I shrugged wearily, tired to my bones. The combination of pain, cold, and multiple bursts of adrenaline had worn me down a lot more than I had realized. I couldn’t stop another yawn.

“What was he talking about as we pulled out?”

“Oh,” I mumbled. “After that mess at Arctis Tor, Lily gave me a silver pin in the shape of an oak leaf. It makes me an Esquire of Summer. Supposedly I can use it to whistle up help from Titania’s Court. It’s their way of balancing the scales for what we did.”

“Never a bad thing to be owed a favor,” Thomas agreed. “You got it on you?”

“Yeah,” I said. It was, in fact, in a little ring box within the inner coat of my duster. I got it out and showed it to Thomas.

He whistled. “Gorgeous work.”

“The Sidhe know pretty,” I agreed.

“Maybe you can use it and get them to back off.”

I snorted. “It’s never that simple. Titania could decide that the best way to help me would be to break my back, paralyze me from the waist down, and dump me into a hospital bed so her gruffs won’t have to kill me.”

Thomas grunted. “Then why would Fix mention it?”

“Maybe he was compelled to,” I said. “Maybe Titania’s hoping I’ll call for help and she’ll have a chance to squash me personally. Or maybe…”

I let my voice trail off for a moment, while I kicked my punch-drunk brain in the stomach until it threw up an idea.

“Or maybe,” I said, “because he wanted to warn me about it. The gruffs have found me twice now, and they haven’t been physically tailing or tracking me. Neither location was one of my regular hangouts. And how did Fix find me just now, in the middle of a blizzard? He sure as hell didn’t coincidentally pick a random IHOP.”

Thomas’s eyes widened in realization. “It’s a tracking device.”

I scowled at the beautiful little silver leaf and said, not without a certain amount of grudging admiration, “Titania. That conniving bitch.”

“Damn,” Thomas said. “I feel a little bad for pointing a gun at the shrimp, now.”

“I probably would, too,” I said, “if I wasn’t so weirded out by the fact that Fix is starting to be as crabwise and squirrelly as the rest of the Sidhe.”

Thomas grunted. “Better get rid of that thing before more of them show up.”

He hit the control that lowered the passenger window. It coughed and rattled a little before it jerked into motion, instead of smoothly gliding down. Wizards and technology don’t get along so well. To high-tech equipment I am the living avatar of Murphy’s Law: The longer I stayed in Thomas’s shiny new oil tanker, the more all the things that could go wrong, would go wrong.

I lifted the leaf to chuck it out, but something made me hesitate. “No,” I murmured.

Thomas blinked. “No?”

“No,” I said with more certainty, closing my hand around the treacherous silver leaf. “I’ve got a better idea.”