Read Dead to Rites for Free Online

handful. Up until ten minutes ago, I’da signed an oath in blood to that effect. So either I’d missed some signs last year (and a few days ago) that I absolutely shouldn’t have missed, or something hinky was up.
    But telling Hruotlundt alla that would net me bupkis, and get him even more steamed to boot.
    So, something else I hadda dig into. Peachy.
    “All right,” I said, conceding defeat. Then, like it’d just occurred to me and throwing in a faint grin for good measure. “You let ’em see you as you really are?”
    It wasn’t a question about them, exactly, and it was the sorta thing we Fae occasionally gab about where mortals are concerned.
    “Nah,” he said after a minute. “I toss up a glamour when Shea visits. They just see a normal human being.”
    Bingo.
“When Shea visits.” This hadn’t been his first time, then. That was
something
to work with, anyway.
    And all I was gonna get on that score. Figured I’d better get to the point of my own visit, before he tumbled to what I’d just done—or he just got impatient enough to give me the bum’s rush for wastin’ his time.
    “Right, then. I’m lookin’ for a
phouka…
”
    I didn’t give him the whole skinny, of course. Just the basics, that Goswythe’n me had butted heads a while back, that he’d vanished, and that I had reason to believe he was back and pokin’ his schnozz into my business.
    And that he was quite probably supporting himself by stealing and cons.
    “Now don’t blow your wig,” I said quickly as the
dvergr
started to inflate like he was literally gonna bust and take everything in the room with him. “I know you just got done tellin’ me you don’t talk about clients.”
    Hruotlundt didn’t sigh, exactly, so much as exhale what’d been buildin’ up into a shout at the very least.
    “But…”
    Inflating again.
    “It ain’t just me he’s gunnin’ for, see? If it was, I wouldn’t be here at all. But Goswythe, he’s threatening some folks who’re important to me. If I don’t find him before he does whatever he’s plannin’, they’re gonna suffer for it.”
    I
was
just talkin’ about Celia and maybe Adalina Ottati, right? Not Ramona. I wasn’t talkin’ about Ramona.
    Definitely not Ramona.
    Definitely.
    “You know me, Hruotlundt,” I finished. “You know I ain’t gonna stand for that. And you know the lengths I’ll go to if my hand’s forced.”
    It’s hard to read a
dvergr’
s emotions—their expressions are literally stony, and even their peepers are more rock than anything else—but I could see he was dithering, even torn. Nah, he wasn’t feelin’ sorry for me or my friends. Hruotlundt didn’t much care about anything beyond his professional rep and his profit margins. Rather, he was decidin’ just how much of a pain in the ass I was gonna make myself tryin’ to protect my people, how much it’d impact his business, how much ground he could afford to give while protecting that reputation (not to mention his mountain-sized pride).
    “As we both just said,” he finally answered, “I won’t give you any personal details about my clients. What I
will
tell you is that, so far as I know, none of my current clients are
phouka.
Most of my regulars, I know well enough to say for sure. The newer clients? I can’t be positive, obviously, but I’ve no reason to suspect they are. Furthermore, if this Goswythe is newly active, he’s either definitely not one of my new customers or he’s being
damn
subtle about it. I had a few strangers with high-end merchandise in the weeks following the Spear of Lugh affair, but since then the newcomers have only provided smaller, less valuable goods. Nothing remotely suspicious about any of them.
    “No, Oberon. You are, as they say, barking up the wrong tree with me. And I do trust you’ll remember that when deciding whose life to make miserable while you’re engaged in your wild
phouka
chase.”
    Well, that was plain enough. And frankly, about as clear’n