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Zee laughed. “Now I know you’re fucking with me.”

The seller frowned, probably wondering if we were both screwing with him. I wasn’t sure we weren’t. “Frogs are real, Zee. They’re an actual living thing.”

“There’s no way this is real.” He held the cute green frog an inch from my face. “Look at it. Those eyes? No. And those fucking legs? What’s that all about?”

I’d never really looked closely at a frog before. The ornament he held had cute, bulbous eyes and splayed toes. Zee had a point. “They do kinda look weird, but they’re definitely real.”

He scrunched up his nose. “You’re shitting me?”

“No, frogs exist. I think they’re on every continent. Maybe?”

“They’re everywhere?!” His eyes widened. “Fuck.” He flung the frog ornament down and wiped his hand on his shirt. “Are they vicious?” he whispered.

“Vicious?” I glanced at the seller for help, but he stared as though we’d both lost our minds. “I don’t know. I’ve never actually met one.”

“Ugh.” Zee cringed and backed away from the stall. “I fucking touched it. You should be ashamed of yourself,” he told the trader. “Nobody is going to buy your weird frogs.”

I ushered Zee from the offending stall and noticed his tail had knotted itself over and over. He really did not like frogs. “It’s okay,” I told him. “I don’t think there are any around right now.”

“Are they big?”

I had no idea. I’d seen a few in the books we’d inherited at the hotel. They’d seemed pretty big. “Maybe, I guess?” A human would know how big a frog was. And I was a human so . . . “They’re at least the size of a dog.” That seemed about right.

“Fuck.”

“If you lick them, they kill you.” The books had been very clear on that.

“What the actual fuck?! This world gets more fucked up the longer I live here.”

I couldn’t disagree. Our trip to the market hadn’t been so great, either. I’d stumbled across a fortune teller who wasn’t a fake and had seen the truth of me, then conned me out of five bucks, and now Zee was scared of frogs. “We should probably concentrate on finding Junk Jim.”

“Yeah.” He gave himself a shake. “I saw a sign for Fae Alley, it’s back here. They never did like to mingle with the rest of us Lost Ones. Shit never changes.”

I had noticed that. We had a few fae checked in at the hotel, but they were often shy and didn’t like to visit the bar, or stay during breakfast service when it got busy. “Social anxiety?”

“More like holier-than-thou-itis. Also, pixies like to hang around with fae. They’re fucking nuts. Tiny psychos. You think frogs are bad? Pixies are like gremlins with wings. On crack. If you see a pixie, don’t look it in the eyes.”

Pixies did not sound like fun. “Oh uh, okay.”

We turned from the main street into a shadowy back alley lined with fairy lights. There were still lots of people here, and the crowd’s rising chatter came in waves. A lot of the wares here seemed to be older, ancient pieces, with big price tags.

“Look at all this antique shit. Daddy Vampire would be right at home.”

Wait, no snarky joke, no belittling comment about Reynard being old? “You should buy him something. Like a gift?”

Zee blurted a laugh, then cut it off. “No.”

That was the end of that conversation.

“Point out Jim, if you see him,” he said.

We walked on some more, blending in among other humans, demons, and Lost Ones, until I spotted a familiar fae at a stall that appeared to be selling half-broken things. The closer we got to his stall, the more his wares looked to be no more than bits he’d pulled from a dumpster.

“That’s him,” I told Zee, and we ventured over.

“Tricycles, chairs, reading lights. I got it all! Human junk is your treasure!” he bellowed. He wasn’t tall like most fae, but he was still taller than me. His dark brown hair might have once been long, but he’d had it hacked off, so it stuck out at all angles. Green eyes that looked bright and intelligent caught sight of Zee and me approaching.

“You, handsome demon.”