Tony rubbed his mouth to hide a smile. Tony had seen Tad in full-blown Look-At-Me mode before. It wasn’t that Tad was lying to the police officer, but, like a good stage magician, he’d keep the police looking where he wanted them to look. I didn’t know what Tad was trying to cover up, but with Adam here and safe, I didn’t really care.

“I thought you fae couldn’t lie?” said one of the kids who was supposed to be cleaning Sylvia’s stuff off the ground.

Tad nodded at him. “Yeah, that’s only the true fae and some of the halfies. All that kind of stuff doesn’t apply to me. ’Cause I lie and”—he spread his arms to invite everyone to admire—“I’m still here.”

Behind me, Adam laughed quietly.

“Anyway,” continued Tad, now talking to the crowd instead of the police, “the supposed UPS guy, he said he needed a signature. I told him to leave a form and we’d pick the package up at the UPS office—and that’s when he unlocked the door with some kind of picklock or magic, I wasn’t paying attention because he tried to hit me with a stun gun. When that didn’t work, he drew a freaking sword and tried to take off my head.”

“A sword?” said the officer, who was starting to look as though he was having trouble keeping up.

Tad nodded. “I know, right? Weirded me out, too. I guess he was pretty old, ’cause he knew what he was doing with that thing. I took two years of aikido at school, and he made a monkey out of me.” I wondered if anyone would notice that although Tad was pretty banged up, there were no sword cuts. “I drew him back farther into the apartment to give the kids a chance to escape. Sometime in there, he tossed me through the wall.”

All the people who were cleaning up the mess near him and the policemen and policewoman who were listening to his story looked at Tad—because he didn’t look like he’d been tossed through a wall. Tad wasn’t good-looking, his ears were too big and they stuck out and his nose was flattened as if he’d gone three rounds with George Foreman, but when he wanted people to watch him, they did. It wasn’t magic; it was force of personality.

“Half fae,” he told them again. “Sometimes it helps.” He looked up at the hole, too, and shook his head and winced. “Doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt. I ran back up and kept him occupied while the kids escaped. I tossed the desk at him, knocked him out the same hole he’d knocked me through, and by then you guys were pretty close. He picked himself up and ran.”