“Right, the lorelei called Lorelei.” He was still shaking her hand as he used his free one to point as if there were some confusion as to whom they were discussing. “Of course, my daughter has told me all about you.” He waggled his brows, every word longer than the last, the conversation almost identical to the one they had when he’d come to the manor to talk with Arista not so long ago. But it was no surprise he had forgotten—Mayor Blackburn didn’t seem to commit much to memory he didn’t deign important.
“Yup, I do know Bridgette.” Lorelei smiled, but she felt her brow furrow. Bridgette Blackburn didn’t like her—not that she liked anybody that much at the manor besides her boyfriend, Conrad, and Lorelei wasn’t even sure about that—so there was no way whatever she said to her father was complimentary.
“Wait, you mean your name’s Lorelei, and you’re a lorelei?” Cindy peered dubiously over the rim of her glasses as if it couldn’t be true. To be fair, it wasn’t.
“Come on now, Cind,”—he was still shaking her hand—“culture, diversity, heritage, isn’t it all fascinating and wonderful?”
“Sure, sure, the seminar, all that. Well, Ms. Lorelei who’s a lorelei, you got a little problem here.”
“Oh, no.” She slipped out of the mayor’s grasp and gripped the edge of the desk. “Don’t tell me that.”
“You didn’t cross the first ‘t’ in accountant on this line, and we can’t have any question about what this means.” She pushed the screen so Lorelei could see, pointing out the place where Ziah had gotten a little sloppy around line ninety or so.
Lorelei grit her teeth. “Really?”
“You’ll need to fill all these out again and then get them stamped by Rudy and—”
“Wait.” Lorelei pointed at the word. “That says canoe.”
“What?”
She pointed to the screen. “Canoe. See, if you just turn your head at this angle—”
“That clearly says accountant,” said Cindy.
“Oh, does it?”
Cindy’s glare could have burned a hole through her, and for a moment she did think she felt her forehead get very warm, but then Mayor Blackburn reached around Lorelei, uncomfortably close, and plucked the forms right out of the screen. “Shall I just take care of these then, Cind?”
“Oh, no, no, it’s no bother, really!”
He was still smiling from under his mustache. “Actually, I’d love to sign off on this personally. Think of it as a favor, perhaps? For one of the town’s best money makers. We wouldn’t want a temporary shutdown and have everyone staying in Foxglove Cove or some wretched place like that. Not again.”
Mayor Blackburn was already walking away with the paperwork, Cindy calling a nasally, saccharine goodbye as Lorelei hurried after. He looked over the pages as he turned into the stairwell but passed the stairs entirely and took a corner where, to Lorelei’s chagrin, an elevator stood.
“Everything looks well enough in order,” he was saying as the doors opened without the press of any call buttons which, coincidentally, weren’t there.
“That’s great.” She tried to not sound out of breath as they entered the elevator and the doors closed. He did not choose a floor, but the box shot off smoothly and the numbers on the screen above the door flew by at an alarming rate, finally stopping at fifty-one where the doors opened once more.
Mayor Blackburn stepped out, and Lorelei was on his heels. This corridor was nothing like the ones below, instead all golden and green-veined marble like the grand entry with warm lighting and tapestries hung on the walls. He turned down a narrower hall, passing a green man with tusks that protruded up from his lower lip. He was dressed in a typical security uniform with a hat perhaps a size too small, but strapped to his back he wore an axe, the double-ended blade wider across than Lorelei’s chest and suspiciously rusted on its edges. She gave him a wide berth as he stared her down.
The offices past the guard actually held people, or a variation on the idea of what a person might be. Lorelei read the names as they passed, slowing when she recognized Marian Saunders, Head of City Council as who Ziah had remarked she would have voted for over Mayor Blackburn had she had the chance. She glimpsed in through the window to see the woman, but was distracted by the visitor in her office, one Agnes Faulkner, clearly raising a stink behind the closed door.
