Pink Princess Fairytini (Fairy Files #2) (12 page)

I glared at Frost, because his calling me Clarinda had been deliberate, likely a test. Frost just shrugged and smirked. God, I hated him sometimes.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m the fairy princess, but I’ve been helping Frost investigate some of his cases. He asked me to come along today in the capacity of an investigator. I’d like it if you’d think of me as a private eye and not a princess.”

Lolly nodded and lifted the plate of cookies. Frost and I both took one and munched as Lolly told us about his daughter, Lulu. She was twelve and gregarious, always happy and energetic. He showed us a picture of a girl in pigtails who looked much younger than twelve, her blue eyes bright and twinkling with mischief, her smile wide and open.

“How did she feel about moving to the Non?” I asked. “Did she miss her friends in Rubalia?”

Lolly frowned. “She makes friends everywhere she goes. We weren’t here two days, before she had a gang of kids following her around everywhere she went.”

That wasn’t exactly what I’d asked. “And your wife? Is she handling the move well?”

Lolly’s shoulders tensed. “My wife has got nothing to do with this. I’m asking you to look for my little girl.”

I was taken aback by the anger in his voice, the warning in his words. “I’m not trying to be nosy, Lolly. Several fae children have gone missing in the past couple of weeks and one of them actually ran away and joined a gang. I’m just trying to cover all my bases. If your wife is unhappy here and Lulu thought she might be able to help her by joining up with a gang that promised her money or stability that could point us in a different direction and help us to find your daughter more quickly.”

Lolly’s face turned a bit red and his gaze narrowed. I’d hit a nerve. “My wife stayed behind in Rubalia,” he said. “Lulu is happy here with me. She wouldn’t run away and she wouldn’t join no gang.”

“Can I ask why you left Rubalia?” I asked. “Frost and I were there recently and we noticed that the forest between the faun and fairy realms had grown in size and was full of dark shadows.”

“No,” Lolly said. “You can’t ask why we left. We left and we’re done with Rubalia. I just want you to find my daughter.”

“Can you give me a list of the names of her friends and how we might contact them?”

Lolly nodded and left the room. I looked at Frost’s grim expression, and I sighed. “He wants us to find his daughter,” I said in a low voice. “As long as he doesn’t have to talk about Rubalia? What if he’s holding the key to this case?”

“That’s his choice,” Frost said. “You can try pushing him, but wait until I’ve gotten the names of Lulu’s friends.”

“Deal,” I said, as Lolly walked back into the room with a notebook and a pen. He sat and bent his head to scribble on the pad. His hand shook as he wrote and I wished I could offer him comfort, instead of being the hard ass who demanded answers. Hopefully, the comfort I’d offer him would be his daughter returned to him safely.

I ate another cookie as Lolly wrote, but Frost sat stone-still, his gaze distant. He was onto something, I could just feel it.

“That’s all I know,” Lolly said, handing the paper to Frost.

“I don’t think that’s true,” I said, making my tone as hard as I could manage. “I think there’s a great deal about the shadows in Rubalia that you aren’t telling us.”

Lolly just glared at me, his mouth a firm line.

“Keeping secrets could mean you will never see your daughter again. All the missing kids have been fae and their disappearances could be related something that happened in Rubalia.”

“I don’t know anything that will help you find my daughter,” he said. “Just do your job and bring her back to me.”

“We’ll do everything in our power to return your daughter to you, Lolly.” Frost stood and put a warm hand on my shoulder. I took the hint and rose to my feet beside him. “Call us if you think of anything else that might be helpful.”

Lolly escorted us out and we stood in the hallway. Frost looked over the list Lolly had given him and shook his head. “All he gave us was a list of first names, what are we supposed to do with this?”

“Start at the playground?”

“Yeah, okay. There’s a big one two blocks east.”

I waited to ask my question until we were on the street and heading in the direction of the playground. “You figured something out back there, what was it?”

He looked at me eyebrows raised.

“I make a living reading people. Don’t look so surprised, you might hurt my feelings.”

He shrugged. “I thought that was one of your rules, no feelings allowed.”

I knew he was goading me to get me off the subject, but his words still caused me a twinge of pain. “What did you figure out?”

