Cold Burn of Magic(43)

“I never said you were—”

“I wasn’t finished yet,” he snapped. “I am a pixie and proud of it. But just because I happen to have been assigned as your pixie doesn’t mean I have to like it.”

“Okay . . .”

His hot glare intensified. “Ashley Vargas was a friend of mine. A nice, sweet, polite girl who didn’t deserve to die in some crummy pawnshop.”

“No, she didn’t,” I said in a quiet voice.

His gaze sharpened, as if he wasn’t sure whether or not I was mocking him. But I wasn’t. I wouldn’t. Not about something like this. Even I had limits.

“I heard you and your buddy Mo talking last night,” Oscar said. “About what a great opportunity this was for you. You didn’t actually believe any of his pretty speech, did you?”

I didn’t answer. Part of me had believed Mo—or at least wanted to—when he said this was my chance to make something of myself. To finally do what my mom would have wanted me to all along.

Oscar heard the confirmation in my silence. “Oh, you did. You really did. Well, don’t that beat all.”

The pixie slapped his hand against his knee and started chuckling, although his laugh was a bit slurred. I eyed the honeybeer cans and wondered how much he’d had to drink. Given their small size, pixies weren’t known for being able to hold their liquor, which is why they drank honeybeer, which was mostly sugar and barely had any alcohol in it at all. I wondered how long and how often Oscar drowned his sorrows—and why he was taking his anger out on me. I had never even laid eyes on him until two minutes ago, but he already hated me.

His mirthless chuckles finally died down.

“Don’t worry. I will do my duty.” He ground out the last word. “I will wash and clean and make sure you have everything you need. But that’s it. That’s as far as it goes.”

“What else is there?”

His mouth gaped open in surprise, and he gave me another suspicious look. More anger burned in his violet eyes.

“Let’s get something straight, cupcake,” he snapped. “We are not friends. We will never be friends, so let’s not go through the whole getting-to-know-you rigmarole, all right? It’ll save us both a lot of trouble.”

“Really? Why is that?”

The look he gave me was far more haunted than I was expecting. “Because you’ll be dead soon enough, and there will be somebody new in here to take your place just as soon as it happens. And when it does, I’ll be packing up your things, just like I did Ashley’s.”

His eyes locked with mine. Pain and anguish shimmered in his bloodshot gaze, the twin emotions like red-hot needles twisting deeper and deeper into my own heart.

“I’m sorry about Ashley. You’re right. She didn’t deserve to die like that. I wish I could have saved her, too.”

Oscar snorted. “Yeah, but you didn’t, did you? You saved Devon instead. How very practical of you, saving such an important member of the Family, instead of just his bodyguard.”

“It wasn’t like that,” I protested. “Devon was closer to me than Ashley was—”

“Open up that disgrace you call a suitcase and leave it on the bed, and I’ll unpack your things,” he interrupted me again. “After I have another honeybeer. Or two. Or six. Or however many are left in the fridge.”

Oscar got up, wrenched open the screen door that fronted his trailer, and stomped inside. The door banged shut behind him, with the interior wooden door slamming shut as well. Five seconds later, country music started blasting. The pixie had cranked up his twangy playlist again. Oh, goody.

The music roused Tiny from his nap. The tortoise cracked a black eye open at me for about half a second before going back to sleep. Seemed he was used to Oscar’s temper tantrums—and ignoring them. I wondered how many years that had taken. Because that was one very angry pixie.

I started to lean down so that I could peer in through one of the trailer windows, but I remembered what Reginald had said about Oscar not liking people spying on him—and trying to poke their eyes out with his sword.

So I stood up, walked over and grabbed my suitcase, and put it on the bed, just like he’d ordered. I left everything in the suitcase, except for my mom’s photo, which I slid in between the folds of her sapphire coat in one of the vanity table drawers so the pixie wouldn’t see it. As I glanced over at the trailer again, it occurred to me that Oscar had given me the same speech, more or less, that I’d given to Devon at breakfast.

But the surprising thing was that Oscar’s words had wounded me as much as mine had hurt Devon.





Oscar stayed inside his trailer, probably drinking and brooding, so I left my room, mostly to get away from his too-loud music. I asked a pixie flitting through the air where I could find Felix, and she told me to check the greenlab on the third floor. I followed her directions to the west wing of the mansion and walked through a pair of glass double doors.

The area before me was part greenhouse, part chemistry lab. To my right, roses, orchids, lilies, hydrangeas, and other, more exotic flowers perched in neat rows, while brown clay pots held herbs like dill, sage, rosemary, and thyme. The savory smells of the herbs, mixed with the soft scents of the flowers, created a heady perfume.

Directly in front of me were several rows of dense hedges, each one featuring sharp, dark green needles that were longer than my fingers. Stitch-sting bushes.