Page 66 of Beyond the Cottage

“Anything. Tell me about living in the capital. How did you end up there?”

She considered lying, but why bother? “I moved out west first, when I was seventeen. That’s where I met Nat. I followed him to the capital when he got elected.”

“Do you like it there?”

“I guess?” She liked the city itself. The people, however…

Ansel propped his head on his hand. “How did you and the senator become acquainted? A politician and a witch hunter strike me as unlikely friends.”

“I wasn’t a hunter back then, and he wasn’t a senator. We were both active in a somewhat…fringe political movement.”

“Fringe how?”

“Nat used to be a pretty radical anti-witchcraft activist. Before he went mainstream, anyway.” She didn’t try to hide the bitterness in her voice.

“I take it you disapprove of the transition?”

“Politics makes people soft. He spends more time campaigning than fighting witches.”

“Do you dislike working for him?”

Gretta hesitated. “The job is fine. Great, actually. It’s what I was meant to do.”

“Killing witches.”

“Yes.”

Tension rolled off him, but he was smart enough not to comment further. “So you struck out on your own when you were seventeen. That’s rather young, especially for a pixie.”

“Yeah, well. You know how my parents were. It only got worse after the cottage.”

“What happened?”

Gretta watched a gauzy curtain flutter in the swamp breeze.

She didn’t like talking about her family. As the only child of two socialites, she’d been little more than a prop before the cottage. After, when she developed behavioral problems and couldn’t stand to be confined indoors, her parents had had no idea what to do with her. They’d tried locking her in her bedroom, which only escalated her hysteria, then they’d shipped her off to a boarding school that specialized in corporal punishment. Gretta ran away in her final term. She hadn’t been home since.

“They didn’t know how to handle me,” she said. “To be fair, I was a little shit.”

“So was I. My father kicked me out when I was sixteen, after I got too big for him to…well. To deal with.”

She frowned as she remembered the belt scars on his back and the old cigarette burns on his arms. His mother had died when he was a baby, so he never had anyone to protect him from the old bastard. Neglectful as her parents were, they’d never personally doled out violence.

She tilted her face toward him. “What happened to your dad?”

“He died a few years ago.”

“Good riddance.”

“I heard the booze caught up to him. To this day, the occasional glass or two of wine is all I’ll drink.”

“I bet that goes over well at your clandestine evildoer get-togethers.”

“It gives me an edge,” he said with a half-smile. “While my colleagues are passed out beside a bottle, I’m quietly taking over the world.”

Gretta snorted and recalled their conversation on the boat. “This afternoon you said you were even shadier back in the day. What did you get into before slinging dust?”

Ansel rolled to his back and stared at the ceiling. Gretta quietly waited for him to answer.

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