She lifted her head to look at me. “So, what now?”
“Now we catch a banti.” I went back to the main room to get my bag and carried it to the bedroom, closing the door behind me.
“And how exactly do we do that? You never explained that part to me.”
“We bait a trap and lure it in.” Unzipping the bag, I pulled out a rolled-up pair of my pajamas and tossed them at her. “Put these on.”
“Why?”
I grinned as I took off my coat and laid it on a chair. “Because you’re the bait.”
Banti were most active at night, but they could be lured out during the day with the right enticement. Technically, Violet was still a teenager, and she was in the same bed the banti had visited last night. I was banking on him not being able to resist coming back for seconds.
“What? No way!” She leaped off the bed like it was on fire. “Why can’t you be the bait?”
“Well, for one, you can doze off at the drop of a hat, and the bait needs to be asleep. Two, snoring attracts them.”
“I don’t snore.”
I raised my eyebrows at her, and she flushed. I continued as if I hadn’t been interrupted. “Three, one of us has to trap him, and I’m the best one to do that.”
“Fine.” Grumpily, she undressed. “But next time, I want full disclosure before I agree to help you on a job.”
“Deal.” I hid my smile as I took the things I needed from the bag. One of them was a real banti dream catcher, not one of the cheap knockoffs at the flea market. It had iron and muryan woven into it, and it was supposed to make the holder invisible to banti. I was about to find out if that was true.
The bedclothes rustled, and I looked over to see Violet lying in the middle of the bed with the cover pulled up to her chest.
“Relax.” I closed the drapes and turned off the lamp, throwing the room into semi-darkness. “I won’t let anything happen to you.”
She took a deep breath. “I know. But I have to warn you it might take me a little longer than usual to fall asleep.”
“Want me to sing you a lullaby?”
A snort came from the bed. “I thought the banti was supposed to give me nightmares.”
“Ha ha.” I walked over to a chair in the corner and sat. “Now be a good little girl and go to sleep.”
We fell quiet, except for the occasional sound of Violet shifting around. After thirty minutes, she stopped moving, and her soft snores filled the room. I smiled to myself and relaxed in the comfortable chair. All there was to do now was wait.
I occupied my time by thinking about the missing ke’tain. Why would a faerie steal one of their religious artifacts and take it from their realm? Understanding the motive behind that might be the best clue to where the ke’tain was now. There were collectors of Fae objects who would pay a lot of money for it, but Court faeries didn’t need money. Lower faeries weren’t wealthy, so money could be a motive for one of them. Would a lower faerie have access to the goddess’s temple? There was so much about their world I didn’t know, despite my extensive reading on all things Fae.
I hadn’t made up my mind yet on whether or not I was going after the ke’tain bounty. It was a lot of money, too much to dismiss lightly, but did I really want to take on something like this with everything else going on in my life?
I was saved from answering by an almost inaudible whoosh of air across the room. Peering through the gloom, I was just able to make out movement at the bottom of the door. I watched in fascinated horror as green fog poured into the room from beneath the door and slowly solidified into a distinguishable shape. The creature was barely eighteen inches tall with green skin and matted green hair, and it strongly resembled the goblin I’d brought in on my first job.
Once it was fully formed, the banti turned its head slowly as if scanning the room for a threat. I didn’t dare breathe when its beady yellow eyes stared straight at me, making goose bumps rise on my arms. Pictures didn’t do these guys justice. In the flesh, they were as creepy as hell, and looked like something out of the nightmares they wove.
A soft murmur drew his attention to the bed, and he crept soundlessly toward it. He disappeared from my view for a minute before he leaped lightly up onto the foot of the bed. Violet didn’t move, and the banti stood stock still watching her until she began to snore again.
It was all I could do to sit there as the ghoulish little faerie walked over to peer down at my sleeping friend. I almost came out of the chair when he climbed up to sit on her chest. My entire body was tensed to spring, but I couldn’t move too soon, or I would lose him. I had to wait until he started to weave the nightmare because that was when he would be most vulnerable.
He held his hands out over Violet’s face, and yellow magic flowed from his fingertips. It wafted down and was immediately inhaled into her partially open mouth. A twisted little smile curved his lips as she began to twitch and jerk in her sleep, her arms pinned to her sides like someone strapped down to a table.
Not yet, I told myself as the tension in my body ratcheted up with each second that little monster was touching my best friend. When I’d promised to keep her safe, I’d forgotten I would have to stand back and watch this until the time was right.
Violet let out a whimper in the throes of a nightmare, and the banti snickered gleefully, enraptured by her dream.
I shot up out of the chair and stalked silently to the bed, gripping a large butterfly net in both hands. Violet moaned in terror, and I stumbled into the foot of the bed, dropping the dream catcher.
I righted myself as the banti’s head did a one-eighty, and those sinister yellow eyes burned into mine.
Chapter 3
Violet cried out again, breaking us from our stare down. The banti jumped off her chest and gave me a look of pure malice before his shape began to blur.
Oh, no. If he escaped, I’d never catch him, and I was not going to fail this job. Leaping across the bed, I sprawled over Violet’s legs and brought the net down over him. The second he was inside the net, I yanked on a string along the handle, and the opening of the net closed, trapping him.
The banti began to screech and thrash weakly in the net, but the thin iron threads sewn into the mesh prevented him from changing form and escaping. At the same time, Violet woke up screaming like the devil himself was after her. She wriggled out from beneath me and scrambled off the other side of the bed.
“Oh, my God!” She swiped at her face and chest as if she could remove the feel of the creature on her.
I took a step toward her, holding up the net. “It’s okay. We got him.”
Her eyes went impossibly round, and she backed up against the window. “Keep that thing away from me,” she screeched over the banti’s caterwauling.
My eardrums hurt from the noise coming from the two of them. Desperate for some relief, I sang a few bars of the first song that popped into my head. By the third line of “Shake It Off,” the banti looked like a limp doll inside the net, and Violet was staring at me with her mouth agape.
Still singing, I set the banti on the bed and opened the net. From my back pocket, I pulled a tiny iron-infused collar I’d stuffed in there earlier and fitted it around the faerie’s neck. The collar was designed for faeries too small for shackles, and it served the same purpose, with one added benefit. It rendered the wearer mute.