Lorelei hurried away from view. Mrs. Faulkner was a member of the Charmed Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Humans, but contrary to the name, its members seemed to absolutely loathe them. Mrs. Faulkner had accused Lorelei of being a human and cast a jaw-locking spell on her at the harvest festival which Conrad had rescued her from. She wanted to be upset about the intrusion of Conrad on her thoughts yet again, but in the wake of that particular memory she was only grateful someone had intervened at all.
Mayor Blackburn brought her to an office at the hall’s end with glass doors, gilded in gold along their edges. Inside was a very pretty, young woman typing gingerly on a tablet at an otherwise empty, glass-topped desk. She looked up as they came in, her eyes black and pupilless, but only nodded at the mayor. Behind her desk was a smooth wall covered in framed black and white photos of the town, the beach, city hall itself, and just when Lorelei thought the mayor would walk straight into it, he put his hand out and dissolved a door-sized section that allowed him to continue on inside.
Lorelei jumped over where the threshold would be, and when she was on the other side the wall closed up, doorless, behind her. She found herself in a spacious, sterile office, floor-to-ceiling windows at its back. The desk in its center was curiously pointed away from those windows, and Mayor Blackburn took a seat in the high-backed, leather chair there. Flipping through the last page of the forms, his grin was ever-present. “I don’t see any reason why I wouldn’t sign off on these right now, Ms. Lorelei.”
And yet it felt like he was about to come up with one.
She couldn’t help but fidget under his gaze. “I would really appreciate that.” Somehow, she knew that was the wrong thing to say, yet she said it anyway.
Mayor Blackburn plucked a golden pen from its holder and hovered his hand over the form. “Ms. Lorelei, might I pick your brain for a moment?”
“Sure.” Then she gasped. “I mean, if you’d like to ask me a question or two, I might have answers for you.” She’d accidentally consented to having a sort of truth-telling spell cast on her in the past and was only lucky in that its caster, Conrad, was admittedly not skilled in cajolery, the school of manipulation magic. Mayor Blackburn, however, was purportedly talented in the magic of charming others.
He gestured to one of the chairs across from his desk, and she sat, sliding on the taut leather, just too short for her feet to reach the ground.
“Would you say,” he began conversationally, “that Moonlit Shores Manor is prime grounds for human infiltration?”
Lorelei’s eyes went wide, and her throat instantly parched, barely able to squeak out, “Huh?”
“I know, it’s very improbable, of course, but not impossible!” The mayor chuckled, dark eyes twinkling in exactly the same way as Bridgette’s when she was about to say something nasty. “Your place of employ has one of the few avenues leading directly in from beyond where our city’s enchantments reach, so I could see one or two humans slipping in accidentally. How would you rank the safety and security of your little bed and breakfast?”
Well, there had been the trow break in, and the fratricidal warlock, and that one tiny instance of an actual human finding herself employed there and sitting right in front of him, but really two out of three security issues on Moonlit Shores Manor’s grounds weren’t to do with humans at all. She felt a crooked smile forming on her lips. “I think things are pretty good.” Surely Arista’s wards were enough.
He nodded, his hand still poised over the signature line. “We had a concerned citizen or two spouting off about humans at the harvest festival. Nigh impossible really, and everyone knows those CSPCH loonies are, well, indeed loonies, but
if it would make my constituents feel safer to think there were, say, a task force in place to root out humans, then by all means, I should implement one, shouldn’t I?”
She stared at him, thinking the question was rhetorical, but when he waited for an answer, she shook her head. “I don’t—I mean—you’ve already got someone to…what exactly would they do?”
“Not hurt them, of course,” he was suspiciously quick to say. “Just a sort of capture and relocate program, placing humans back where they belong if they show up. Plenty of the world is already theirs anyway, I can’t imagine what they’d want with our little, enchanted corner of it.” He laughed like she were in on some joke with him. “There’s a process for these things, it’s all quite above board and clean and the magistratus functions so well already, but I think it makes the townsfolk nervous when they don’t see it in action. They might have a better sense of security if they knew Moonlit Shores had something more permanent to identify and extract any humans from our happy little town. Don’t you agree?”
Lorelei swallowed but managed to nod.
