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what you are, lady.” I probably sounded meaner’n I meant to, but I was angry. Angry at people tryin’ to manipulate me; angry at Ramona for refusin’ to admit to me that she wasn’t human months ago—which was pretty clear now, in light of there bein’ someone else whose power was
exactly
the same as hers; angry at myself for still carin’ enough to be angry at Ramona at all. “But I don’t want any part of it.”
    “Fine.” Her whole demeanor shifted as quick as if someone’d just flipped a switch. The puppy eyes, the waterworks, the whole “seductively helpless” spiel, gone, leaving nothin’ but all business. “Clearly I approached this wrong. My apologies.”
    “I don’t want you to apologize. I want you to leave.”
    Even as I said it, though, somethin’ occurred to me.
    “And don’t think I haven’t tumbled to your people watching and asking around about me, either. They’re good, but they ain’t
that
good.”
    You should know me well enough by now to recognize one of my test questions when you hear it. I was still more’n half convinced it’d been Goswythe all this time—shadowing me, talking up my friends, all that. (Hell, if I hadn’t felt the empathic whammy Miss McCall had tried to put on me, I mighta believed she
was
Goswythe.) But it still wasn’t a sure bet, and her showin’ up now probably was no coincidence. I wanted to see what kinda reaction I got.
    And what I got was a twitch around the peepers and a quick frown, a brief return to the worry and fretting of a minute ago. I didn’t know her well enough, and she was way too skilled, for me to tell in that moment if the fear was genuine or a real solid act. It
tasted
real, but with another Fae or one of our relatives? Unreliable evidence at best.
    “I hadn’t realized you already knew they were out there,” she said, sliding off the desk and beginning to pace a neat track in the age- and foot-packed carpet. “They’re not my people, Mr. Oberon. In fact, they’re why I came to you. If they find my sister before I do…”
    She let it hang there, almost daring me to make the obvious connection.
    I made the obvious connection.
    Damn it to hell, Ramona, what’d you get yourself into now?
    And for that matter, what’ve you gotten
me
into?
    “Yeah,” I told her, “I can see how that might be a worry.”
    She brightened, flashing blindingly pearly whites.
    “So you’ll help me?”
    “To find the door, yeah. Otherwise, no.”
    Oh, but she went icy at that. Either she didn’t have the same fine control over her mojo that Ramona did or she wasn’t botherin’ to exercise it, because I felt a tangible wave of cold fury shoot across the office.
    “What is wrong with you, Oberon?”
    “To start with, I don’t know you from Eve, toots.”
    “You don’t know
most
of your clients before you take them on!”
    “Most of ’em don’t show up and try to dope me with a mystical Mickey, either.”
    She stamped her foot, and I knew
that
was an act. Her anger, her
real
anger, was far too intense for dippy gestures like that.
    “I need you to find Ramona and bring her to me, Oberon. It’s the only way she’ll be safe. The only way
either
of you will be safe!”
    “Sorry, not buying it. I don’t trust you. I don’t trust you
so much
that it’s actually makin’ me trust
other
people less.”
    Funny thing was, I wasn’t entirely exaggerating with that. I was goin’ back in my head and questioning even what little I’d thought I’d known about Ramona.
    “I’m
sure
as hell not handing anybody over to you without a lot more than your reassurances to go on. Now I’m gonna ask politely one more time, and then I’m gonna
help
you leave.”
    And just that quick, her anger vanished. It was so sudden, I almost staggered. She smiled, and it was the most worrying thing she’d done since I stepped through the door.
    “Maybe you’d reconsider,” she murmured, tapping a fingernail to her lip as if she’d only just come up with