He shrugged.
“I don’t know if it’s the stone in that necklace, but I thought if that could help her talent shine… And of course, I wanted to take care of her. I didn’t know how else to do that but give her gifts. Honestly, I didn’t have the faintest idea how to decorate the room I prepared for her.”
“This room seems really nice.”
“This is all the work of my interior designer. I have no eye for these things.”
Diefenbaker looked depressed again. Well, at least now I knew why Laura’s room was such an eyesore.
“And this so-called lawyer…”
Something was bugging me about this. A lawyer?
The only people who knew about the dragon egg were me, Lindel, and the alchemist behind the theft. Only the three of us—no, wait, one more. The man who’d passed Lindel’s offer to me.
Dean.
The request itself had gone directly from Lindel to me, but Dean certainly could have known the details. After all, he was the one arranging things. If he pretended he was just figuring out how much to charge, I could see him gleaning enough information to guess. This was a case big enough to warrant personal involvement from an ancient mage like Echos, and everyone knew Lindel was the dragons’ guardian. The stolen dragon egg and a request from Lindel—even an idiot could connect the dots.
I had a bad feeling about this. “This lawyer,” I said, absently fiddling with my bra. The dragon egg pulsed against my skin. “Was this lawyer—”
“Jack!” a voice yelled from my phone.
No ring tone, no sampled voices. Forgetting to use his beloved Bogart’s voice, Baron’s scream came out like a burst of white noise.
“Jack, get back here now! Your office is trashed, and Larry and Jeffrey are gone!”
9
I did something I rarely do. I jumped fully into the faerie world, knocking stunned faeries out of the way as I raced through the forest, and landed in my office. Usually I stayed out of the faerie realm because time flowed so differently there, but I had more important things to worry about right now.
I was standing on pieces of a broken plate and some leftover pizza. Fragments of crockery with congealed cheese stuck to them, a spray of brown on the wall where a can of soda had slammed into it. The couch had flipped over, a brown puddle of spilled soda spreading like a bloodstain behind it. A bag sporting a game store logo—Larry had used that money on a new game after all—had been flung to one side. The Nintendo was on, its light blinking furiously. Two controllers lay on their sides like dead mice. The game’s title screen was displayed on the TV, the words “Press Start” blinking futilely.
“Larry,” I whispered. Then I screamed, “Larry!”
No answer. I forced down the rising panic, checking every room, opening every door.
“Larry! Jeffrey! Larry, Jeffrey, where are you? Where are you?!”
Silence. Sickening silence.
My toe bumped something. I picked up a Yankees cap, the one piece of clothing Larry’d managed to keep after transforming in the theater. It lay wrong side up like an overturned turtle.
“No use. He’s gone.” Baron’s voice issued from the phone in my pocket. He’d calmed down enough to use Bogart’s voice again. Had I ever seen Bogie acting this upset? Not worth thinking about right now. “As soon as they left the place, he used some concealment alchemy. I’ve got everyone looking, sent copies of myself out everywhere, but they’re coming up empty.”
This was my office. Nothing could ever set foot in here that I didn’t let in myself. That’s why I paid such high rent.
The only people who could get in here were me, Larry…and Dean. My business partner.
He didn’t directly visit my office all that often, but it had been known to happen. As my business partner, my security would let him in. If he wanted, he could step into my office whenever he liked.
Even when he intended to kidnap my brother.
“We’ll expand the search. Hold on.”
The Baron vanished. The BGM from the TV was making me fret. I turned, and the zombie lurching across the logo melted away. A text message replaced the title screen, white letters on a black background:
I’ve got your puppies and the bitch. If you want them back:
Bring the item to Great Hill in Central Park.
Don’t use magic getting here. I’ll know.
You know what’ll happen if you don’t show up.
The glowing letters flickered and then slowly faded. I stared at the screen, paralyzed. Only when they’d completely faded did I yell and throw Larry’s cap. It bounced off the LCD display and fell to the ground. The TV shut off, and the screen went black.
The room was dark. I realized the sun had set. This was why I hated going through the faerie kingdom. It’d been early afternoon when I’d jumped here from the Plaza Hotel, but now it was a pitch black, New York night. Maybe jumping here had been less of a drain than taking the subway or a bus, or glowering at traffic from the back seat of a cab, but it felt like I’d wasted a huge amount of time. That killed me.
Larry. The one person like me, really like me. When I’d decided to stay in the human world, he’d grumbled about it but come along. My twin brother, always acting like a kid, always making me look after him. If it weren’t for him, I’d be truly alone. Neither my human parents nor my faerie parents had ever really felt like family. For all his griping, Larry was always at my side, ever since he’d knocked on my window that evening and shown me his wolf ears and fangs.