“I haven’t figured out anything, yet,” he said. “But something didn’t smell right back there. I only smelled Lolly and he didn’t smell like any other brownie I’ve ever met. He smelled like …”

“The shadows in the forest?” I asked, taking a wild but not unfounded guess.

He swallowed hard and nodded. “I didn’t want to say anything until I was sure, but that bartender in Rubalia told us people touched by the shadows acted different. What if Lolly was acting different and that’s why his wife stayed behind? Or what if his daughter hadn’t wanted to be around a father who acted odd and had been crashing somewhere else for a while to avoid him?”

“You think she’s been missing longer than he said?”

“Maybe. Or maybe she’d still been checking in with him, even though she didn’t live there. He doesn’t strike me as a dangerous brownie, but whatever the shadows did to him may have changed that.”

“Did you smell the shadows on the other parents?”

“No. But I might have missed it. I hadn’t been exposed to the shadows when I spoke to them.”

The playground was a bit run-down, and out of date, rusted metal and creaky swings, but it was full of kids. The younger ones played on the jungle gym, the older ones played basketball or sat on the grass whispering secrets.

“Let me go first,” I said, putting a hand of Frost’s chest and shoving him back. He gave me an amused smirk, but let me do my thing.

I went over to a group of girls sitting in the shade of a neighboring building. All of them looked about Lulu’s age with smooth skin, shiny hair, and bright, but wary eyes. One of them looked as though she might be a unicorn maiden and another was almost certainly a dryad. The humans with them seemed a bit awed by their beauty and lilting voices. “Hi,” I said. “I’m giving out free make-overs to promote my cosmetic line. Would you girls be interested in helping me out?”

“You sure it’s free,” asked one of the human girls. Her skin was a gorgeous mocha shade, and she squinted up at me since the sun was behind my back.

“All free,” I said. “In fact, you’d be helping me if you showed your mothers how pretty you look and convinced them to buy some of my make-up.”

“My mother won’t like it if I wear make-up,” the unicorn maiden said.

“Just wash it off before you go home,” another girl said.

“Okay,” she said, her voice soft with nerves. “I’ll volunteer to go first, then. I’ve been dying to try make-up.” And, just like that, I was in.

An hour later, I found Frost in a pick-up game of basketball with a group of boys, two trolls and an ogre among them. Frost didn’t see me approach, and I just watched him for several long moments, enjoying the grace and ease with which he moved and the bright smile that lit his eyes. One of the smaller boys tried to knock the ball out of his hands and Frost laughed, letting the ball fall as though the boy really had been strong enough to get it away from a full-grown werewolf.

Frost noticed me then and waved goodbye to the kids, before jogging over and wrapping me up in a sweaty hug. I laughed in surprise at his unusual gesture. “Just think you should be as sweaty as me,” he said when he released me. His smile grew wider. “You sure took a long time over there. You get anything useful?”

“I thought it was time to change tack and yes, I did get some useful information,” I said. “Let’s go back to your office and I’ll fill you in.”

He nodded and we started back toward the apartment building and his bike. “You didn’t complain about me rubbing my sweat all over you,” he said.

I couldn’t help the smile that rose to my lips. My pretty shirt was streaked with dampness from his sweaty body and, even though it should have bothered me, I was enjoying his good mood too much to be annoyed. “Oh, Frost, don’t you know by now that I don’t complain, I get even.”

His eyes widened a bit. “I’d like to see you try. You don’t stand a chance against my wolf senses and quick reflexes.”

I laughed because he had no idea what he was up against. “Challenge accepted.”

“Lulu has actually been missing for a week. The girls said Lulu was afraid of her dad, just as you suspected, Frost. She was crashing on the couch at a friend’s place. She told the friend’s mother that her dad had hit her. She also said that he’d kicked her out, or I don’t think the friend’s mother would have let her stay.” I filled Vin and Frost in on what the girls at the park had told me, once we were all back at his office. Vin had hurried over as soon as I’d called her and got there so quickly that Frost still glistened with sweat.

“So she was crashing somewhere else. Did you get the name of the friend?”

I nodded. “I got even better. One of the girls texted her and she came over, said she’d been the one to tell Lolly that Lulu had gone missing. She thought he had something to do with her vanishing, until he freaked out and got totally upset that his daughter was missing.”

