“It’s medicinal,” he said, reddening and turning to stand before the array of baking supplies, feet spread wide in his Peter Pan pose. Reaching to a top shelf, he dropped a jar of yeast in with the rest. “Bee pollen,” he grumbled under his breath. “Where in Tink’s bordello do they keep the vitamin supplements? Can’t find a bloody thing in this store. Who laid it out? Gilligan?” His head rose and he scanned the signs hanging over the aisles.

“The vitamins would be with the medicines,” I said, and he jerked.

Clearly shocked, he stammered, “You heard that?” and I shrugged. “Damn,” he muttered, walking away. “I didn’t know you could hear that well. You never heard me before.”

I trailed behind him, arms empty. Jenks insisted on carrying everything, insisted on opening every door for me, hell, he’d flush my toilet if I let him. It wasn’t a macho thing, it was because he could. Automatic doors were his favorites, and though he hadn’t played with one yet by getting on and off the sensor pad, I knew he wanted to.

His pace was quick, his steps silent in the new boots I had bought him all of an hour ago. He wasn’t happy about me insisting we go shopping before seeing if Jax was at The Butterfly Shack, a butterfly exhibit and wildlife store, but he agreed that if Jax was there, he was hiding or he would have had the owner call us to come get him. We didn’t know the situation, and if we knocked on the door and told the proprietor he had been harboring a pixy, one possibly wanted in connection with a theft, we might start a few tongues wagging.

So Jenks and I used the interim while the proprietor closed up shop and counted his money to do a little pre-break-in outfitting/shopping. I had been pleasantly surprised to find some upscale stores right beside the tourist-crap traps in an obviously new slab of light commercial buildings that had gone up in the last five years or so. The trees only had been in the ground that long. I was a witch; I could tell.

Since it was just before the tourist season, the selections were high and the prices were almost reasonable. That would change next week when school let out and the town tripled its population when the “fudgies”—tourists named after the candy Mackinaw was known for—descended on them.

Turns out, Jenks was a power shopper, which probably stemmed from his garden gathering background. In a very short time we had hit three clothes stores, a dance outlet, and a shoe mart. So now instead of a hunky young man in sweats and flip-flops, I was with a six-foot-four, athletic, angsty young man dressed in casual linen pants and matching fawn-colored shirt. Under it was a skintight two-piece suit of silk and spandex that had set us back a couple hundred dollars, but after seeing him in it, my head bobbed and my card came out. My treat.