I was rewarded when he made a face. Finch hated cooked food, especially any kind of meat. If it wasn’t fresh fruit or vegetables, he refused to touch it.
Mom and Dad? he signed, watching me closely.
I let out a long breath. “Sorry, buddy. No one will do anything until they’ve been missing for two days. But don’t you worry. I’m going to find them, with or without anyone’s help.”
How?
“I don’t know yet. I’ll think better after I get some food in me.”
I entered the kitchen and took last night’s leftovers from the fridge. Putting a large portion of meat loaf and mashed potatoes on a plate, I stuck it in the microwave to heat while I made up a small fruit plate for Finch.
When both of our meals were ready, I carried our plates over and laid them on the coffee table. Mom didn’t like us eating in the living room, but there was no way I could sit at the table and look at her and Dad’s empty chairs.
After I’d washed up our plates, I headed for the only place that could give me a clue to my parents’ whereabouts. Mom was meticulous about record keeping. If there was anything to find, it would be on her computer or somewhere in her desk.
Luckily, Mom had given me her password ages ago. “Just in case,” she’d said. At the time, I couldn’t imagine ever having a reason to go into their work computer. I think, at the back of my mind, I’d always known there was a chance one of them could get hurt or worse on a job. But I had never let myself consider the possibility of something happening to both of them, and at the same time.
I logged in and thanked Mom for her amazing organizational skills when I easily located the main folder for the business. Inside was a directory of subfolders, all titled by year, and in the folder for the current year, I found a spreadsheet containing every job my parents had worked on since January. Each job was color coded by level, with links to other tabs that contained more detailed notes.
I scrolled through the spreadsheet, amazed by how many jobs my parents had done this year. And not level One jobs either. All of these were Threes and Fours.
All bounties were categorized by threat level, according to Agency guidelines. Level One was the easiest, and the bounty for that one was a thousand dollars. Level Two carried a bounty of two thousand. Level Three jumped up a bit with a bounty of five thousand. A level Four was a whopping ten thousand dollars. There was a level Five, but I had no idea what the bounty was for that one. If my parents had ever brought in a level Five, they hadn’t told me about it.
Experienced bounty hunters competed for the Threes and Fours because they were the most lucrative. Beginners and junior hunters took most of the Ones and Twos until they were ready to move up to the next level.
According to the spreadsheet, Mom and Dad had two open jobs, a level Three and a level Four. The Three was for a goblin that had been burglarizing houses in several Brooklyn neighborhoods for the last month. The Four was for a dealer peddling a highly addictive drug called goren.
Goren was made from a Fae plant of the same name that had been banned in our realm. Faeries ate it as a garnish on their food, and it was harmless to them. For humans, it created a state of intense euphoria. It didn’t harm them physically, but once they tried it, all they cared about was getting more of it. They would sell everything they had just to get more of the drug.
“Aha!” I almost shouted when I spotted a name I’d heard before in the contact list for the second job. Tennin. Mom had mentioned him yesterday at dinner. I rubbed my chin as I tried to remember what she’d said. Tennin was in town for a day, and they had to talk to him before he left again. He was the one they’d gone to see last night.
According to Mom’s notes, Tennin was a photographer, and she’d flagged him as a trusted confidential informant. Wondering what was so special about a photographer, I did an internet search for photographers named Tennin in New York City. It didn’t take long to find out that he was a paparazzo, and a damn good one, if his website was any indication.
I sat back in the chair and stared at the monitor as I contemplated what to do with this new information. I could call Bruce and Levi and ask them to talk to Tennin, but there was no guarantee either man would take me seriously and actually reach out to the photographer. Or that Tennin would confide in them about why my parents had gone to see him. He was listed as a confidential informant, so he might not take too kindly to being outed to others.
And then there was the fact that Mom had said Tennin was only in town for a day. I only had today to talk to him before he was gone again, for God knew how long.
I was standing before I realized I’d made a decision. I would go talk to Tennin myself. If I explained the situation, he might open up to me because of who I was. It was worth a try, and it was all I had right now.
Taking a piece of paper, I jotted down Tennin’s address and logged off the computer. I called goodbye to Finch, and I was about to leave the apartment when a set of car keys hanging beside the door caught my eye. Dad’s keys. I hadn’t noticed them earlier, but their presence meant Mom and Dad had taken her car last night instead of his Jeep. They always used the SUV when they expected to do a capture, which told me they hadn’t planned on anything big going down last night.
I hesitated only a second before I grabbed the keys from their hook. Then I hurried from the apartment for the second time that day.
Chapter 3
I stared at the tall, blond male who opened the door of the Williamsburg apartment. My gaze took in his stunning blue eyes, full mouth, and perfectly symmetrical face, and I knew immediately that Tennin wasn’t human. No human gene pool or plastic surgeon could produce such flawless beauty. He certainly looked nothing like those scruffy, unkempt paparazzi I’d seen glimpses of on TV.
“Hello, gorgeous,” he drawled appreciatively as he looked me up and down. “When you buzzed up and said who you were, I was dubious. I guess I don’t need to see your ID to confirm your identity. Has anyone ever told you that you could be a clone of your mother?”
“I might have heard that before.”
Tennin smiled and waved me inside his sparsely furnished apartment. In the living room, there was a white leather couch with a matching chair and some small glass tables. The walls were mostly bare, and the place hardly looked lived in. It was a nice apartment, but a lot less grand than I would have expected for the home of a Court faerie. Not that I’d ever been in one of their homes before, but I’d imagined they lived more luxuriously than this.
“What brings you to my home, Miss James? I’m delighted to have such alluring company, but I am reasonably certain your parents don’t know you are here since Patrick isn’t beating down my door.”
I turned to face the faerie. “I’m here because my parents came to see you last night, and now, they’re missing.”
The playful smile fell from his face. “Missing?”
“They never came home, and I haven’t heard from them. And before you say something about them being able to take care of themselves, I know that. But they would never be gone this long without calling me.” My words came out sounding defensive, so I softened my tone. “I just want to know what you told them, and if you know where they might have gone when they left here.”