Robin. Oberon’s Second-in-Command stood over the kelpie vampire like an adorable sack of horned, sweet boy.
He was in full uniform—midnight blue jacket with silver buttons and a silver hem on the cuffs. Midnight blue trousers tailored to his goat legs. Black shin and hoof guards that acted as boots. A pristine white shirt. Silver caps on his cute horns that set off the room’s light as white-hot bolts of glare.
A handsome if stern and self-absorbed face.
A bubble of magic formed around Robin’s hands.
There was a reason he’d cleared the staff out of the kitchen. She’d caught the backwash from the last time he’d tossed that spell at a dark fae. She knew exactly what was about to happen.
“Don’t!” Wrenn yelled. “He’s part of a case I’m working! He knows something about—!”
“No vampires in Oberon’s Castle!” Robin interrupted. “You sent in pictures, Wrenn.”
“But—”
The ball of magic elongated into a spike. Robin pulled back his arm. And that spike pierced the kelpie’s vampire heart.
Light magic blazed. Dark magic roiled. The kelpie-vampire turned into a suffocating dust cloud.
She couldn’t see. She couldn’t breathe.
“Robin…” she gasped as she blacked out.
Chapter 5
Wrenn woke up face down on an ornate parquet floor. Tiny inlays fanned out in a circle in front of her face as if her nose was the epicenter of a wood halo. Intricately-cut bits of oak entwined with equally intensely-meshed teak and mahogany, all of which had been set into the sleek white lines of birch.
And the whole thing smelled of white strawberry varnish.
Which meant she was in one of the large Armory practice rooms. Not her apartment. Not in any of the Royal Guard magic recovery rooms. Not an infirmary or even the kitchen behind Rich and Lush’s Tavern.
No. She was in the one place in all of Oberon’s Castle where Robin Goodfellow felt comfortable enough to talk about delicate issues.
She rolled over. Long ago, the space had been a ballroom. The parquet flooring and an old stage shimmered in the golden morning sun. A curved balcony ran the entire length of its external wall, separated from the interior by intricately twinkling, intricately cut, leaded-glass doors.
The space was part of the massive towering structure of crystal and obsidian at the center of Oberon’s Castle, the actual proper castle of Oberon built a millennium ago. The Armory part was more refurbished rooms like this one, granite blocks, and enchanted fae steel doors rather than the towering grown spires outside.
One needed to be high up in the chain of command to get into the Armory, and Robin Goodfellow was nothing if not a high-hanging link in that chain.
She’d been in this room several times.
Sunshine arced through the space in sheets of rainbow colors from the light thrown by the doors. Reds splashed the walls. Greens danced along the front edge of the stage. Blues and yellows jumped and curved.
All of which camouflaged Robin’s natural shimmering magical aura—and his spells.
“What were you thinking, Wrenn?” Robin Goodfellow’s deceptively sweet voice echoed off the walls. “On the holiest of all the holy nights, young lady!”
Wrenn squinted and sat up. The melodrama was a bit much this morning. “Could we not do this, Robin?” she asked. “I need coffee.”
Somewhere in the room, he laughed.
Like all the fae in Oberon’s Castle, Robin Goodfellow was a sinewy band of flair and subterfuge.
Slowly, she stood. The headache would stabilize in a minute or two, but she’d need either exercise or a few moments in the sun to warm her cold flesh.
A sigil formed just on the edge of her vision, next to her left ear, spinning and pulsing with the power and geometry of the main source of fae power—the natural world. Greens coiled around the sigil’s interior designs. Reds nipped at its surface. Cool blues formed its structure.
The sigil was meant to lay a sharp smack across her cheek.
Exercise it would be, then.
She ducked under the slap spell—and twisted away from it, instead of toward where the spell’s creator should have been standing.
Something was not right about the spell. The shimmers folded the wrong way, and its tilt felt off, as if she were looking at a reversed photo of a familiar face.
The fae were masters at such deceptions, twisting glamours and flicking out slight-of-hand tricks to deceive a mundane person’s senses. Sometimes smells came from the wrong direction, or were off just enough to trigger an unwanted memory. Or a sound echoed in a way that made the mundane think they heard ghosts. Or, with Wrenn, made her see a spell where it wasn’t.
The real slap spell grazed her right shoulder. A fiery sting screamed through her leather jacket and into her flesh.
She yipped. The fae used magic to glamour up what they wanted the world to see. She used her reputation. Wrenn Goodfellow, daughter of Puck and Paladin of Oberon. Mundane-born witch, yes, but indestructible. Dangerous. Fast.
Cold. Cutting. Immovable.
The tension from last night’s flashback released from its batteries. Her muscles coiled. Bones readied.
Wrenn lowered her shoulder and planted her foot as she scooped her body forward and upward in a one sweeping motion.
Her shoulder hit Robin’s belly. She felt him, even if she couldn’t see him or his glamour. Felt her shoulder press into his flesh just under his ribcage. Felt her body take his off-balance weight as she lifted and tossed him away from the sun-kissed balcony doors.
His glamour did not hide the thud when he landed a good six or seven feet away.
What had been heavy air a moment before manifested as Oberon’s Second-in-Command lying on the floor like a sack of horned young man.
He still wore his full uniform. Still looked up at her with his handsome if stern and self-absorbed face.
The tension hadn’t gone with his flip. It stayed coiled in her leg.
She moved her foot back to kick.
Robin raised his hands. “Good flip!”
Wrenn blinked. The ghosts of her flashback danced just on the
