Susan turned a fierce cop gaze on him. "Maybe don't annoy me too much."
His mouth fell open. "But you—"
She cut him off. "You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to get your butt shoved in my jail overnight. You have—"
"Hey! What about my right to an attorney?"
"You have no right to an attorney in Dead End. An alligator ate the last attorney who occasionally took cases as a public defender here," she said in a bland voice.
I tried not to laugh at the expression of pure indignation on the eagle shifter's face.
"It's true," I told him. "Well, Mr. and Mrs. Chen are lawyers, but they don't do this kind of thing, and Gruber Elliott, but he hasn't taken any new clients since he became a vampire. He got really drunk and stood up in a Town Hall meeting and said 'being a vampire lawyer gives a whole new meaning to the word bloodsucker,' and then he attacked Larry the tow guy, but Larry always carries a wrench, and he walloped Gruber over the side of the head with it."
Susan nodded. "Broke a fang too. Didn't Elliott go see your ex to get that fixed?"
I sighed. "Yes. Poor Owen. He said he nearly got drunk just on the whiskey fumes in Gruber's breath. But he managed to repair the fang."
"Ah, the saintly Dr. Snodgrass," Jack said mildly. He'd been there the night Owen and I had parted—amicably, but it had still hurt—and Jack had been very kind to me. That didn't stop him from making the occasional snarky comment, though, especially when Uncle Mike reminisced about "that dull dentist fellow Tess dated who could bore the paint off the side of my barn."
There were far too many smart alecks in my life.
"I see life in Dead End hasn't changed a great deal in three centuries," Jed said dryly. "In my day, it was the Widow Smythe singing badly when she'd get into the grog on wash day."
I opened my mouth to ask any of the hundred questions about Widow Smythe, wash day, or grog that the sentence all but begged for, but the timer dinged, and Jack took the second batch of cookies out of the oven. Logan just sat there, eyes narrowed, staring back and forth between me and Susan.
Finally, he tapped one finger on the table. "I want to believe you're making this all up, but I'm really unhappy to say I don't think you are."
"Welcome to Dead End," I told him, holding up my glass in a toast.
"Yeah," muttered Jack, putting another plate of fresh cookies on the table. "Just don't stay long."
"Anyway," Jed said, getting back to his tale. "The basic problem is that the queen whose palace is closest to our doorway to the Fae lands is unhappy with me."
Jack whistled. "Not a lot worse than an unhappy Fae queen."
"Which queen?" Susan asked.
"There's more than one?" I learned something new about the supernatural world every day now.
"Many more than one, and there are hierarchies," Jed told me. "The Autumn queen, Viviette, still rules here. Well, in the Fae lands adjacent to Dead End."
Logan clenched his jaw so tightly I was surprised not to hear his teeth crack. "It was an Autumn Court prince who made the Bargain with my sister."
"That can't be a coincidence," I said, and Jack glanced at me and nodded, looking more and more grim.
"According to Queen Viviette, Prince Kal'andel na Garanwyn—notof the Autumn Court—stole the dagger from her and brought it to the human world. According to Kal'andel,Jackstole it fromhimand still has it, here in Dead End."
Jack growled. "Again, I did not steal her stupid dagger. Not from her and not from him."
"Specifically, Kal'andel—who claims he did notstealit, but that shegiftedit to him, and there may be war yet between their Courts over these competing claims—anyway, Kal'andel says that he hid it inside the huge willow tree in town. The one that has a new gazebo next to it now," Jed said.
"That gazebo is at least a hundred years old," Susan said.
"Right. The new one," Jack's grandfather said, nodding; his concept of "new" was naturally much different from ours. "They believe the dagger disappeared in the past year, which is coincidentally the time since you arrived in Dead End, grandson. When she sent two of her guard to retrieve it, it was gone. You, Jack, are known to the Fae as someone powerful enough to find and hold one of their artifacts."
"But I didn't take it," Jack said through clenched teeth. "So somebody else must have. If it was even there in the first place. I swear I'm going to kick Kal'andel's butt the next time I see him. I should have done it the last time."
"The Fae can't lie," Susan said.
