We’d been to all the possible stores and had spent hours searching for the shoes, finding nothing. We’d begun to suspect that the shoes had returned to the first shop we’d searched, as they had the last time Grym had looked for them, and we’d returned to that shop hoping to catch them unaware.
Grym headed for the sales girl, who gave him a bright smile. “You’re back. Are you thinking of buying those boots after all?”
I left him to it and headed into the woman’s side of the store. Despite a frustrating day of searching, I still moved toward the shelves of shoes like a zombie heading for fresh brains.
Shoes were my drug of choice. Aside from egg rolls, tacos, and anything sweet and fattening, shoes were my biggest weakness. I walked along the shelves of strappy sandals, my fingers reaching out to reverently touch each one. I sighed with happiness and then moved toward the heels. A moment later, I stiffened when a large form heated the air behind me and cleared its throat.
I turned and gave Grym a stiff smile. “Haven’t found them yet.”
He arched a pair of dark brows. I was beginning to suspect he was on to me and my shoe fetish. “You’ll need to use your Keeper magic. As we discussed before, they can change their appearance and even their size, so a visual search won’t work.”
I pressed my lips together to keep from sticking my tongue out at him. Pulling my shoulders back, I opted instead for more adult behavior. “I was just getting ready to do that.”
He nodded. “Do the back room too.” He walked around the shelves blocking me from the sales lady’s view and returned to the young woman with a smile that made her flush with pleasure.
I looked at her with a shocked expression. Who would smile like that at Detective Crabby Pants? The poor woman must be desperate for a boyfriend. On the plus side, when he left her sobbing into her sushi, she had a vast array of options for shoe therapy right in front of her.
I forced my attention back to the task at hand. At least his interest was pointed elsewhere, and that was good for me.
I closed my eyes and tried to feel the energy waiting deep inside my core. I concentrated hard, trying to shove the sound of the flirting across the store out of my consciousness. It wasn’t easy.
I mean, ignoring the flirting.
Well, finding my Keeper magic wasn’t easy either.
But the flirting made me kind of sick.
I belched softly.
Nope, that was the banger coming back for a visit. I grimaced. It didn’t taste nearly as good the second time.
“Were you looking for anything specific?” the girl asked Detective Grouchy Britches.
I twitched, realizing I’d gotten distracted from my task.
My energy wilted like a plucked dandelion in the hot sun.
I shoved air out of my lungs, shook my hands as if trying to loosen them, and then closed my eyes again, searching for the core of my power.
Nothing.
Except for a hard knot in my belly, which I suspected was lunch.
Using my Keeper magic wasn’t coming easily to me. It had gotten a tiny bit easier each time I tried, but I was still far from good at it.
Something touched my shoulder. I jumped with a yelp and swung around.
A delicate pair of sandals hung in the air in front of me. The sun beyond the glass found the pink crystals arranged at the top of the shoes and sparked with vibrant energy.
The rogue shoes had found me. I must have leaked again. For once, my leakage had come in handy. “Well, hello there,” I murmured softly.
A tiny part of my brain reminded me that the shoes were dangerous.
But they were so pretty.
My hands came up, my gaze locked on the dainty sandals. As I looked at them, they gave a happy little dance and shot toward the floor, positioning themselves in front of my feet. All I had to do was slip off my sneakers and…
“Yes, the more tread, the better,” a loud male voice said.
My gaze jerked toward Grym and I found him staring at me over the woman’s bent form as she dug into her supply of men’s boots.
I shook my head to clear it of the shoes’ magical influence, but he seemed to take that as a denial that I’d found them. He pointed impatiently toward the open door behind the sales counter. Through the wide crack between a pair of white curtains, I could see rows and rows of shoe boxes, stacked from the floor all the way to the ceiling.
I grimaced.
My gaze was caught by movement down by my feet. The sandals were shifting color, their pretty jeweled uppers sifting through the rainbow from pink to white, to turquoise blue, to violet, to…
I forced myself into action, shoving away the magical muzziness I didn’t doubt the shoes were causing in my brain.
Either that, or I was suffering from banger poisoning.
Hm…
I bent double, reaching for the shoes. “Come to me, my pretties,” I mumbled.
Something in my voice or expression must have warned them that I meant trouble.
They jerked out of my grasp and hung in the air for a moment, shifting with the light to cast pretty shapes over the nearby shelves with their crystals. Watching the shapes, I felt my mind going muzzy again.
I gave myself a hard shake, one hand snaking out to grab a shoe out of the air.
As soon as my fingers closed around it, the thing went spastic.
It shot skyward, taking my hand with it. I barely held on as the shoe tried to yank away from my grip, the other sandal pummeling me about the head and shoulders.
I tried to grab the second shoe, but it dodged neatly away. Before my eyes, the things turned into high heels again. They were a deep, blood-red color with four-inch-tall metallic heels that looked painfully sharp.
I quickly learned just how sharp they were when the
