Home Improvement: Undead Edition

“The client’s got a pixie portal in her swimming pool?” I groaned and shot a frustrated look down at the four Warded cat carriers I’d tucked into the shade of Nelson’s Column. There were two sleeping pixies in each and it had taken me since dawn to catch the little monsters. It was now midday. The last thing I wanted was another pixie job. “Toni, please, ple-ease, tell me this is one of your windups?”

Toni, our office manager, laughed in my phone’s earpiece. “Sorry, not this time, Genny. And it’s an emergency job—” The trilling of the other line interrupted her. “Hang on, hon,” she said, and I heard her faint, “Spellcrackers.com, making magic safe, guaranteed. How may I help you?” before I tuned her out.

Catching pixies was so not my favorite job. It made me feel like the wicked faerie who didn’t get invited to the christening, but who turned up anyway. And catching pixies in Trafalgar Square on Easter Saturday, in an early heat wave, with a full complement of tourists, schoolkids, and al fresco sandwich- snackers happily pointing their digital cameras and video phones my way . . .

Well, you get the picture.

I raked fingers through the ends of my hair where it stuck to my nape and contemplated the last pixie. It was squatting on the flank of one of the four bronze lions that guarded the base of Nelson’s Column, swishing its barbed tail like an angry cat. Its blue-gray scales shimmered in the sunlight, and its lipless snout was stretched in a taunting grin. No way was it going to make this easy. Then, as if to hammer that thought home, the pixie flapped its vestigial batlike wings, cartwheeled along the lion’s broad back, and jumped up to perch on the statue’s huge head.

The impromptu audience gathered below laughed and clapped and whooped. The two heritage wardens, who were doing crowd control around the column’s base, exchanged a long-suffering look. And in the background the ever-present rumble of traffic rose and fell like the murmur of the sea. Which was where the pixie was going back to after I’d caught it in my hot sticky fingers.

Despite the fascinated audience, pixies in Trafalgar Square were nothing new. The first one appeared back in 1845 as soon as they’d begun pumping water into the newly built fountains—the fountains had opened a portal straight to the Cornish sea—and the pixies had been slipping through ever since. A cautionary lesson to anyone thinking about digging a new garden pond. Get a witch to do a magical survey first, or you never know where you might be connecting to—or what might live there.

“Genny Taylor!”

At my shouted name, I looked down to find a petite girl of about my own age—twenty-four—at the front of the crowd. She had spiky black hair, a silver dumbbell through her left eyebrow, and a tattoo of red and black triangles on the side of her throat, and she was overdressed for the heat wave in Goth-style camo gear. She grinned, lifted the huge professional camera hanging round her neck, and snapped off a couple of shots. Damn, my persistent paparazzo was back. She’d been stalking me for a good couple of months (one of the joys of being the only sidhe fae in London), though only the gods knew why, as I sincerely doubted the media needed any more photos of me chasing pixies. YouTube already had half a dozen videos, from what I’d heard.

I shifted, giving her my back.

“Hi, hon.” Toni’s voice returned in my earpiece.

“What’s the story with the swimming pool anyway?” I asked.

“The client’s doing renovations,” Toni said. “One of the builders put an iron spike through the Ground Ward and fritzed it, and then some idiot left a hose running.”

“Great.” Repairing a Ground Ward added another hour to the job.

“Oh, wait till you hear the rest,” Toni said. “The husband’s an antiquities dealer, so the house is full of statues. Very old and very expensive statues. Hubby’s on a buying trip just now, and the client’s having forty fits in case something ends up broken.”

Pixies love statues. It’s what makes them dangerous.

A few years ago, a pack of about thirty-odd pixies, high on candies filched from a coachload of schoolkids (sugar works wonders for amping up magic), managed to partially animate the exact same bronze lion I was looking at. The lion shook its head, roared, and snapped its jaws at the crowd for over an hour before the pixies’ magic finally wore off. So the Greater London Authority declared the pixies a health hazard, and Spellcrackers. com had won the contract to keep the pixie numbers down to acceptable levels.

