“I don’t need protecting from a bunch of old ladies with pearl necklaces.”
“You need to be protected from everything.” He sounded equal parts fond and frustrated. “You walk into danger like it’s a casual acquaintance.”
“And you act like the world runs on legal codes and proper procedures.”
“It should.”
She smiled despite herself. “Must be exhausting, being right all the time.”
“You have no idea.”
The water shut off in his stall. Hazel quickly finished rinsing her hair, suddenly aware that she’d been lingering.
She emerged to find him waiting by the sinks, fully dressed except…
“Your shirt.” She stared at the ruin of what had probably been expensive cotton. Pixie dust had eaten holes through it like acid, leaving it more hole than fabric. She could see strips of his chest through the gaps.
“It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine. You look like you lost a fight with a paper shredder.” She gestured at the truck stop’s small convenience store. “They might have…”
“I have a spare in the car.”
Of course he did. Of course Marcus Hawthorne traveled with spare shirts, probably organized by color and thread count.
Ten minutes later, she stood in the parking lot wearing his spare shirt: soft blue cotton that smelled like his detergent and fell past her hips. The truck stop technically had shirts. Shirts with slogans like “I Brake for Bigfoot” and “Maine: The Way Life Should Bee” with a cartoon lobster-bee hybrid that would haunt her nightmares.
Marcus’s shirt had been the lesser of two evils.
“It was all they had,” she said defensively.
He stood frozen by the car, keys in hand, staring at her in a way that made her stomach flip.
“It looks good.” His voice cracked slightly on “good.”
She swallowed. “We should go.”
“Yes.”
But he kept looking at her like she was something unexpected, something that had knocked him off balance.
“Before more pixies show up,” she added.
“Right. Pixies.”
Back at the car, Hazel fished the anti-nightmare pendant from the glove compartment where she’d stashed it that morning and fastened it around her neck. After today, she wasn’t taking any chances.
They drove with the windows down, her wet hair whipping in the wind. The silence between them felt different than before: charged instead of awkward.
“I’ll handle the Shadow Council,” he said as they passed the Willowbrook town limits.
“We’ll handle them.”
He glanced at her. “We?”
“Unless you plan to take on Margaret Thornfield and her pearl-clutching brigade alone. She’s been running that council for thirty years. She knows where all the bodies are buried.” Hazel paused. “Possibly literally.”
“I’ve faced worse.”
