She knelt down beside the lock. “Keep a lookout,” she ordered. I did, but the street was deserted, so I saw most of what she was doing. She took a piece of thread out of her pocket, and a box of matches, and pulled a hair out of the back of her head, where it grew longer. She wet the thread on her tongue, twisted it together with the hair, and wrapped both around the lock plate. Then she struck a match and poked the paper end into the keyhole. The words she murmured weren’t in the language of the Elflands, or in any language I’d learned in the World. They might have been Latin. She said the last one with extra force, though still softly, and as she did, the flame disappeared down the matchstick into the lock and went out.

“Didn’t work?” I asked.

“Nope, worked just fine. Look.” Around the lock plate there was a line of faint iridescence where the hair and the thread had been.

“It’s unlocked?”

“No, it’s locked to anybody but me or my designated surrogate. Doesn’t matter which side of the door you’re on, or whether you have the key.” She stood up and dusted off the knees of her jeans. “There are a few advantages to police work in this town. Come on, we’re going in the back.”

She put her hand inside her jacket when we moved into the torchlight, and brought it back out holding her gun. On this door, when Sunny tried the knob, it turned. “Heavens, not very wary, are they? Stay behind me,” she said, and opened the door.

The hall was dark, but wavering light leaked out of a room on the right. Voices did, too, the musical rise and fall of the language of Faerie. I expected Sunny to do the kick-open-the-door-and-yell-Freeze routine that I’d seen in movies. What she did was slide through the opening and level her pistol in a long sweep that covered the whole of the little space. It was the three elf kids in what was obviously their dormitory. The light came from one fat candle stuck by its own wax to the top of a battered footlocker. One of the kids sat on the lower mattress of a bunk bed; another sat on the floor at her feet, his back against the bed frame; and the third sat on the cot against the opposite wall, which wasn’t far away. The three of them were smoking one herbal cigarette, passing it around like a joint, and I wondered if they were on short rations, or if it was just their last one.