific, probably thanks to Tolkien. People thought they were all small, green, and stupid. None of that necessarily applied. The dangerous to humans part still did though, which was why I needed to keep them away. I didn’t count. I had
never
counted as just human, even before I found out the full depth of what I was. If I couldn’t handle a pair of goblin teens, I’d better just go back to my mother’s books and study.

My feet pounded the pavement as I ran, using the crowd’s energy to power my sprint after the goblins, dodging around people where I had to, but mostly just making them step aside before it became necessary.

“Siobhan, Dougie,
stop
!” I put power into that word, using the energy of the crowd around me to turn it into a command. I couldn’t take over their minds and make them do what I wanted, but I could throw a suggestion at them with enough force to make them hesitate. A second or two of hesitation was all I needed to catch up to them.

They whirled toward me, the alarm on their faces obvious at my presence. Apparently, even though they had been planning to meet me, they hadn’t expected me to show up when they were in the middle of stealing from someone.

Siobhan was actually quite pretty by goblin standards. It was simply that goblin standards were so alien that most of the time, they came across as weird and otherworldly. If she’d been human, I would have put her in her late teens. The hair sticking out from under the hood was a blonde so pale that it was close to white, while her features had patches of silvery scales like a fish’s skin. Or a lizard’s.

Dougie was mostly just a bundle of sullenness in a hooded top. After centuries of banishment from the daylight world, goblins didn’t like the sun much. He glared openly at me, and the animosity was clearly mutual.

I sensed mostly fear and anxiety from Siobhan. For all that they could be dangerous, goblins weren’t known for their magic. They couldn’t shut me out like a powerful witch could. Even for a goblin, Siobhan had almost no shields. Dougie was only a little harder to read. Judging by the way Siobhan was looking at him, he obviously had a certain icky romantic appeal, at least by goblin standards. The best that I could say was that he did have better teeth than most goblins.

“I said stop!” I repeated, when Dougie grabbed Siobhan’s hand to run away again. He froze and she bumped into him. She deserved more than this opportunistic loser.

Dougie half-snarled at me, and I held out my hand with a sigh.

“Hand it over, Dougie. Whatever you took, give it up. The last time we played this game, I knocked you down and nearly broke your arm. That was before I even knew what I was. Now…I am sure that Siobhan has informed you what I could do to you.”

He stuck out his chin in a defiant way that said he knew all about me, but he wasn’t scared. It would have worked better if I couldn’t feel the fear underneath thrumming away like the dull beat of a drum. Of course, even a frightened thug could be dangerous, when cornered.

“Are you really sure you want to play this game now?” I asked. “With me?”

He looked like he might be prepared to try it anyway, but Siobhan put a hand on his arm.

“Give her the cell phone, Dougie,” she said. “Elle isn’t going to hand us over to the police. Or the coven.”

I wasn’t sure I liked the certainty there, but she
was
right about that. I didn’t want the police finding out about goblins any more than the rest of humanity. The last thing we needed was for them to know about the creatures living among them. In this case, in tunnels running through the dead volcano under Edinburgh.

As for the coven…well, I had a few problems with an institution whose approach to the non-human was to kill it the moment it became a problem. I had already had one close call when it came to my former coven contact, Rebecca, and a warlock whom Niall and I had overcome together when he’d tried an assassination attempt.

That didn’t mean I was letting Dougie and Siobhan get away with stealing, though.

“The phone,” I said quietly, but with a firmness designed to let Dougie know I meant business. Dougie handed Siobhan a new-looking Android phone. Siobhan was the one who handed it to me. Maybe Dougie didn’t want me touching him. People could sometimes be picky about that kind of thing once they knew what I was. They thought a touch would be enough to drain them. They weren’t quite right, but I wasn’t going to tell Dougie that.

“I thought I told you to leave this idiot?” I said to her quietly.

She gave me one of those complex shrugs that only teenagers seem to be able to manage. “You aren’t my mother.”

Now there was a whole argument I didn’t want to have.

“Dougie, where’s what you took from my office?” I asked, narrowing my eyes at him.

Siobhan looked shocked. “Did you steal something from Elle’s office last night?”

“I don’t have your petty cash box,” he said, with what he probably intended to be defiance.

I’d had enough. “Dougie, you know I can
feel
when you’re scared, right?” I took half a step toward him. “Not to mention the part where I never said anything about a petty cash box. Where’s the money that was in it?”

“Spent,” he admitted, after a sullen second or two of standing there, obviously trying to work out if he could get away with any other answer.

Siobhan stared at him in obvious shock. It was nice to know that she hadn’t known about that part. “On what?”

“Stuff.” Dougie shrugged. “None of your business.”

Siobhan looked like she might cry. That or hit him. I wasn’t sure which, even with my powers.