by right’?”
“Miss,” he began, his condescension making my teeth grind so hard I expected to taste powdered enamel.
“Sydney,” I interrupted, forcing a determined smile. “My name is Sydney. And you are?”
He closed his eyes briefly as if it was a great effort to be civil. “I’m Agent Sparrow. And Balthus insisted that you were his because you damn near were—you’re two-thirds his already, and you were about two words away from sealing the contract.”
“What contract?” I demanded in irritation.
“Balthus is a death djinn,” Sparrow explained, slowly emphasizing each word as if I was mentally deficient. “You were one wish away from him granting your death wish, at which point your soul would have belonged to him.”
“What!” I exclaimed. “My soul…death wish?” I spat incredulously, “I didn’t wish for anything! What the hell are you talking about?”
“Look Miss…Sydney…” he corrected, palms up to prevent my interruption, “I have little patience for those who would throw their lives away so carelessly. You wished for death, Balthus intercepted that wish, and the contract was created. He first had to grant three wishes of your choosing. At the completion of the third, he would have granted your death wish and your immortal soul would have belonged to him.”
No matter how much I would have liked to believe he was kidding—or maybe just clinically insane—considering the recent scene on the balcony, I had the sinking suspicion that he was deadly serious. My knees buckled and I stumbled backward, dropping onto the thick cushion of a nearby chair.
“I can’t believe this,” I muttered. “I didn’t wish for death! I didn’t wish for anything.” I blinked at Sparrow, feeling increasingly faint.
He gazed at me, a flicker of uncertainty moving across amazingly blue eyes. “That’s not possible. Not even Balthus can bend the rules that much. You must have wished aloud for death within his hearing at some point recently. I watched him stalk you to the bar. There’s no other reason he would have been interested in you.”
I shot him a glare, stifling the offended response that sprang to my lips. This was so obviously not the time to indulge my battered ego.
“I…I jokingly may have said out loud to myself that I wished I was dead earlier this evening,” I murmured, remembering my words by the ladies room.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the man by the phones who’d overheard me had looked a lot like Balthus.
Sparrow gave me a look that said I had just proved his point. He walked past me and headed into the unexplored room opposite us.
“Wait a minute!” I exclaimed, following on his heels through a well-stocked kitchen and down a dim, lushly carpeted hallway.
When we hit the bedroom, I stopped in my tracks. The most gorgeous bed I’d ever seen dominated the space, its offer of tranquility almost too inviting to resist. A fluffy cream comforter was surrounded by four posters of glowingly polished cherry-wood, draped with gossamer silk curtains that sparkled in the muted light.
The surrounding furniture, also gleaming cherry-wood, was carved with a delicate and dreamy touch. Deep blue carpet, thick and soft, had me resisting the urge to slip my shoes off so that my toes could sink into it.
“Just one minute, Sparrow,” I demanded distractedly, forcing my gaze away from the sliding glass doors leading out onto the room’s private balcony. “Are you telling me that some stupid words I spoke to myself in a moment of…uncertainty…were enough to bind me to some crazy contract just because Balthus overheard them?”
I was going to say ‘moment of weakness’, but settled on ‘uncertainty’ because it irked me to add to Sparrow’s obviously low opinion of me.
“You must have meant it when you said it,” he insisted, his attention now focused on a thorough search of the bedroom.
“Oh, come on!” I threw my hands up in exasperation. “That’s crazy. I was talking to myself, for Goddess’ sake. Do you honestly mean to tell me that you’ve never voiced a thought, in a moment of anger, or grief, that you didn’t really mean?”
I watched him and waited for him to deny it. If he did, he was either lying or he wasn’t human…which, considering the experiences of the evening, was a frighteningly plausible possibility.
He paused in his search and eyed me in a considering manner. “Are you Wiccan?”
“What? No…what does that have to do with anything?” I asked in baffled annoyance.
“You said, ‘For Goddess’ sake’—an unusual turn of phrase for most humans. I wondered if you were Wiccan. It might explain Balthus’ attraction to you, especially if you have an aptitude for spell craft.”
“No,” I shrugged uncomfortably, “I don’t follow any particular religion. It’s just my way of balancing things out. I’ve never found much creditability in the popular assumption that the creator of the universe is a man.”
Sparrow’s lips twitched, the twinkle in his eyes making him appear genuinely amused. I found that I was smiling back at him in spite of myself.
“What do you mean when you say it’s a weird thing for ‘humans’ to say? Does that mean you’re not human?”
“I’m half human, half sidhe,” he answered, turning to continue his search of the bedroom.
“She?” I repeated in confusion.
“It’s Gaelic: s-i-d-h-e, pronounced ‘she’,” he explained. “We’re a race of human-sized faerie folk from Ireland. I wouldn’t expect you to know of us—few people do, especially outside of the homeland.”
An unrestrained smile of wonder stretched my lips. “There are really faeries?”
Sparrow straightened from his perusal of a drawer to smile grudgingly at my excitement, “Is it so outlandish after seeing a djinn get sucked into a lamp? Yes, Sydney, there are really faeries.”
I couldn’t help it. I giggled. I’d always loved faeries.
“That’s awesome. But I’m pretty sure you were about to tell me how Balthus could have overheard me talking to myself and turned it into a contract to take possession of my soul.”
“Persistent little witch, aren’t you?” He curled his lip at me, but his eyes held barely restrained laughter.
“I just told you I wasn’t a witch.” I snorted.
“Alright, Sydney, you win,” he conceded with a helpless chuckle. “Balthus is obviously a criminal. Maybe it’s not such a stretch that he didn’t play fair. But the fact remains that, although he may not have followed the spirit of the law, he was most definitely bound by the letter of it. Even if only for a moment, deep within your soul, you had to have meant to wish for death.”
His words knocked all of the wind out of my sails. The defeat must have shown in my eyes, because he looked at me with the first hint of sympathy I’d seen from him. “I’m sorry, Sydney,” he said quietly.
