“Exactly.”
“Now what?”
“You don’t want to report a dead body?” I asked, my smile impossible to hide. “You don’t want Tate to ream you out for the second time today?”
“You’re right about one thing,” Nick said. “If the SAPD has this, there’s a possibility, however small, that the fae will come for it.”
“And that’s a risk you don’t want to take.”
Nick shook his head. “How do we get this to the Far Realm?”
“He looks like he’s Spring Court. I’m going to contact the Spring Queen to see if it’s something she wants to deal with.” I rolled my eyes up and huffed a sigh.
“Great,” Nick said. “How do we get the body out of here?”
I squinted at it, realizing we had a major problem.
“Carry it?” I suggested. I looked at Nick, who held up his hands.
“Hey, I’ve been told to be hands off. I’m not even backup, remember?”
“Yeah, that was when you could’ve gotten into trouble,” I said. “Now you’re going to be in trouble if you don’t help me. Eventually somebody is going to come down here, and how are we going to explain a dead body? Tate is going to be pissed. He’ll probably send you to Fiji.”
“Well, I wouldn’t want that. All those beaches. All those half-naked men. All those drinks.”
“Come on. I know you have something up your sleeve, Nicholas King,” I said.
Nick rolled his eyes but pulled out his alchemy notepad. “This will help with the weight, but you’ll need to make sure no one notices us carrying out a large coffin.”
I clapped my hands together, rubbing them like I was some stage magician. Then, with a grin, I patted them down on the funeral shroud. The coffin disappeared.
Or rather, using the air and the light, I made it so people’s eyes would just glance off it. Nick frowned, looking down at where the coffin had been. Even as he looked, his eyes slid to me.
When he tried to refocus, his eyes slid to the door.
“How did you do that?” he asked.
“There’s this weird effect,” I said. “If you get the right light, people have a hard time focusing on something. It’s like an invisible sun glare. You know how you automatically wince away from sun bouncing off the windshield? This is like that, butI’m doing the cheap version. It won’t hold up that well under scrutiny.”
“Well, then we’d better move,” Nick said. He drew three circles, powering up each as he went. Frowning down at where the coffin used to be, he gestured with the three slips of paper in his hand. “I need to see it.”
I brushed my hand across the coffin, and it became visible again. The light wasn’t happy, but I reassured it that it would only be a moment. When Nick placed the circles at the head, foot, and in the center of the coffin, the thing floated.
My eyebrows shot up, the expression exaggerated because of the glamour.
“You said it would be lighter, not that it would fly,” I said.
“I must have done the calculations wrong, or it’s a lot lighter than I assumed.”
Shrugging, I took hold of the front and gestured for Nick to take the back. Soothing the light back into its invisible glare, I tugged on the coffin. It came easily, like an obedient dog. I could just see myself walking it around the dog park, everyone staring as I paraded around a dead fae body.
With Nick behind me, we jammed the thing into the elevator, then took it to the lobby. The security guards were even more shocked to see us come out. They must’ve expected that we would disappear with Damon Griffith like the legends said. One of them even rushed to the front door to hold it open for us.
Then we were outside, a dead body between us, as the realization that the coffin wouldn’t fit into my car struck both of us.
Six
Ten minutes later, after jerry-rigging my optical illusion, and after Nick figured out how to tie the coffin to the back of my car, we were towing the body behind us.
