“Fine,” she ground out.
“Let the little beast go,” he called. The boy dropped Ling, and she streaked across the lawn and hid behind Audrey’s legs, hissing and spitting.
“My name is Kaldar, by the way,” the man said.
“Not interested,” Audrey told him. “This is strictly a business conversation. You step a hair out of line, and I will hurt you.”
He tossed the bow to the ground. “With what? I took my knife back, and your bow is gone. You’re out of weapons.”
She headed for her door. “Oh, I have more inside. Don’t you worry. I always have more.”
AUDREY leaned against her kitchen counter, arms crossed. Kaldar sat on her love seat, as relaxed as he could get. Mr. Smooth Operator. The man was handsome, he knew it, but if he was waiting for an acknowledgment from her, he would be old and gray before he got it.
The boys had taken the chairs. The blond sat with an inborn elegance, back straight, one leg over another. A shockingly pretty kid. A few years, and he would be crushing hearts left and right. Of course, if he kept hanging out with that fool, he might not survive that long.
The brown-haired boy sat in the chair like it was a rock in the middle of a raging river, and he had to defend it from gators. As she watched, Ling snuck closer to him and showed him her teeth. The boy’s eyes flashed amber. He hissed, and Ling beat a strategic retreat. A changeling. Well, at least Kaldar was telling the truth. The Louisianans murdered changelings on sight. Kaldar probably was Mirror, which didn’t explain anything. The Mirror had no reason to get involved.
The four of them looked at one another. Inside Audrey, irritation fought with her sense of hospitality, but the South was too deeply ingrained into the core of her being, and it won.
“Would you like some iced tea?”
“Sweet?” Kaldar asked.
“Well, of course it’s sweet. Who do you take me for?”
Kaldar arranged his face into an angelic expression. “I’d love a glass.”
Wicked. That was the right way to describe him. Wicked to the core and full of himself. She had to get him out of her house. Audrey took out four glasses. The blond boy rose. “Please let me help.”
“Sure. What’s your name?”
“George.”
“Nice to meet you, George.” She distributed the ice into the four glasses and poured tea into each one. “Did I hurt you in the parking lot?”
“No, m’lady. I fell, so I could put a tracker on your car.”
Great. At least that explained how they had found her. She took two glasses, George took the other two, and they brought them to the table.
“Should I check it for poison?” Kaldar asked.
“I would,” she told him. Waste your time, go ahead.
The blond boy passed a glass to the dark-haired boy. The changeling sniffed, took a sip, held it in his mouth, and swallowed. “It’s clean.”
“First you let one child get hit by my car, now you make the other one act as your human poison detector. You really have no conscience, do you?”
Kaldar leaned back. “I didn’t ask him to check for poison. His brother asked him.”
Audrey shook her head and turned to the changeling boy. “What’s your name?”
“Jack.”
“Jack, there are poisons that are tasteless and odorless, the kind that even a changeling can’t detect. Next time, let Kaldar drink first. If he dies, no big loss.”
Jack snickered.
Kaldar sighed. “Tell me about the heist.”
Audrey shrugged. “My father needed money to put my asshole brother into rehab. Yet again. I agreed to help them for the last time. My father and I took a plane to Orlando and met Alex there. We crossed into the Weird through the Edge in Florida, broke into the pyramid, and nabbed the box. It was a plain wooden box, about a foot and a half long, a foot wide, eight inches tall. We took it, popped back into the Broken, and drove up I-95. When we reached Jacksonville, I left them and flew back to Seattle.”
“Did you know who commissioned the heist?” Kaldar asked.
“No. I suspect it was the Hand. Am I right?”
“Yes.”
Oh, Seamus. You moron. “I told my dad it was a bad idea. But no, he had stars in his eyes. They’d promised him a small mountain of gold, and he figured if he flipped it into US currency, he’d get a little over fifty grand. I take it his buyer double-crossed him?”
Kaldar reached into his bag and pulled out a small contraption of pale bronze-colored metal. A bowl, formed by several circular bands sat on a narrow stem, which widened into a base resembling tree roots. She’d seen high-end gadgets from the Weird before, and it had that polished look: beautiful, with an attention to detail that was usually paid only to fine jewelry. You could sell it to some art gallery in the Broken. They’d auction it off and never know what it was.
Kaldar squeezed the stem. A whisper of magic shivered through the air. The metal panels of the stem rose, revealing the insides of tiny, fine gears in a dozen of shades. The circular bands rose, turning slowly. A faint glow coalesced above them. Kaldar leaned closer and said, pronouncing the words with crisp exactness, “Adriana. Fountain.”
The glow snapped into a ghostly three-dimensional image of a cobbled square with some sort of ruin in the center that might have been a fountain at some point but now was mostly a heap of broken marble. Flesh-colored remains dotted the scene. Alex’s handiwork. He must’ve teleported out, and someone held on to him half a second too long.
The Hand didn’t get their goods, which meant they would be hunting both her father and Alex. And her. Her heart skipped a beat.