“My cell is on the table beside you. Call Goodfellow.” Robin Goodfellow was our go-to guy on all things paien. What he didn’t know, chances were you didn’t want to know. Niko kept stitching while I called. He’d trained for this when we lost our last healer back to the home country. Niko could go to the hospital if worse came to worst. He was human inside and out. I wasn’t. One scan, one blood test, and that was something else not worth talking or thinking about. Nik had been taught by the best healing spirit around. He could handle most serious trauma. If it was critical . . . with ventilators, heart-lung bypass machines, lacerated livers, kidneys, a nicked heart—then, hey, nobody lived forever.
By the time Goodfellow arrived Niko had finished with me and had rubbed ointment on his neck. The burn looked painful, but not serious. That had me in a slightly better mood when Robin picked our lock, walked in, and dumped a Styrofoam container on the sand-colored kitchen counter. Nice kitchen, big apartment, flat-screen TV, and all the weapons money could buy. We’d moved up in the world since the bad old days. “As requested,” he said. “Why such a request, I don’t want to know.”
I lifted the lid immediately and grinned. He had brought me a smiley face pancake. “That puts you one up on Nik.” Hell, it even had “Cal” incised across the happy, syrup-drenched forehead.
“He’s an actual adult?” the puck asked Nik with a large helping of disbelief in his snake-oil smooth voice. “You’re quite sure about that?” It was five in the morning, but as always Goodfellow was dressed like he was heading for a photo shoot at GQ.
In sweats of his own, although considerably newer and less bleach stained than mine, Niko shrugged. “Some jump developmental hurdles. Some scale them slowly but with determination and success. And then some, like Cal, are laziness incarnate and run around them. I consider it a miracle he doesn’t eat with his hands.” All this was said at the same time he set a bottle of Tylenol on the counter by me and tapped it meaningfully. Lidocaine doesn’t numb forever and he knew it would be wearing off about now.
I took a closer look at the pancake and scowled. “What exactly is that hanging from the bottom? Right under the smile?”
“Sausage link,” Robin answered promptly. “Smallest they had for authenticity. I toothpicked it there myself. You can thank me at any time.” I would’ve thanked him by throwing it at his head, but I was hungry. Sometimes pride takes a backseat to an empty stomach.
While I ate, Niko described the skinned body, showed Robin the pictures, told him about the attack on me and then him, the speed involved, the smell of a lightning strike—my cut and his burn in the shape of a hand. Goodfellow listened, studied the pictures, the handprint, and gave a speculative hum. The entire thing had taken three minutes total. Pucks were not known for being slow or bringing up the rear—unless it was in a sexual context. He knew, I could tell. Already, he knew.
He’d taken off his suit jacket and now slouched on our beat-up sofa that I refused to give up as it was shaped perfectly over the years to my lazy ass. There was an unhappy look in the usually sly green eyes. He was a fox faced with an empty henhouse. A barn cat who’d already eaten all the mice and had nothing left to entertain him. “It appears to be . . . but no, it couldn’t be him. He’s been absent for over a hundred years. The real one anyway. I doubt seriously it could be him.”
“Who? Who the hell can’t it be?” Finished with breakfast, I sat on the coffee table to face both of them. Robin was a puck. Pucks lived long lives. Thousands of years, hundreds of thousands, some even more. Robin Goodfellow, as far as we knew, was the oldest puck alive. If anyone knew everything about absolutely anything, it was him.
“Did he say anything about your hair?” he asked abruptly. “Cal, did he say anything about that shaggy mop of yours?”
Absently, I pushed my hand through the mess. Thick, black, and straight, it hung almost to my shoulders. I could get it into a ponytail, barely, to keep it out of my face for fighting. “How’d you know that? He said he liked the color. That it was black. Something about it meaning I was wicked and he wanted it. Hell, I think he took a good hunk of it with him.” Lucky it was thick. I didn’t care about my hair, not like Robin with his six-hundred-dollar haircuts to keep those Great God Pan brown curls just as they’d been drawn on temple walls. But I didn’t want a bald spot over my ear either.
“Ah, skata.” He ran a hand over that expensive haircut and turned it into a tumbleweed. “Dark hair. He likes dark hair. More importantly he likes to kill or ‘save’ people with dark hair. He thinks it’s a sign of evil. Wickedness. At least goes the rumor. If it’s him.” He shook his head. “I’m not certain. It could be or it could be other things. This is a diagnosis I do not want to commit to without more information. Truthfully, I’d rather not commit to it at all.”
He was looking less and less happy by the moment. “Niko? Did he mention your hair? The rumor also goes that he tends to associate blond hair with whores and whores also with wickedness. Red hair too. Whores, whores everywhere. It’s a theme with him. He is a judgmental bastard. He cannot abide wickedness. Odd in a killer, isn’t it?”