2 Witch and Famous (4 page)

Back to the issue at hand.

“Siobhan, who does this cell phone belong to?” I asked.

“He’s coming.” She angled her head at someone coming through the crowd with a purposeful stride. I could feel the anger coming off him at having been stolen from. Siobhan was probably just good at keeping an eye on marks.

Since I couldn’t afford the approaching man going to the police, I held up the phone and nodded at him. I added the nicest smile I had. Not to mention just a trace of power. From the way he checked me out as he approached, I knew it had worked.

“Is this yours?” I asked.

“I think that’s mine, yes,” he said a little breathlessly. He turned it on, checking it. “You caught the thieves involved?”

“No thieves.” I treated him to another smile. “There seems to have been a terrible misunderstanding. These youths thought it was their phone.” I pushed a little harder. I needed him to trust me. This was one side of my powers I’d used plenty of times. Even the coven had used me for this. Smoothing over…incidents. “They picked it up by mistake.”

“Oh, thank goodness I have it back. I’m traveling on business and I would be lost without my phone!” he said. “I couldn’t believe it when they picked it up off the table while I was eating.”

I handed it to him. “You know how alike phone cases look.” It wasn’t an explanation, not really. Without the steady stream of power I was pushing into him, he would never have believed it. Never have
trusted
me enough to believe it. I wasn’t hypnotizing him, exactly. I couldn’t put thoughts in his head, but I
could
influence what he felt so much that he would believe almost anything I said.

“I don’t think the boy realized his girlfriend had theirs in her pocket. Sorry.”

“These things happen,” the man said. “Nice of you to straighten things out. Um…you wouldn’t be interested in getting a drink sometime, would you?”

“I’m with someone,” I said.

“Even so…”

Maybe I’d overdone things. Certainly, it took another flicker of magic before he turned away, going to take a call.

Of course, by that point, Siobhan and Dougie had gone.  

Thieves! Not just thieves but
goblin
thieves! Goblin thieves, in Siobhan’s case, who didn’t listen to me. Was there
no
way to get Siobhan to dump Dougie for her own good? Maybe a strong dose of my power? Goblins had not much more of a wall around their emotions than humans, so I might be able to achieve something if I tried.

Only that would be wrong. I was
not
going to use my power to push them to break up. I didn’t have the right, even when I thought it would be for the best. Siobhan needed to make that decision for herself. It was still a mystery to me why she would ever want to be with Dougie, though. Either it was blind infatuation or Siobhan had a very compelling reason not to walk away from an idiot like him.

It occurred to me that I wasn’t going to be getting information from Siobhan today. That was a pity. She was a good source of information down in goblin territory, not to mention anything on the less legal side of life in the capital. It was just that Dougie was such a bad influence on her behavior above ground. As for below ground… who knew what goblins did there? I’d certainly never been near their home. Outsiders kept out or they didn’t come back.

I sighed and made my way toward my offices, where I’d been planning to go once I’d gotten what I needed from Siobhan. At least, before I started playing chase with a couple of tear-away goblins. Couldn’t
one
day in my job be straightforward?

The office was new. It was my concession to the fact that, if I was going to make a living now that the coven hated me, I needed to expand my business beyond just the gigs that I got through them and a couple of trusted insurers. That meant prestige. Stability. Enough room to actually accommodate my legal advisor.

I’d acquired office space above a firm of accountants, some cheap office furniture, even a simple website proclaiming me open for business. Fergie had built the website. Combine that with his spying on the coven, and I was starting to believe he had many untapped talents.

 “Hi, Elle.” Fergie was waiting for me when I got in, looking very smart in a neatly tailored, if slightly worn, suit. Although his dark hair did stick up at rakish, untamable angles, he didn’t make my heart rate increase like Niall did. Possibly, it was just something about the word ‘lawyer.’ Or possibly not. “I didn’t know when you’d be back to the office.”

“Text me anytime,” I said. “Here’s your haggis, tatties and neeps.” I handed him the take-away container. “I still don’t know how you can eat them.”

“These are wonderful. Thank you.” Fergie smiled at me in such an open way that I couldn’t help smiling back.

“Want to eat lunch with me today?” I asked. When he held up the box, I shook my head. “I’ll be having salad.”

Fergie started to smile, but then stopped himself. “I think you might already have plans. Niall’s in your inner office waiting for you.”

“Niall’s here?” Here when he hadn’t been back at his own house. His comings and goings were proving increasingly impossible to keep track of.

Fergie nodded. “Another time then?”

“Sure. Why not?”

I only hoped Fergie wasn’t looking for anything out of lunch with me beyond the meal. Oh, Fergie was pretty good looking, in an outdoorsy kind of way, yet next to the impeccable man who sat on the edge of my desk, there was no comparison.