“Save for the approved ones, of course.”
“Approved?”
“There are only a couple of them left since we took the form away about twenty or so years ago. It was a real monster of a thing. Two hundred and some odd pages!” He rattled the business license application. “Makes this look like fun! New humans haven’t been allowed here in Moonlit Shores since, though on occasion someone brings the form back to the committee for reapproval. Marriages, adoptions, things like that.”
Lorelei hadn’t heard of such a thing. In fact, she hadn’t realized there already were humans living in town at all. She thought for a moment to ask but reined the urge back in.
“My task force could keep an eye out for more unsavory fellows as well—undocumented, hexed riff raff and such. Though I’m sure you’re checking papers when you have a vampire come to stay, aren’t you?”
“I’ve never met a vampire,” she said hollowly.
“Well, we can never really be sure without papers, can we?” He chuckled again, and her stomach turned. “And to be honest, we didn’t make a big stink over it, but we did have to call in the magistratus to pick up a couple lycans in the fall who didn’t have papers on them. Troubling stuff, but mostly harmless—there wasn’t evidence to suggest they’d done anything except not register themselves, of course. It’ll be abyssally more expensive now, though.”
Lorelei remembered the lycans who had come to the manor for Grier that fall and been chased off, scattering through the woods and presumably toward town. She couldn’t imagine any of them bothering to register themselves.
“I’ve been thinking,” he went on, “If I do hire in a few specialists for a task force, I could send one or two over to your place; they’ll need somewhere to stay before they settle in permanently anyway.”
Lorelei touched her nose as if she could feel the trail of freckles Bur had given her to hide her humanity. Faeries! Now that was an idea. They loved contracts and they were the first to be able to identify a human. “What, uh…who were you thinking of for this task force?”
“I can’t give that away.” Mayor Blackburn burst into a hearty laugh. “No, I’d need your lot just as unaware as the rest of us about the specific individuals. But they’d be coming right from the ranks of the magistratus.”
The magistratus. Wizard cops. Ziah had mentioned them once and didn’t seem to care for them.
“So, why are you telling me all this?”
He leaned toward her so that his pen almost touched the form. “I can’t have the actual sentinels’ faces plastered anywhere, no uniforms either. It’s all an undercover type job, you see. But I do need rumors, Ms. Lorelei, and isn’t that what your kind are best at?”
She looked at him sidelong.
“No offense meant.” He snorted, and she didn’t believe him for a second. “I’ve never met a lorelei myself, but fae beings, they love their gossip, we all know that.”
“Right.” She didn’t know lorelei were supposed to be gossips. And Ren, an elf and so also a fae being, was the least likely person to gossip she’d ever met. But the mayor seemed resolute.
“Anyway!” He sat up straight and finally signed the form with a flourish, his signature huge and overlapping half the page with large, loopy letters in a thick, black ink. Then he pulled a small cylinder from his inner pocket, metallic on the outside and fitting into his hand like a wax seal stamp. He pressed the end of it to the space beside his signature, and the page lit up with a green glow.
Then he plucked a blank piece of paper from a small stack, laid it atop the newly signed last page of the form, and gave it a tap with his pen. The letters of the bottom page were sucked up onto the top, swirled around, and left behind an official-looking business license, complete with his signature and stamp. “Here you are, my dear! To another year of booming business which I am sure will go off without a hitch.”
“Thank you.” She stood and took the copy, the page warm to the touch as the green glow dissipated. “And, um, I’ll be on the lookout for any new guests who might be warlock…police.”
Mayor Blackburn chuckled darkly. “Oh, now, who says I haven’t already sent them?”
She blinked back at him for a long moment, and he stood. Then she forced on a grin. “Right! I’ll be sure not to say a word.”
“Of course, of course, keep this just between you and me.” He winked, and her head swam. Their conversation swirled around in her brain, and she held very still—this wasn’t the first time someone had tried to do this to her, and she wouldn’t let it happen again.
Lorelei turned to the solid wall they’d come through. Wavering slightly, she went for the place where the door had been, a painting of two colonial hunters standing beside a pile of pelts in its place.
