Faerie Blood: An Urban Fantasy Novel (The Changeling Chronicles Book 1) Read Online Free Page A

which already displayed my signature and my terms. His eyes roved over the page, but I knew he didn’t take in a word. He was desperate enough to trust a stranger with his son’s life.
    Someday, maybe I’d feel pride, not guilt at the realisation. Isabel’s spells are the best in the region. I’ve no trouble tracking people within this realm.
    Bring in the faeries, though, and all bets were off.
    “That okay?” I asked, when he’d handed me the signed form. “Call me tomorrow morning and we’ll get started. I can’t make any promises. Faerie magic isn’t something most humans understand. I certainly don’t.”
    More of a white lie this time, but I’d rather not get his hopes up any more than I had to. Swanson nodded, mumbling thanks, as I unlocked the door and let him outside.
    I took some calming breaths and considered the facts. No Sidhe had entered our realm in over twenty years. No human had crossed between the realms in ten, as far as I knew. The other faeries left behind after the invasion, based on my shaky knowledge, had no way back.
    Which meant there was a chance the person who’d taken Swanson’s child was still here, somewhere, in this realm. I’d need to see the fake ‘child’ to get to the bottom of how they’d created one in the first place.
    I hadn’t seen a changeling in thirteen years. Tomorrow was not going to be fun.
    I was lugging my ruined clothes from the bathtub when Isabel came in, the door clicking shut behind her. She waved at me, wearing one of her usual long flowery dresses and more shiny bangles on her slim brown arms than the inside of the troll’s nest. Despite her innocent appearance and general mild-mannered nature, she could hold her own in a fight. I’d once seen her kick a half-ogre twenty feet through a window. And she was five feet tall and probably weighed a hundred pounds, if that.
    “Wow,” she said. “I take it the case didn’t go well?”
    “It went.” I examined my jeans, wondering how many times I could stitch them back together before they came apart at the seams. Probably one less time than I’d done it. Looked like I was due for another shopping trip, with the money I didn’t have.
    Yet.
    Isabel moved to clear a bunch of odd spells off the living room sofa. To a non-magic user, the place looked like it belonged to a stationary fanatic. Most of her spells took the form of rubber bands, while her handmade point-and-shoot explosives looked like fancy pencils. Most witches were encouraged to make their spells look like household objects because it reassured clients the arcane forces witches used were relatively harmless. Or something. I didn’t blame Swanson for his alarmed reaction, considering the number of symbols drawn onto the ceiling in sharpie and the burn stains on the carpet from over-enthusiastic sessions testing her latest explosive spells. As a prominent member of one of the local witch covens, Isabel’s the best at both offensive and defensive witch magic. She also happens to be my closest friend.
    “Someone was here,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “A client?”
    “New one, yeah.” I sank into an armchair. I had to sink, because the second-hand furniture had a tendency to collapse without warning.
    “I wouldn’t tell the landlord,” said Isabel. “You know what he’s like about letting ‘weirdos’ into the flat.”
    I snorted. “Has he ever met us?”
    She grinned and shook her head. “Weirdos who don’t pay rent. Whichever.”
    “We don’t always,” I reminded her. Witches earned a pittance, while my own payments depended on whether Larsen was feeling particularly generous. Jobs had been few and far between lately, and he only suffered to let me keep coming into the guild because I kept all the nasty faeries away. Like keeping a bad-tempered cat to get rid of a mouse infestation.
    “This new case.” Isabel smiled at me. “You never go for the easy options, do you? What’s the catch?”
    “It’s a tricky one,”