Cold Burn of Magic(42)

My fingers curled around the hilt of my sword, and my eyes cut left and right, but I didn’t see any of the other Draconis. Just Deah and Felix.

Deah spotted me and clamped her lips shut. She gave Felix a withering glare, spun around, and stormed away. Felix’s head whipped around, but when he realized it was me, his body relaxed. I walked over to him, still keeping a watch out for Blake and the other Draconis.

“What are you doing here?” he snapped. “Were you following me?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Devon and Grant took Poppy back to one of the Ito hotels. They’re going to meet us at the car. They sent me to find you.”

Felix deflated a little more. “Oh. Sorry.”

“What was that about? With Deah?”

He raked a hand through his black hair. “I was apologizing to her, trying to smooth things over.”

His explanation made sense, but something about seeing them together bothered me.

“You shouldn’t have done that. Blake was being a total jackass. If anyone should be apologizing, it’s him. Even though there’s no excuse for how he treated Poppy.”

“You really don’t know anything about how Family politics work, do you?” Felix said. “It’s the Draconis on top, and then everyone else below them.”

“I know that’s how it works. Believe me. But that doesn’t make it right.”

Felix shrugged. “Anyway, Grant’s right. We should leave before things get any worse. Come on.”

He stuck his hands in his pockets and walked past me. And I realized what I’d missed before.

Felix wasn’t clutching his red gift bag anymore. When she’d left, Deah had been carrying it—and she’d had a red rose tucked into her long blond hair.





CHAPTER THIRTEEN


I didn’t say anything to Felix about my suspicions concerning him and Deah, and we walked back to the car.

Grant and Devon were waiting in the SUV with the engine running. Grant gave me another angry look when I climbed into the backseat, still pissed about what I’d done and all the problems it would cause, but I didn’t care.

It had been worth it to see the pain in Blake’s eyes.

For once, even Felix was quiet, and we rode back to the mansion in silence. Felix mumbled an excuse about needing to check on something in the greenlab, then hurried away. Devon disappeared as well, and Grant said that he needed to talk to Claudia about what had happened.

I went back to my room and plopped down on the bed. I pulled out my phone and texted Mo, asking him to call me so I could tell him about my run-in with Blake, but he didn’t respond. He was probably busy in the shop, trying to sell tourists tacky yard art they didn’t need and couldn’t afford. A pang of longing shot through me. A week ago, I would have been in the Razzle Dazzle with him, discussing the latest job he had lined up for me. But things were different now, for better or worse.

I was surprised how sad that made me.

Since I didn’t have anything better to do, I took a long, hot shower, using up some more of the fancy soaps and lotions in the bathroom. I put on a fresh pair of cargo pants and a T-shirt and came back into the bedroom. I headed over to the vanity table so I could pull my hair back into a ponytail—

“So you’re the new girl,” a soft, twangy voice called out. “Woo.”

Startled, I grabbed my sword from where I’d propped it against the vanity table and whipped around, wondering who had gotten in here and what they wanted.

But no one was there.

My eyes scanned the entire room, from front to back and wall to wall, but it was empty. So was the balcony outside.

“Over here, cupcake,” that twangy voice drawled again.

A movement off to the left caught my eye, and that’s when I remembered the pixie. Looked like he’d finally decided to come out and be sociable.

I put the sword down on the bed, walked over to the table to his house, and bent down so we were eye level. Tiny the tortoise was snoozing in a sunspot, so I focused on the pixie.

He was wearing black cowboy boots with pointed, silver tips, a threadbare white tank top, and blue-striped boxers, both of which seemed to be spattered with mustard, ketchup, and other stains. For a guy who was only six inches tall, he was handsome, with sandy blond hair and eyes that were a vivid violet. A bit of stubble clung like golden fuzz to his cheeks, as though he hadn’t shaved in several days.

He slouched down in a tiny, rickety lawn chair on the front porch of his wooden trailer, his legs stretched out in front of him, a can of honeybeer in his hand. At least, I thought it was honeybeer, since it looked the same as all the other cans littering the yard. My nose twitched at the sour stench wafting up from him. It certainly smelled like honeybeer, and he looked like he was in the middle of a bender.

“You must be Oscar.”

The pixie drained the rest of his honeybeer, crushed the can in his hand, and tossed it away. The can clattered against the others in the yard, sending them all flying apart like bowling pins and making them tink-tink-tink across the grass. “Yep. Lucky me.”

“My name is Lila—”

He held up his hand, cutting me off. “Let me stop you right there, cupcake. We need to get a few things straight.”

“Like what?”

He glared at me, his violet eyes practically glowing in his face. “First of all, you will wipe that indulgent smirk off your face. I am not your pet, and I am certainly not a toy to be trifled with.”