Suzanne Johnson - Elysian Fields

“What the hell are you doing?” I jerked out of his grasp and walked around him to the table. The food smelled like twelve kinds of heaven. Maybe even good enough to eat with the wackadoodle. Who surely couldn’t be human, or he wouldn’t have sensed my injury. I didn’t think he was a shifter, though, unless it was some exotic animal I’d never encountered. Maybe he was fae. I needed to research them. I’d never met a faery, but I bet they were pretty like him.

“How did that happen?” His gaze remained riveted on my arm.

“Scraped it on the back fence when I took out the trash last night,” I said. “Stupid of me. I should’ve turned on the floodlights.”

“You’re lying.” He raised his gaze to meet mine.

Enough already, freak show. “What are you, Rand?”

He smiled and handed me a pair of chopsticks in a paper sleeve. Maybe I’d poke those pretty eyes out. “I’m hungry.” He sat down at the table, cracked his chopsticks, and dug into a carton of steamed dumplings. “I got you the fried pot stickers.”

I loved pot stickers, which he obviously remembered from the one time I’d accompanied Eugenie and him to dinner. I’d expected to feel like a third wheel, but instead he’d been inappropriately attentive to me, and by the time we left, Eugenie was almost in tears.

Which is why this wasn’t going to happen. I still held my cell phone, and I punched Eugenie’s speed dial. When she answered, I invited her to dinner. “It’s Chinese, not your favorite, but you and Rand can play with the chopsticks and keep me company.”

She laughed. “Sounds good to me. Got to finish up Mrs. Reese’s perm and then I’ll be over. I’ll call Rand.”

I looked at the offending party, who sat at my kitchen table watching me with a bemused expression. Jerk. “I’ll call him. Just come over as soon as you finish.”

I pulled the carton of pot stickers in front of me and slipped my own chopsticks out of the sleeve. “Take off your earrings,” I said, popping a fried dumpling in my mouth and chewing. He wore peridot studs in both ears.

Smiling, he propped his chopsticks against the side of his carton. “Sure, I’ll take off anything you want.” He maintained eye contact while he reached up and removed one stud, then the other. He laid them on the table.

“No, hand them to me.” More direct contact might help me figure him out.

“What ever you want, however you want it.” I ignored the double entendre as he reached across the table. He didn’t know what I wanted. I wanted to know what he was, and then I wanted him to leave. I’d keep the food.

A pulse of magic swept up my arm when our fingertips touched. I curled the small gold and peridot studs inside my fist and pulled my hand away. Wizard’s magic—they’d been bespelled to hide what he was, as I suspected. I studied them a moment, the anger I’d been tamping down since the incident with Jake boiling to the surface. “Where’d you get these?”

“Bought ’em on eBay,” he said without a hint of humor.

“Give me your hand.” Touching ramped up my empathy and ability to read aural energy. Afterward, I wanted to know what he was up to. If he’d had a wizard bespell peridot for him—or even if he’d bought bespelled gems on the black market—he was going to a lot of trouble to stay hidden. These days, with no restrictions on any species moving into New Orleans as long as they could mainstream with humans, what good reason could he have for hiding?

He slid his hand into mine, wrapping long fingers around my knuckles and stroking my palm with small circles of his thumb. I ignored his pathetic stab at intimacy and searched for his energy signature. And got exactly nothing. Maybe he had something else pierced with a bespelled peridot, something I couldn’t see.

“You’re frightened of something,” he said, frowning and squeezing my hand, his eyes dropping back to my arm. “What happened to you? How did you really get hurt?”

Holy hell. Was he reading me ? I jerked my hand from his and rubbed it on the leg of my jeans. “Rand, what are you?” I thought back to my classes on the dominant species in the Beyond. Elves were empathic, and so were some types of fae. I’d almost bet he was one or the other. But why hide?

“No one who would ever hurt you,” he said. “I—”

Whatever he was about to say, it was lost. I hadn’t heard the door open, but Eugenie stood framed in the doorway, looking from Rand to me and finally at the floor. Damn it. This wasn’t what it looked like, namely her best friend holding hands with her boyfriend, but I couldn’t exactly tell her I was trying to identify his species. Unlike Rand, Eugenie was human.

“I was just looking at the cut on DJ’s arm.” Rand’s lie came out as smooth as whipped butter. “Says she cut it taking out the trash, but I think she probably should have a doctor look at it.”

It almost killed me to see tenderhearted Eugenie go from jealousy and hurt to quick ac cep tance and concern for her friend DJ. “Let me see.”

I held out my arm, and she studied the wound. Deeper on one end, where a loup-garou fang had entered, then more shallow where it had scraped. “I dunno. Rand might be right—it kind of looks like it’s getting infected.” I looked at the angry red skin surrounding the scab. It burned and throbbed, but I suspected it would be unlike any infection a local doctor had seen.

“I’ll keep an eye on it.” I pushed a container of fried rice toward her, and she made a face. Eugenie had changed a lot since meeting squeaky-clean Quince Randolph the Mysterious Hippie Plant Guy Who Now Might Be an Elf or a Faery. No more weird hair colors, no new celestial tattoos, no partying on Saturday nights, no fried-food pig-out tours of the neighborhood restaurants.

He’d killed a lot of her spirit, and for what? I swear, half the time he didn’t seem to even like her. Currently, the son of a bitch was watching her like a teenager in history class during a lecture on Edwardian politics, detached and bored.

Eugenie cared about this guy, and he was going to break her heart. I might not be able to stop that, but I’d do my best to make sure he didn’t use me as his weapon.

Stuffed full of Chinese food and sore from my half-gainer off the sofa, I limped next door to Alex’s house, unsure whether the sick churning in my gut came from too many pot stickers, fear of impending furhood, anger at Quince Randolph for complicating my friendship with Eugenie, or dread over unveiling the real facts of life to a nice human cop whose worldview was about to implode.

Preternatural roulette—a fun game for the entire family. I walked up the front steps of the raised cottage, knocked on the front door, and walked in without waiting. Alex owned a true shotgun house, with the living room opening into the dining room, which opened into the bedroom, which opened into the kitchen. One could literally fire a shotgun from the front door and the shell would go straight through the house and exit the back door. The only break in the line was a long, narrow bathroom off the bedroom.

The house, built around 1900, reminded me of a cute little dollhouse, with intricate old millwork and a hearth in every room except the kitchen and bathroom. I’d never tell Alex his house resembled a Victorian dollhouse, however. He’d only recently finished painting the interior walls in manly earth tones. He’d feel emasculated by cute .

Once inside, I spotted Ken standing in the kitchen near the back door—he waved at me. “Want a beer?”

“Sure.” The idea of alcohol kind of made me ill after the Jake incident, but the encounter with Quince Randolph had unsettled me. He’d all but admitted he wasn’t human. Question was: why was a faery or elf hiding his species and hanging out with my friend Eugenie?