“Thing is,” Toni said, breaking into my musings, “you’ll need to do the job on your own; everyone else is either down at Old Scotland Yard—” She paused, and we shared a moment’s silence about the tragedy, currently absorbing the media, of the two eleven-year-old boys who’d gone missing from an amusement arcade a week ago. Any witch with a touch of scrying ability was helping the police right now. So far no one had gotten lucky. “Or they’re off to the Spring Fertility Rite,” Toni finished. Easter is the witches’ big jamboree.

“No probs. Does the client know I’m doing the job?” Some humans didn’t want a fae in their home—either too scared or too bigoted—and while I can pass for human if I hide my catlike pupils, it’s never good business to fool the clients. Of course, I get other job requests that have nothing to do with cracking magic and everything to do with some jerk’s sexual fantasy, so I find it pays to check.

“She asked for our pixie specialist.” Which was my “star billing” on the company website. “Plus I told her, but she’s worried enough that the Wicked Witch of the West could turn up on her doorstep and it wouldn’t be an issue.”

“Love you, too, Toni,” I said drily, digging the Pixnap—my favorite pixie-sedating cream—from my backpack.

She laughed. “Oh, and stay out of my stationery cupboard until you’ve gotten rid of all that pixie dust.”

“Hey, that was an accident,” I said in mock affront, rubbing the honeyscented cream into my hands and forearms. “And I tidied all your pens after they’d finished doing the tango.”

“Pixing my face wasn’t an accident.” Toni didn’t mean her face, but the Green Man plaque hanging behind our reception desk. I’d been experimenting with pixie dust, and animated him. Trouble was, he’d been carved from a dryad’s tree, and the pixie magic was taking its time wearing off. “He still winks every time I walk by,” she said in disgust.

“Sorry.” I stifled a chuckle. “At least he’s stopped telling everyone to come back tomorrow.”

She huffed, told me that she’d e-mail me the client’s details, and we said our good-byes.

I turned my attention back to the pixie, who was doing a furious jig on the lion’s head, and hauled myself up onto the bronze lion. Its metal back was scorching from the sun, and gritty from all the pixie dust. It really was way too hot for this. My Lycra running shorts and bra top had seemed a good idea at dawn, but now the black material was absorbing heat like a vamp sucking up blood, while the yellow plastic of the Hi-Vis waistcoat had welded itself to my spine. I sighed and shimmied along the lion’s back until I crouched on its shoulders.

“C’mon, little pixie,” I murmured, sliding my cream-covered hand up the lion’s metal mane. “Playtime’s over. Time to go home.”

The pixie’s snout peeled back to showcase a row of chitinous teeth, and warning clicks issued from its throat as it maniacally shook its head. I don’t speak pixie, but its meaning was pretty clear—

“Back off, my bite’s nastier than yours.”

“Yeah, don’t I know it,” I muttered.

And out the corner of my eye I saw Tavish’s broad shoulders shake with mirth. He was standing, well, posing really, on the fountain’s highest bowl, which put him about twenty feet up, so I could hardly miss him. And if that weren’t enough, he’d bespelled the water so it cascaded over him like a cloak of sun-trapped diamonds, making him look like some gorgeous, hedonistic river god. But then he was a kelpie, so the look was apt, even if his black cargo shorts sort of ruined it. Still, at least he was wearing shorts, and was in his human shape, so I counted that as a win.

I glared over at him. He gave me a happy thumbs-up, and the beads threading his long dreads flashed from silver to a gleaming turquoise. I glared harder. Bad enough having an audience without being critiqued by another fae, however hot he was. Though to be fair, Tavish didn’t work for Spellcrackers, but he’d still offered to help when he’d strolled into the square five minutes after I’d arrived. I almost hadn’t been surprised. He’d been turning up more and more on my outside jobs. If he’d been human I’d have expected the date question—hell, I was more than interested enough that if he’d been human I wouldn’t have waited for him to ask. But he was wylde fae, likely older than the last millennium, tricky, capricious, and dangerous. And while I might be sidhe fae, I’d spent the last ten years living with humans. It was always possible I’d got my attraction wires crossed, and I didn’t want to end