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Nothing moved.
“She only did that the first time,” Lila conceded.
“What does she usually do the other times?”
“I sit there.” She pointed to a spot on the ground. “And she comes to me. Then I give her some candy, and we play for a bit.”
“Was anything different the last time you saw her?” I asked.
Lila shook her head. “It was the same. We played and then she hopped into the bush, and…and…” She blinked rapidly. “And she never came back.”
Time for the professional to do her job. I approached the bush and looked behind it. Nothing seemed amiss. No broken branches or signs of struggle.
“Where did you find the collar ribbon?”
Lila pointed to the roots of another tree. “It was lying over there.”
The roots looked like normal tree roots to me. I’d had some experience with sentient man-eating trees, but these didn’t look like that. Mostly because they hadn’t attempted to eat me yet.
These were the kinds of keen observations that had made me famous among the Fae.
“Let’s have Greenie try to follow her smell.” I gestured to Greenie. “Let him sniff the ribbon.”
Lila didn’t look very sure about approaching the giant Fae hound, but she gathered her courage and thrust her hand forward. “Smell,” she commanded.
Aw, a little Fae lady in the making.
Greenie sniffed at her hand, then gave me a woof of agreement and a wag of his tail.
“Good boy,” I said proudly. I helped Lila back on top of him, then attempted to jump into position. A loud humph escaped my lungs as I landed on my stomach and began to slide down, aided by Greenie’s body shaking in silent laughter. “Bad boy!” I managed.
“Miss!” Lila grabbed at my hoodie and tried to stop the slow slide of doom. I grabbed Greenie’s mossy fur and hauled myself forward. After some more squirming and climbing, my leg finally made it across and I managed to sit upright on Greenie’s back.
Greenie and I needed to have a long conversation about doing things like this in front of clients. Again. I was a professional now—I had a reputation to maintain.
“Go, Greenie,” I said, holding Lila securely in front of me.
Greenie let out a happy sound and shot forward between the trees and into the underbrush. I protected the kid’s face, earning myself a mouthful of soil and leaves as we popped out into what looked like someone’s abandoned backyard back on the human surface. A dirty picket fence surrounded a wide space, the pickets leaning at an angle. Wild bushes and weeds ran the base of the fence and grew tall by a small tree on one side. A mountain of trash bags had been piled on the back deck of a rundown one-story house with grimy windows and a sagging roof. The cloudy skies made everything look even more dismal.
Lila scrunched her nose. “Ew.”
Couldn’t have said it better myself. I leaned over her shoulder to talk to Greenie. “Are you sure this is it, Greenie?”
Greenie woofed and approached the tree, then leaned down to smell the ground.
“Let me take a look around.” I slid down Greenie and used my sneakers to poke between the weeds and bushes around the tree. Images of screaming rodents jumping at my face filled my mind, and I stopped poking.
“What’s that?” Lila asked, suddenly standing by my side.
I jumped and swallowed down a curse. The kid’s parents would probably not thank me for teaching her human bad words. She was pointing at a rusted half-open tool locker by the fence.
“That’s where human dreams of maintaining a home garden go to die,” I told her.
She nodded solemnly.
Soft rustling noises behind us had us spinning on our heels. A group of weeds and long grass was moving as something made its way across.
I swallowed hard. I had seen this movie before. Could Greenie take on a velociraptor?
