Page 64 of Eye on the Ball

“Of course not! We had a hunch.”

“A … hunch.” I let them see my skepticism, but they didn’t waver.

“Yes. And we came here looking for Tess.”

“For me?” Tess glanced at me, but I was as confused as she was.

“Yes. Eleanor said you were here. We want you to keep the trophy at your shop until the game.”

They pushed it at Tess, who had to either take it or let it fall to the floor.

She took it.

Something about the situation made me wish she’d let it fall.

* * *

After I dropped Tess off at Dead End Pawn with the trophy, which I convinced her to put in her vault until this situation was resolved, I headed for my house and one of my most recent purchases.

I’d bought a null container.

Null containers were specifically designed to nullify or block magic from either getting into them or out of them. The concept was that you could store a magically charged item inside and it would be as safe as you could make it until you could neutralize the object entirely.

There was something about that trophy that I didn’t like.

At all.

If I’d been in tiger shape, I’d have thought that my fur felt rubbed the wrong way. It was magic. I could feel it still, just under my skin, and I didn’t like anything about it.

Did the witches have the trophy? Whichever witch or witches who cast the stasis spell on Ace? Was it the same witch who made the bad-luck charm?

Tess didn’t sense any magic on it, but she wasn’t sensitive to any but Fae magic, so that wasn’t surprising. A better test would be to ask Shelley, but we—all the adults in her life—had made the joint decision to keep Shelley away from any dangerous magic as much as possible.

As soon as I walked into my house, which smelled a little musty since I’d been spending all my time at Tess’s house, my phone rang.

“Hey, Jed!”

My great-great-great-however-many-greats granddad was on a speaking tour across the country with a college history professor who’d also become, I suspected, his girlfriend.

“Jack, my boy! How’s life? How’s your beautiful Tess?”

I laughed. “Tess is doing great, you old charmer. How’s life as an in-demand speaker?”

“You first. What’s up in Dead End?”

It took me nearly twenty minutes to fill him in. “And I think there’s magic on the trophy,” I concluded.

“Trust your intuition and keep your girl safe.”

“I plan on it,” I said grimly, pulling the null container out of the coat closet.

“I have news, too,” he said, almost hesitantly. “I hope you won’t feel like I’m abandoning you, but I’m going to stay in Los Angeles for a while. I’ve been asked to write a book!”

“Wow! About your experiences back in the day? The truth about history? That’s great!”

“Yes. Well, that and my experiences with the Fae, although I won’t tell a lot about that.” Jed’s voice turned grim. “Some things are better left in the dark.”

The Fae queen who’d imprisoned him probably wouldn’t like her secrets to be told, either.

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