“My apologies.” Mayor Blackburn waved a hand, and the wall opened up.
She sputtered out a thanks and scurried through the hole.
Mrs. Faulkner was gone from Marian Saunders’ office, but Lorelei still hurried down the hall, finding the elevator and getting in. The doors closed and blessedly took her back to the first floor where she stepped out into the massive and empty entry. The interior lights had brightened in the wake of the setting sun, the glow from inside warm and the city through the windows shadowed and eerie.
She took a moment to run the conversation back in her mind, but the pieces still fit together. In fact, they were even louder and clearer than she expected them to be. Mayor Blackburn’s spell hadn’t actually tried to muddy anything in her brain—he had instead insisted she remember.
Resolutely headed for the door, she eyed the directory once more and stopped beside it, looking about but still seeing no one. Lorelei leaned down to it and whispered, “Hexed registration.”
The letters popped off and reorganized to read Residency, Registration, Hexed, Office 3365, Thirty Third Floor. Lorelei frowned and headed back out into the cold.
CHAPTER 4
UNDIGNIFIED
Lorelei biked hard to get back to the manor, the new business license tucked safely in her bag. It was getting late and the sun set early as the year crept toward its close. The crowds were thicker in town as charmed folk headed home, but once she reached the residential area outside of the business district, it was easier to maneuver. She passed under a ball hovering in the air in the middle of the street, a group of children on each side attempting to push it toward the other. It zipped over her head and landed with a hollow smack directly onto one of the kid’s faces, and the other side cheered.
Eventually the sidewalks fell away and the street rolled over hills, lone homes with sprawling yards and wooded lots between here and there, each tucked farther off the road than the last. She passed by the mayor’s house, Blackburn Estate, where the lawn was being tended to by a man with antlers who herded a group of fluffy, sheep-like creatures in a clean line across the grass. She grimaced even though Bridgette probably wasn’t even th
ere.
When she made it to the edge of the woods, she slowed, the path a little bumpier. The eyes of the town were far behind her now, and even though no one had given her a second glance, she was still relieved after what Mayor Blackburn said. He seemed more concerned with the fears of the charmed folk than he was about any actual humans, but even casual concern could upset what she’d become comfortable with. And he’d mentioned the hexed too, vampires, sirens, and lycans who were once humans but had been cursed. Though everyone believed Grier was just a shapeshifter, Lorelei knew his secret, that he was actually a lycan who had, as of yet, not gone feral, and if he was supposed to be documented but wasn’t? Well, she had no idea what those consequences would be.
She took a few deep breaths and carried on over the trail through the woods. Orange light filtered through the leafless trees as the sun sunk lower. Maybe the mayor really was only trying to start a rumor. Paying for an anti-human task force when all he cared about was his constituents believing one existed seemed extreme. That was a bit conspiratorial, but hadn’t that been exactly what he was getting at in his office?
But then, if there ever was a human who popped up in town and no one around to deal with it, that would prove the task force didn’t exist. The CSPCH was at least tangentially skilled at sniffing out humans, Mrs. Faulkner had been able to identify Lorelei. If Mayor Blackburn wanted this thing to take, he’d likely need at least one case: a human that was living amongst them, not dangerous really, but just there. Someone they could capture and relocate, as he said, to make an example of. She swallowed and glanced up at the darkening sky through the naked branches above then sped up.
The forest fell into the deep blues of an early winter evening quickly, and though it was a short trip back to the manor, it certainly felt long. Who thought putting an inn in the middle of nowhere was a good idea anyway? Charmed folk, that’s who. Then she blinked at herself: that sort of thinking wouldn’t do her any good.
A scurrying in the trees beside her made her glance out into the darkness. She didn’t see anything, but her mind flashed with the image of Byron’s form, standing at the end of the trail, cloaked in black, waiting. She listened hard over the sound of leaves under her tires, able to just make out something, and whatever it was, it certainly sounded like it was moving with her.
The Wayward Deed (Vacancy Book 2) Page 4