“Doesn’t prove he didn’t have something to do with it,” Vin said.

“No. But another girl wandered over and said she’d heard one of the guys had seen Lulu go off with a woman the night she vanished.”

“Could he describe her?” Frost asked.

I shook my head. “No one’s seen him for a couple of days, but I got his name and his address.”

“Why didn’t we try to find him while we were there?” Frost asked, already rising to go after the boy.

“Because his name is Rodney Elder and he went missing the day after she did.”

Frost dropped back down into his seat and Vin swore. “That can’t be a coincidence,” she said.

“No. But was it coincidence that the kid who saw Lulu taken also happened to be fae? And why did Lolly wait so long to call Frost? The whole thing smells a bit like a set-up.”

“A set-up?” Vin asked. “Who are they trying to set up?”

“It doesn’t make sense,” Frost said. “It’s more likely that they meant to get Rodney and took Lulu by mistake. Or that it’s just coincidence he saw her get taken.”

“Or they killed Rodney so he couldn’t point the finger at the woman who took Lulu,” I said.

“I still say it’s a set-up,” Vin said. “Lolly’s been infected by the shadows and he could be working with the kidnappers to lead us in the wrong direction or into a trap.”

“That seems like a pretty elaborate scheme,” I said. “They’d have to be watching us and to have predicted we’d be going after them.”

“Right. Because it’s so hard to predict that Frost, the only PI who works with the fae, would be called in, and then ask his trusty sidekick for help,” Vin said.

“Sidekick?” I said with a gasp. “I’m no one’s sidekick.”

“I’m not buying it as a trap, Vin,” Frost said. “But if this is a set-up, what are they after?”

Vin and I looked at each other and then back at Frost. “That’s the question we have to answer before they get it,” I said.

Vin nodded. “Yeah, I’ll see what I can dig up. I’m going to talk to Mercury right now, maybe he’s heard something.”

Vin left, and I stood. “What sort of progress are you making on the mess with your club?” Frost asked.

I shrugged. “I’m not sure what I can do. I’m heading over there now to help with the clean-up, and I’m going to have to go shopping to replace my stolen equipment.”

“Didn’t you have insurance?”

I nodded, feeling overwhelmed. “Property insurance and liability insurance, but neither of those covers stolen items inside the restaurant.”

“Could your liability insurance help with the lawsuit the mayor’s got against you?”

I perked up a bit. “Maybe,” I said. “I’ll look into it. Thanks.”

“I’ve got one of my agents working on your case full-time, but it’s like Neil just disappeared. We can’t find him, and we can’t find any way to connect him to the mayor.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “It was a long shot anyway.”

He frowned. “Why do you say that like you’re done? We’ll keep looking for Neil and we’ll set this right.”

“And even if we find him?” I asked. “He’s not going to pay for my missing equipment, and he’s probably already fenced it by now. I can’t afford to replace everything, especially now that the restaurant’s closed, and I can’t afford a lawyer to fight the lawsuit.”

“I have a lawyer friend who would love to help. He could use the attention he’d get from a case involving the mayor, and he’s very motivated for you to win. He’ll even do it pro bono.”

I stared at him, not taking the card he slid across his desk, not believing it could be so simple. “He’d do it for free? What would I owe him?”

“Not a thing.”

I got that the guy might gain some fame from taking my case, but it still seemed like too much. “What will I owe you?”

Frost’s jaw tightened and his glare was so angry that I had to fight the urge to shrink back into myself. “Nothing, Chloe. Some people in this world do things for people because they like them and want to see them succeed.”

“I’m not that likeable,” I said, because I didn’t buy it. Frost and I had achieved a relationship somewhere in the ballpark of friendship, but we were hardly besties. He had to have an ulterior motive.

Something in his gaze softened, and I found I preferred his anger. This warm, affectionate look made my chest ache and made me want…But I wouldn’t think about that. Then the soft look was gone, as though he sensed my dislike of his softening. “No,” he said. “You’re not that likeable, but I like the mayor less than I like you, and this is a good opportunity for my friend.” He opened his desk drawer and tossed me an envelope. “And this is because I appreciate your help and think you should be compensated for it.”