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"An ill thing, surely, but what has that to do with me? I cannot enforce fairness in the World of Men."
"Angela's boss is awoman ," Tina informed him.
"Indeed." Coilleach rose gracefully to his feet. "Still, what would you have me do? Shall I slay this
woman for you, mistress?"
"Yes!" Tina shouted, at the same time that her grandmother said, horrified, "No! Of course not!"
Coilleach raised one elegant eyebrow. "What then?"
Mumtaz hesitated, and then said, slowly, "I wish the woman who is Angela's manager Jillson, her name
is to quit, with no repercussions to Angela. Remove this difficulty. If she is gone, then things will be
better."
"And if I do this thing for you, is my debt discharged?" Coilleach asked.
Mumtaz thought about it, thought about the pinched look on her granddaughter's face as they'd sat at the
dinner table. "Yes," she said. "Do this thing for me, and we are quit."
"Done," Coilleach said, and suddenly he smiled. "I will miss you, you know, mistress."
Mumtaz snorted in a very unladylike fashion.
Abruptly, Coilleach was gone and the ruby cat sat before her again. It stretched or was it a
bow? and vanished into the shadows of the garden.
"Cool!" Tina said. "Wow, Gramma, who was that? Where do you know him from? What was that debt
thing he was talking about? Why wouldn't you let him kill that bi "
Mumtaz waved her hands, batting her questions away. "It's late! What are you doing up at this hour,
anyway? You're having a dream. Go back to bed."
"It isn't even my bedtime yet!" the little girl protested.
"It is if I say it is," her grandmother informed her grimly. "March!"
* * *
The next day, Angela dragged herself to work again, blissfully unaware that a little someone extra was
tucked into her briefcase. She set the briefcase beside her chair in her office, and she didn't notice when
the someone shimmered its way out and slipped out the door.
Coilleach appeared in the hallway, in the seeming of a tall, preternaturally handsome young man wearing
a highly expensive business suit, complete to silk shirt and tie and glossy shoes. He looked up and down
the hallway, his lip curled slightly. This human place was even more boring than usual. What use were
these humans if they didn't have imagination? That was their only saving grace, after all, and he didn't see
much evidence of it in gray carpeting and bulletin boards with official government posters about employee
rights and safety, in dull cream walls that needed painting and an acoustic tile ceiling.
Fortunately, one wall of the hallway was windowed, overlooking a parklike open space with trees; it
didn't entirely compensate for the amount of Cold Iron in the building, but it did help. He wouldn't stay
long enough for the deadly metal to really bother him.
He sauntered down the hall, glancing into open office doors, stepped hastily past the lunch room with its
stainless-steel refrigerator and microwave and sink. The occupants glanced up some of them stared,
openmouthed as he went by. He could hear murmuring behind himself, and he lifted a hand, and the
employees who had been enthralled at the sight of the beautiful stranger found themselves sitting in front
of their computers again, trying to remember what they'd been doing a moment before.
On the way in this morning, he had teased quite a lot of information out of Angela's mind about her boss.
Her office would be yes, here, at the end of the hall. A corner office.
The door was locked. He smiled and turned the knob. The door opened without protest, and he went
inside and closed it behind himself.
It was a large office, much larger than Angela's, with an antique wooden desk and an executive leather
chair; a sofa along one windowed wall, a wooden bookcase along the other. No utilitarian metal
furnishings here, he observed.
So, he thought. This is Carrie Jillson: indifferent to human sensibilities, unable to create anything new,
able to charm the most difficult of humans, and a nearly complete lack of Cold Iron in her office. The only
evidence of the metal he could see, in fact, seemed to be in the computer, which rested on a small stand
on the other end of the office from the desk. Even the office chair was made of brass and leather, not
steel.
And the final evidence, of course, was that the whole room stank of magic.
Carrie Jillson, like Coilleach mac Feargus, was an elf.
He stepped around the desk and sat in the leather chair, leaning back into the overstuffed cushion,
looking around.
A wall of windows, overlooking the park. A tryptich of prints on the wall, a Canty painting divided into
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