“Blank?” she asked. “Can I see it?”
I passed her the sheet of paper. She did the same thing I had, flipping it over to check the back before shaking her head. “I don’t get it,” she said.
“Me neither.”
“Cass Lindstrom! You’re here!”
We both looked up to see Horst emerging from the kitchen, his face alight. But that light dimmed considerably when he saw the shattered window.
“What happened?” he asked, vaulting neatly over the display case in a move I was sure I’d still be thinking about when I was an elderly woman.
“Glory,” Cass said, jogging me out of a brief fantasy in which Horst vaulted over every piece of furniture in my apartment. “Show him.”
Oh. Right. The paper. I offered it to him, even though I didn’t know what he was supposed to get out of it.
Unlike Cass and me, Horst didn’t bother flipping the paper over. He held it up, his eyes darting back and forth as though he were reading something written there. Then he crumpled the paper into a ball with one hand. “Well,” he said. “I suppose we should get this cleaned up.”
“What did it say?” I asked.
“It said—” He caught himself. “You saw it. There was nothing there.”
There had definitely been something there, something Cass and I couldn’t see but that Horst could. Some sort of fae magic, I imagined.
And he still wouldn’t tell me what was going on.
“You know what,” he began, one hand lightly patting the pocket of his shirt. “Maybe you should go visit your hometown for a week or so. Take a trip. Get away from all this humidity for a bit.”
I palmed the rock that had broken my window. It was roughly the size of my fist, and it occurred to me how lucky I’d been that neither Cass nor I was standing in its path when it came through the window. “I have a business to run. And a party to throw. I can’t leave town right now.”
“I can handle things for you while you’re gone,” he said. “I’m a pretty decent baker, believe it or not. Tell her, Cass.”
“He actually is,” Cass agreed.
“And I can take care of the cats. And the”—he winced—“rats. Only...the cats don’t use the litter box every day, do they? I really don’t do litter boxes.”
He was teasing me, but I wasn’t in the mood to be teased. Someone had just thrown a rock into my place of business, and Horst knew who it was and why.
And he wouldn’t tell me.
“What’s going on, Horst?” I asked him, my voice deliberately soft and controlled.
“Why would you think something’s going on?” he asked. Then he started moving toward the kitchen. “Do you keep your broom and dustpan back here?”
“I’m not an idiot,” I snapped. “You know why this happened.”
He froze halfway to the kitchen. When he turned around, his mask was so firmly in place that I could barely see the real him in there. “I don’t think you’re an idiot. But I do wish you would leave town for a little while.”
“You could come stay at the Enchanted Forest,” Cass offered.
“Thanks, Cass, but I’m not leaving unless I know why. Horst, are you going to tell me?”
A muscle in one of his cheeks twitched as he met my gaze. “There are things you are better off not knowing,” he said finally.
“Then I’m staying.” I crossed my arms over my chest and lifted my chin. If he couldn’t trust me enough to tell me why he was worried, why should I trust him enough to listen to him?
Horst’s shoulders sagged. “Fine. I’ll get someone to fix your window tomorrow,” he said.
“That would be helpful. Thank you.”
