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sleeves rolled up above his elbow. But like me,
     he was barefoot. His dark hair was kept short, but it still curled a little. In that
     way, his hair fit him perfectly. Try as he might to be straitlaced, there was just
     a part of him that wouldn’t completely be tamed.
    I dropped my bag on the floor in front of the shelves and crouched down to rummage
     through it. I’d pulled out a couple fake passports—both for me and for Linus—when
     Ridley reached me.
    “You don’t look that bad,” he said with his hands shoved in his pockets.
    I looked up at him, smirking. “And here I didn’t think you liked blondes.”
    As far as I knew, his last couple girlfriends had been brunettes, but that really
     wasn’t saying much when it came to the Kanin. Like all trolls, the Kanin had certain
     physical characteristics. Dark curly hair; brown or gray eyes; olive skin; shorter
     in stature and petite; and often physically attractive. In that regard, the Kanin
     appeared similar to the Trylle, the Vittra, and, other than the attractive part, even
     the Omte.
    It was only the Skojare who stood out, with fair skin, blond hair, and blue eyes.
     And it was the Skojare blood that betrayed my true nature. In Doldastam, over 99 percent
     of the population had brown hair. And I didn’t.
    “Come on. Everyone likes blondes,” Ridley countered with a grin.
    I laughed darkly. Outside of the walls surrounding Doldastam the world may have shared
     that opinion, as Ridley would know from his tracking days. But here, my appearance
     had never been anything but a detriment.
    “I was referring to your run-in,” Ridley said.
    I stood up and gave him a sharp look. “I can handle myself in a fight.”
    “I know.” He’d grown serious, and he looked down at me with a level of concern that
     was unusual for him. “But I know how hard dealing with Konstantin Black had to be.”
    I turned away from him, unwilling to let him see how badly it had shaken me up. “Thanks,
     but you know you don’t have to worry about me.”
    “I can’t help it,” Ridley said, then waited a beat before adding, “It’s my job.”
    I pulled open a cabinet drawer and flitted through the files, looking for the one
     with my name on it, and dropped the passports inside of it.
    “It must’ve taken all your restraint not to kill him,” Ridley went on when I didn’t
     say anything.
    “On the subject of your job, have you figured out why they were after Linus?” I bent
     over and dug through my bag, refusing to talk about it. I wouldn’t even say Konstantin’s
     name aloud.
    “No. So far we’ve come up empty. I’ve scheduled a phone call with the Queen of Omte
     first thing in the morning, and I have a meeting at ten in the morning tomorrow with
     the King, Queen, and the Chancellor.” He paused. “I’d like you to be there too.”
    “I’m no good at meetings.” That wasn’t a lie, exactly, but it also wasn’t the reason
     I didn’t want to go to the meeting.
    As the Chancellor, my dad would be at the meeting, and I didn’t want to talk about
     letting his attempted murderer get away. I knew he would never hold it against me,
     but that didn’t make me feel any less guilty.
    I grabbed stacks of American and Canadian cash out of my bag. Ridley pulled his keys
     out of his pocket and unlocked the safe at the end of the cabinets. My own set of
     keys were buried somewhere in my bag, and it was a bit quicker to let him unlock it.
    “You know more about this than we do,” Ridley reasoned. “For the sake of Linus and
     the other changelings, we need you at this meeting.”
    “I’ll be there,” I said reluctantly. I crouched back down over my bag and dug out
     what was left of my tracker supplies—a knife, a cell phone, a mileage log, and a few
     other odds and ends—and began putting them in the cabinets.
    “What are you doing out here, anyway?” I asked. “Aren’t you off for the night?” His
     job was much more of a nine-to-five gig than