I was halfway to the car when I heard the door close behind her. I reached the car, then paused, cocking my head. If I listened hard I could hear a fiddle playing—low and lonesome, coming from some far distance. I almost recognized the tune, but then the sound was gone.

I looked around, but I was alone in the parking lot with my brother’s car. Or so I thought.

I opened the back door and laid my fiddlecase on the seat. As I was straightening up, my gaze became level with that of one of the small twig and leaf fairies that were regulars at the mall revels. She was lying on the roof of the car, pixie-featured and grinning, head propped on her elbows, her vine-like hair pulled back into a thick Rasta ponytail. She wasn’t really made of twigs and leaves and vines—or at least I didn’t think so—but her skin was the mottled colour of a forest, all greens and browns.

“Hello, Hazel,” I said.

“Hello, your own self.” She got up, tucking her ankles under her knees so that she was sitting cross-legged. “Can I get a lift into town?”

“Sure. What’re you up to?”

She shrugged. “Oh, you know. A little of this, a little of that.”

“In other words, some kind of mischief.”

She made her features go very serious and said, “I don’t think so,” but she couldn’t hold it. Laughing, she fell back onto the roof and then kicked her feet in the air.

“Well, come on,” I said.

She jumped to the ground when I shut the back door. Standing, she came up to about my waist, a skinny little gamine in baggy cropped blue jeans, a sleeveless T-shirt, and a yellow bandana tied loosely at her neck. Her feet were bare on the pavement.

“You’re not cold?” I asked.

She shook her head. “But I could pretend to be, if you like.”

I laughed and opened the driver’s door, standing aside so that she could climb in and scramble to the passenger’s side of the bench seat.

“Buckle up,” I told her after I got in.

“It’s okay,” she said. “You won’t get a ticket. I won’t let the policemen see me.”

Handy thing, being a fairy and only being seen when you wanted to be. Unless you had the gift of the Sight, or had it given to you as I had by Galfreya, so that none of the more impish fairies could play tricks on me.

“That won’t help if I have to brake suddenly,” I said, “and you go flying up against the windshield.”

Hazel sighed theatrically, but she already knew that I wouldn’t start driving until she did as I’d asked. It was an old argument, but that didn’t stop her from trying every time I gave her a lift.