plopping down beside me and removing the foil from the cork.
I snorted. “Sort of. If you want to put an extremely euphemistic spin on it.”
Balthus had been all of those things. Granted, I hadn’t had a chance to find out about his endowments—but as he was a creature with the ability to make wishes come true, it was probably a safe bet he wasn’t lacking in that area. Unfortunately, trying to steal my soul trumped any of his desirable qualities.
Sunny stared at me expectantly, her expression shifting to a frown at my hesitation to elaborate. I watched in amusement as she popped the cork, filled the expensive crystal glasses and then placed them next to the bottle on the scratched glass of my old coffee table.
Then she turned to me and her hands snaked out to grab my shoulders and shake me. “Enough!” she yelled. “Spill, Spill, SPILL, you insufferable wench!” She unerringly found the ticklish spot on my side and set upon it without mercy. “NOW!”
In response to my screech of protest, Jasper, who had curled up on a nearby chair, raised his head to glare at us. I could almost see his black brow twitch in disdain at our childish antics.
When I could breathe again, I haltingly began to tell Sunny about coming to the hotel Friday night and how I met Balthus at the bar and then followed him up to his room. She grinned appreciatively at my description of him and kept interrupting me with suggestive questions and innuendos.
When I finally got to the part about Sparrow showing up on the balcony with the lamp and Balthus going all smoky and disappearing, she just laughed in an ‘Oh, that’s a good one Syd—you got me!’ sort of way.
When it slowly dawned on her that I wasn’t kidding, she downed the rest of her champagne in one gulp and silently got up to retrieve another bottle. After that she didn’t say a word until I’d completed the story, including Lorien’s appearance on my pillow later that night, and how I completely forgot about Jeremy until the next morning.
By the time I finished we were on bottle number three.
“That’s some tall tale, Syd,” she said at last, her speech slurred.
“I wish that’s all it was,” I said blithely. Not only was I high on the champagne, but it felt damn good to tell a fellow human what had happened to me after keeping it to myself for a week.
Sunny stared at me wide-eyed and I giggled at her expression for a moment before I realized I’d spoken the forbidden word. I slapped a hand over my mouth just in time to cover a sneeze.
“I told you not to say that word!” grumbled a tinkling voice. “And if you’re going to get sloshed and talk about me, the least you could do is invite me. Ooh, champagne, my favorite!”
I swung my head toward the sound, waited for my blurred vision to clear, and then smiled at Lorien through a sparkling red haze of faerie dust. “Lorien, Sunny” I gestured, “Lunny, Sorien. Um, sorry, you guys know what I mean.”
I gazed expectantly at Sunny, who was looking somewhere off to Lorien’s left with narrowed eyes and an expression of utter confusion adorning her heart-shaped face. My head tilted back toward Lorien to find her dipping a thimble-sized earthenware jug into my champagne flute.
She took an experimental sip and sighed in approval before carefully settling on the edge of the glass tabletop with her bare feet swinging over the side.
“She can’t see me,” Lorien said smugly.
“What? But you said believing is seeing!” I settled my eyes back on Sunny, who was watching me with an air of concern.
“She thinks you’ve taken a spin on the loopy locomotive,” giggled Lorien, already helping herself to a second jug of my drink.
I snatched my glass away indignantly and turned to Sunny. “I have not taken a ride on the loopy locomotive,” I insisted. She licked her lips and looked at me as if she thought it might be time to call the nice folks in white coats after all.
Jasper leapt nimbly from his chair to the carpet and stalked around the coffee table. He deposited himself directly in front of Lorien, his bright jade eyes fixed on her and the stark white tip of his black tail twitching. An indulgent expression crossed Lorien’s face as she reached out and sprinkled a light peppering of green faerie dust over his dark muzzle. He promptly began to purr and rub his head against the driftwood base of the coffee table.
I huffed in annoyance. “Apparently Jasper can see you. Why can’t Sunny?”
“She doesn’t truly believe?” Lorien suggested, gazing longingly at my glass.
I jerked back to face Sunny. “You don’t believe me!” I accused in a wounded tone.
“Of course I do!” she claimed defensively. “It’s just a lot to take in—death djinns, and hot half-faerie detectives, and faerie guardians…I’m trying,” she mumbled.
“Can’t you sprinkle her with faerie dust or something to make her see?” I begged Lorien.
“That’ll just make her sneeze,” she smirked. “She has to really believe.”
I thought for a minute. “Okay, Sunny. Lorien’s going to make you sneeze.”
Her eyebrows shot up skeptically and I ignored the added insult to my sanity.
“What I mean is, she’s going to sprinkle you with faerie dust and it’s going to make you sneeze. Will you believe me then?”
“You want me to believe faeries exist because I sneezed?”
“No,” I said with as much dignity as I could muster, “I want you believe that faeries exist because faerie dust is going to make you sneeze exactly when I predict. And because I’m your best friend and I say faeries exist.”
“How do you know faerie dust will make me sneeze?”
I blinked at her. “It makes me sneeze.”
“Maybe you’re allergic to it,” she suggested, unconvinced.
I looked imploringly at Lorien, who was in the process of sneaking jug number three from my glass.
“What?” she said innocently.
“How do you know faerie dust will make her sneeze too?” I asked, ignoring the fact that my faerie guardian was apparently a lush. In my present state, I was in no position to judge.
“Oh, faerie dust makes all humans sneeze,” she assured me with glee.
“Lorien says it makes all humans sneeze,” I relayed. Then I narrowed my eyes, “Unless, of course, you’ve been hiding your non-human origins from me all these years?”
Sunny snorted.
“Right,” I breathed. “Okay then—Lorien, do your stuff!”
Lorien plunked her faerie-sized champagne jug on the coffee table and zoomed crookedly over toward Sunny’s nose.
“Sneeze!” I directed in smug amusement a split second before Sunny broke out in a sneezing fit, right on cue. A thick
