The September air felt good in the shade as I tucked in my black halter top and picked up the canister. Feeling more myself, I stepped into the sun, dropping my cap on a passing kid’s head. He looked at it, then smiled, giving me a shy wave as his mother bent to ask him where he had gotten it. At peace with the world, I walked down the sidewalk, boot heels clunking as I fluffed my hair and headed for Fountain Square and my ride. I had left my shades there this morning, and if I was lucky, they’d still be there. God help me, but I liked being independent.

It had been nearly three months since I had snapped under the crap assignments my old boss at Inderland Security had been giving me. Feeling used and grossly unappreciated, I had broken the unwritten rule and quit the I.S. to start my own agency. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, and surviving the subsequent death threat when I couldn’t pay the bribe to break my contract had been an eye opener. I wouldn’t have made it if not for Ivy and Jenks.

Oddly enough, now that I was finally starting to make a name for myself, it was getting harder, not easier. True, I was putting my degree to work, stirring spells I used to buy and some I had never been able to afford. But money was a real problem. It wasn’t that I couldn’t get the jobs; it was that the money didn’t seem to stay in the cookie jar atop the fridge very long.

What I made from proving a Werefox had been slipped some bane by a rival den had gone to renewing my witch license; the I.S. used to pay for that. I recovered a stolen familiar for a warlock and spent it on the monthly rider on my health insurance. I hadn’t known that runners were all but uninsurable; the I.S. had given me a card, and I’d used it. Then I had to pay some guy to take the lethal spells off my stuff still in storage, buy Ivy a silk robe to replace the one I ruined, and pick up a few outfits for myself since I now had a reputation to uphold.

But the steady drain on my finances had to be from the cab fares. Most of Cincinnati’s bus drivers knew me by sight and wouldn’t pick me up, which was why Ivy had to come cart me home. It just wasn’t fair. It had been almost a year since I accidentally removed the hair from an entire busload of people while trying to tag a Were.