I walked into my inner sanctum and smiled a hello. “Niall. What a lovely surprise! What are you doing here?”

He did come down to my work place, but not that often. He had plenty of his own, after all, even if I’d never been entirely clear on what he did. There was a little talk about deals from his PA, Marie, but beyond that, I’d never asked for the details.

“Hello, Elle. Have a bit of excitement down at the Fringe Festival?” Niall asked, cocking his head.

“How…” I paused. I knew how he could do it. The same way I would. He could feel the mix of emotions that still clung to me in the aftermath of my encounter with the goblins. It didn’t mean he knew details, just that something had happened. “It was… interesting.”

“Tell me.”

“In a bit,” I said. I would much rather look at him than talk about Dougie. Niall was, quite simply, the best-looking man I’d ever seen, and I didn’t just think that was just because he happened to be the man I loved. Or just because he had the preternatural attractiveness of any enchanter/vampire. Dressed in a full three-piece suit that would have made anyone else look like they were in a costume for the festival, he simply looked perfect, like a Renaissance artist’s model who had stopped off in a nineteenth-century tailor on his way to the present.

“Niall?” I kissed him. I couldn’t be in the same room as him and not kiss him. I’d discovered that at some length over the past few weeks.  I’d also discovered that he very rarely opened any conversation by just coming out with what he wanted. “What are you
really
doing here?”

“I really came to take you to lunch,” Niall answered, his arms still around me. He looked me up and down. “You still haven’t told me about the festival. Did something…strange happen?”

“It wasn’t anything important.” I knew he was still worried about the idea that the coven might come after us. My former friend, Rebecca, had supposedly fixed it so that they wouldn’t, but since she had already tried to kill me once, we couldn’t take that as a given.

“What happened at the Fringe?” Niall asked again.

“I just had to stop a couple of goblins from stealing some tourist’s phone.”

“You
had
to do it?” Niall looked over at Fergie through the open door. “Mr. Black, is there any law in this country that requires someone to hunt down thieves?”

Fergie shrugged. “Well, there used to be the old hue and cry laws, but those haven’t been in force for—”

“We get the idea, Fergie.” I shook my head in exasperation. “Niall, I’m in a job that involves helping people.”

“For money, in certain specified circumstances. You investigate insurance claims. That isn’t the same as getting into all-out brawls with goblins.”

“It wasn’t an all-out brawl,” I insisted. “Besides, Siobhan was there. I wanted to keep her out of trouble. Especially when keeping her out of trouble means that we give the coven fewer reasons to come to Edinburgh. If goblins are causing trouble, what do you
think
they’ll do?”

Niall had to acknowledge that point, surely? Even so, he still seemed put out that I’d been involved in something like this. I knew that most of it was probably just his concern for my safety, but I was fine. I could have taken on half a dozen goblins.
Probably.

“How much power did you have to use to catch them?” Niall asked.

“Not much.” I shrugged. “It all came out of the crowd, anyway.”

Niall shook his head, stepping back from me. “No, Elle. I have told you, it doesn’t work like that. Crowds are good for magic and for boosting your body, but you still burn your reserves. I know you still aren’t feeding. Not the right way.”

Ah, so that was why he was here. He wanted to have
this
conversation. Well, if he thought I was just going to give in on this, he needed to think again.

“I know I skipped Marie yesterday, but she was looking too tired,” I offered, by way of an explanation. A way not to fight, at least.

“Which is why I have said all along that your current ways of feeding can be no more than temporary,” Niall shot back.

My current ways of feeding.
They involved either taking energy secondhand from Niall as he chose to give it to me, or taking energy through small, pinprick wounds on people we knew who didn’t mind, like Niall’s employees. Neither method was the way that Niall thought I ought to feed. He’d been very clear on that.

“So, when you came here to offer to ‘take me to lunch’…” I prompted.

“I meant that I would take you to lunch. Food that is cooked and prepared.” Niall looked slightly affronted. “I have reservations.”

“Not as many as I think I have right now.” I gave him a stern look. This being Niall, he looked back inscrutably. “You really aren’t about to push some unsuspecting human my way?”

“I simply intended lunch. However, if on the way, you should happen to find a suitable energy donor, would that be such a bad thing?”

“Is it a bad thing?” I echoed. “Just grabbing some random man or woman, using my powers to seduce them, and then stealing their energy with a kiss? You don’t see anything wrong with that? Even when you are the one in an intimate relationship with me?”

Niall frowned. Of course, he frowned. He seemed to be frowning a lot these days. “It is how I have fed for almost my whole life. It is the safest way to feed, Elle. No one realizes what we are doing. We can stay safe. We can stay secret.”