Jojo bared a mouthful of teeny-tiny shark teeth. “The dark-haired one is not such a lackwit as you.”

“Gee, thanks,” Jen said.

I had no idea why Jojo would switch from plaguing me to helping me, but right now I couldn’t care less. Kneeling on the sidewalk, I eased dauda-dagr out of its hidden sheath and dumped the rest of the bag’s contents unceremoniously onto the concrete. I sorted through them by feel. Wallet, phone, keys, comb, hair scrunchies, a packet of tissues, lipstick—okay, I may be a hell-spawn, but I’m still a girl—a tangled set of earbuds, receipts, the lollipop that Doc Howard gave me . . . and there, buried in the heap, a small leather sack tied shut with a cord. I picked it up and gave it a cautious squeeze. It held something hard and lumpy, something soft and yielding, and something sharp and poky.

“Is this it?” I asked Jojo.

A few pedestrians were rounding the corner toward the park. With a huff, Jojo cast a glamour over herself, her appearance shifting to that of a five- or six-year-old girl. “What else would it be, you beetle-brained churl? Open it!”

Now that I actually had the thing in hand, I hesitated, squinting at Jojo’s blurry child-face. “Why should I trust you? Why would you help me?”

“You bade me spy upon her,” she said impatiently. “The sister. She wants to take him away from here. At least you don’t.”

Aha. So dear Emmy had managed to piss off Sinclair’s lovelorn fairy. Good enough for me. I began picking at the cord tied around the sack.

“Here.” Jen held out her hand. “Give it to me. You can’t even see straight.”

“Does it matter who opens it?” I asked Jojo.

The fairy shook her head. “No. But I can’t touch it.” She shuddered. “Iron. I loathe iron.”

It took a few minutes for Jen to get the cord untied, and she had to use her teeth. Jojo rummaged for a tissue in the pile of junk from my bag, spreading it on the sidewalk. Jen opened the leather sack and poured the contents out carefully onto the tissue, and . . . ah, bliss.

Once again the pain vanished; the agonizing spike drilling into my forehead, the throbbing in my tooth. The blurriness and double vision went away and the world returned to clarity, bright and crisp and beautiful.

This time it stayed that way. I held still and took a few cautious breaths before examining the sack’s contents, which appeared to be one discolored human molar, a crude iron nail, and a pile of dirt.

Jojo peered over my shoulder. “A coffin nail and graveyard dirt, like as not.”

“What about the tooth?”

She looked at me as though I were an idiot. “’Tis a tooth.”

“Gross,” Jen commented.