I fidgeted with my hands in my lap. Though part of me wanted to turn away from this conversation, the rest of me saw a hook. I pressed my lips together and drew them close to my teeth. “Max, what are you?” It sounded innocent. Stupid even. It wasn’t just my preschooler tone, like I was asking what a cloud was or why the sky was blue. It was my ridiculous open face. I couldn’t control my expression no matter what I did.
I waited for him to stiffen, waited for the shadow to return. It didn’t.
“I’m your bodyguard, Chi.” The old Max would have taken the opportunity to point out I was a prize numbskull for having forgotten that. The new Max simply watched me.
I paused for a heck of a long time before nodding stiffly. “I know. But who were you before you were a bodyguard for the McLanes? Were you always a fairy? What—”
This time his smile didn’t stiffen.
“I’m here to help you, Chi. I always have been. So just…” Max trailed off, and it was one of the most awkward, pronounced pauses I’d ever heard him give. Another clue that there was something much deeper beneath the apparently gruff and two-dimensional Scottish bodyguard’s surface. “Just trust me, and we’ll get through this.” For the briefest fraction of a second, Max made eye contact, and there was nothing in this world that could pull me away from his penetrating gaze. Then? Then his phone rang, he answered it, and he walked outside into the rain.
Trust?
My brain said no, but as always, my heart said an emphatic yes.
I watched Max walk out into the rain to answer his phone call. All too soon, he was out of sight, trudging through the darkened garden.
I sat back in my chair and let out a massive side that reverberated through the room and could have been mistaken for a clap of thunder. Drawing my hand up, I placed it over my eyes and blinked wearily against my palm. Then my phone beeped. I crumpled forward, snatched it out of my pocket, and waited with baited breath as I read the text from Bridgette.
She was happy to see me and was available right now.
I left Max a scribbled note on the table, grabbed my jacket and keys, and left.
Though I hadn’t lied – for the first time in my life – and I did trust Max, that didn’t mean I wasn’t determined to find out absolutely everything I could about him. Because there was something that told me that would be the key, not only to my life but his.
Chapter 2
It was still absolutely pouring down, and as I got out of my car, I tilted my head up and frowned. The kind of frown that doesn’t just cut down your chin but threatens to lop it right off your face.
I hadn’t pressed Max to figure out more about his weird comment about the Lonely King and the weather. But as I tilted my head back and felt the rain splash against my cheeks like thousands of watery swords, I realized something had to be up. Even I, with my almost insignificant knowledge of magic, could feel that slight buzz in the air. It left an unpleasant tingling beneath my tongue, and a cold, slick feeling shifting between my shoulder blades.
I shivered, caught my collar between stiff fingers, and yanked it high over my neck.
Bridgette was waiting. And god knows I needed some answers already.
I quickly jumped up onto the pavement and rushed under the relative protection of an awning. I say relative, because the rain was coming in every direction, sideways and almost from underneath, as if it were propelled by the twisting, chaotic winds of a hurricane.
Bridgette wasn’t at the café, and instead, she’d suggested we meet up at the library. In the past few weeks, I’d gotten to know another side of Bane City. The magical side. The side that apparently existed under everybody’s noses and had so for hundreds of years. If you had your wits about you and a shadow of knowledge about magic, you’d be able to see it down every winding street, twisting alleyway, and darkened shopfront.
Drawing out my phone and protecting it with the sleeve of my rain jacket, I checked the coordinates, nodded to myself, then hooked a right between two buildings. Not down an alleyway, mind you – between two buildings that abutted. To the rational mind, to the untrained eye, there was no space between the buildings. But to the magician, if you tilted your head at just the right angle, you could see it – a fraction of a gap. A gap that grew larger as you plowed headfirst into it.
That unpleasant tingle beneath my tongue only became stronger, practically zapping down my throat as I forged a path forward. After several steps, the buildings parted sufficiently, and I found myself traveling down a laneway that was nicely spaced and no longer felt as if I were being squeezed between two walls of brick.
I checked my phone once more until I found the right section of wall. I walked right up to it, hesitated for half a second, then reached forward and rapped my knuckles on the brick.
One knock then two, and finally the brick started to change. Charges of iridescent blue and green magic crackled over it, sinking through the deep pores of the brick, sparking into the air, and changing everything they touched.
With that special sinking feeling I only felt around powerful magic, the wall before me changed, just as had happened when Max had introduced me to that seedy magical bar.
With a final creak like an old oak splitting in half, the door opened, and I walked in.
The library was amazing, breathtaking. It took me right back to
