“I’m not your enemy,” I whispered, to whoever might be listening. “I don’t want to cause any trouble. I just need to know what Aeslinn has planned for Pritkin. Then I’ll take him and go, okay?”

There was no reply, unless you counted a light breeze, whistling through the treetops, high overhead. And I realized that, for a brief moment, I’d actually expected one. As if Faerie itself was listening.

Guinn is getting to me, I thought, and closed my eyes.

And just that fast, I was in.

The pub was loud and crowded, so much so that the front door had been propped open and people were spilling out into the street. The night air was cold enough to frost the breath in front of their faces, but most were too drunk to notice. Nigel wasn’t, and was older than most of them to boot, having fifty years under his belt and running headlong at sixty. Of course, his fey blood insulated him somewhat from the ravages of time, but it didn’t seem to help with the cold, which bothered him more and more each year.

The south of Spain, he thought longingly, or the Canaries. Yeah, he’d heard that the Canaries were right pretty, and the sun shone nearly all the time. He needed to make a big score and retire, like his landlady had recently done. O’ course, she’d stayed a bit closer to home…

“Ever been to Portsmouth?” he asked his companion.

“Wot?”

“Me landlady sent me a postcard, showing the beach and all. The pier looks nice there. She said they have nice shops.”

The smaller man turned to look at him. “Are you daft?”

“No, just makin’ conversation—”

“You’re not bein’ paid to talk; yer bein’ paid to watch—”

“Watch what?” Nigel asked. “Nothin’s happening, and we’ve been here a solid hour. I’m about to freeze me bollocks off.”

His companion suggested something else he could do with his bollocks, which Nigel though was unnecessarily rude.

“If you’ve never been t’Portsmouth, you could just have said.”

“Shut it!”

Nigel shut it, but not because he’d been ordered. The little man had no right to order him around, even if he seemed to think otherwise. They were partners in this, both bein’ paid the same, both answerable to old Tom, who’d probably be interested to know how bossy a certain somebody was bein’.