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They didn’t notice the malformed curse lingering in the wreckage, either, or when it blindly scented something familiar from the burning it had been trapped in and crawled toward Eddie, shivering and Twisted from the sap-fueled flames.
    Sharnahan’s work buddy Clyde, a wide-set foreman with a seamed brown bullet head and a fine wide white mustache, let Eddie stay at his house while the insurance paperwork was processed. A week afterward, Eddie bought a lotto ticket at the Kwik-Ease during their morning coffee run. It turned out to be worth a cool ten million, which was a goddamn good bit of luck, he remarked to his buddy.
    Clyde just grunted and asked if that meant he’d be quitting onthe spot or would give him two weeks. Sharnahan did the latter, then retired after a beer-soaked party at Clyde’s.
    Unfortunately, Eddie was dead within six months of a bone cancer spurred by a black flapping curse’s last fading breath. He left half the money to the animal shelter he’d gotten Juniper from, and Juniper and the remaining half to his niece, who had married rich, divorced richer, and finally moved to San Francisco with Juniper, who lived longer than any feline had a right to. The niece became the Crazy Cat Lady of Holt Hill and often was heard to remark that cats were lucky. They brought the good fairies.
    Her beloved uncle had always told her so.

BRAVADO
7

    H unting Unseelie again
. Midnight found Jeremiah Gallow crouched easily on the edge of a rooftop, surveying the terrain.
Feels fucking familiar, doesn’t it?
    The city wheeled below him, waves of traffic on concrete shores, tang of cold iron and the fog of exhaust, garbage in alleys and a faint note of burning on a chill spring wind. The breeze had lost winter’s bite—Summer’s Gates were open now, both her realm and the mortal world turned toward renewal—and its broad back carried other, darker scents. Rain blurred and softened the air, a tang of ozone from the afternoon’s lightning and a heavy, spicy expectancy.
    The sidhe are out tonight. Close your windows, hide your cows, and above all else, bar your doorways with iron.
    He closed his eyes, a lean man with a heavy dun coat, its side mended with needle-chantment and its leather patches scuffed and scarred, his dark hair cut military-short to hug his skull. Mortal gazes would slide right over him, maybe pausing briefly at the breadth of his shoulders or a flash of the light, the piercing green of his irises. On a jobsite he was close to invisible, justanother construction worker, young enough not to have run to fat but old enough that a career other than backbreaking labor was a vanishing prospect. He showed up on time, traded dirty jokes, ate his lunch, had a beer or two or went home, everyone’s buddy and nobody’s friend.
    There
. Silver threads pierced the sound of traffic, stitching through the dark fabric of mortal night. The huntwhistles were far away and to the south—they had noticed the burning of his mortal trailer and knew he would not be weary or stupid enough to burrow himself near it. They hoped to find his trail near the ashes, now.
    The Unseelie were no doubt hunting a woman tonight, too.
    Robin Ragged would be using every trick she could beg, win, or steal to confuse her trail, but Jeremiah had the locket that had rested next to her skin and now throbbed against his own as he thought about its owner. Simple chantment would lead him to her—it had, in fact, brought him to this wreck of a building downtown, an Art Deco leftover with gargoyles watching the street, sandwiched between two high-rises. There was a lot of cold iron in its construction, and a curious slick patch on the roof that reeked of sidhe. If it was spoor, it was nothing he’d encountered in the sideways realms or the mortal world, and its presence here was troubling, to say the least. Given the way Gallow’s skin crawled when he approached it, a death had been meted out.
    It hadn’t been hers, though. That was all