Dead Reckoning

weren’t supposed to pick and choose which rules we obeyed, but that was the way I felt.
    I shoved my confused thoughts back into a corner of my head and picked up the cluviel dor again. Touching its smoothness was pure pleasure, like the happiness I’d felt when I’d hugged my great-grandfather—but times about two hundred. The cluviel dor was about the size of two stacked Oreo cookies. I rubbed it against my cheek and felt like purring.
    Did you have to have a magic word to open it?
    “Abracadabra,” I said. “Please and thank you.”
    Nope, didn’t work, plus I felt like an idiot. “Open sesame,” I whispered. “Presto change-o.” Nope.
    But thinking of magic gave me an idea. I e-mailed Amelia, and it was a difficult message to phrase. I know e-mail isn’t totally secure, but I also had no reason to think anyone considered my few messages of any importance. I wrote, “I hate to ask, but besides doing that research on the blood bond for me, can you find out something about a fae thing? Initials c.d.?” That was as subtle as I could get.
    Then I returned to my admiration of the cluviel dor. Did you have to be pure fairy to open it? No, that couldn’t be the case. It had been a gift to my grandmother, presumably to use in case of dire need, and she had been completely human.
    I wished it hadn’t been far away in the attic when she’d been attacked. Whenever I remembered how she’d been discarded on the kitchen floor like offal, soaking in her own blood, I felt both sick and furious. Maybe if she’d had time to fetch the cluviel dor, she could have saved herself.
    And with that thought, I’d had enough. I returned the cluviel dor to its velvet bag, and I returned Gran’s letter to the pattern envelope. I’d had as much upset as I could handle for a while.
    It was necessary to hide these items. Unfortunately, their previous excellent hideaway had been removed to a store in Shreveport.
    Maybe I should call Sam. He could put the letter and the cluviel dor in the safe at Merlotte’s. But considering the attacks on the bar, that wouldn’t be the best place to stow something I valued. I could drive over to Shreveport and use my key to enter Eric’s house to find someplace there. In fact, it was highly possible that Eric had a safe, too, and had never had occasion to show it to me. After I’d mulled it over, that didn’t seem like a good idea, either.
    I wondered if my desire to keep the items here was simply because I didn’t want to be parted from the cluviel dor. I shrugged. No matter how the conviction had come into my head, I was sure the house was the safest place, at least for now. Perhaps I could put the smooth green box into the sleeping hole for vampires in my guest bedroom closet . . . but that wasn’t much more than a bare box, and what if Eric needed to spend the day there?
    After racking my brain, I put the pattern envelope into the box of unexamined paper items from the attic. These would be uninteresting to anyone but me. The cluviel dor was a little more difficult to stow away, at least partly because I kept having to resist an impulse to pull it out of the bag again. That struggle made me feel very—Gollum-esque.
    “My precioussss,” I muttered. Would Dermot and Claude be able to sense the nearness of such a remarkable item? No, of course not. It had been in the attic all the time and they hadn’t found it.
    What if they’d come to live here in hopes of finding it? What if they knew or suspected I had such a thing? Or (more likely) what if they were staying here because they were made happy by its proximity? Though I was sure there were holes in that idea, I couldn’t shake it. It wasn’t my fairy blood that drew them; it was the presence of the cluviel dor.
    Now you’re just being paranoid, I told myself sternly, and I risked one more glimpse of the creamy green surface. The cluviel dor, I thought, looked like a miniature powder compact. With that idea, the right hiding place came to me. I took the cluviel dor out of its velvet pouch and slid it into the makeup drawer of my dressing table. I opened my box of loose powder and sprinkled just a little over the gleam of creamy green. I added a hair from my brush. Ha! I was pleased with the result. As an afterthought, I stuffed the disintegrating velvet bag into my hose-and-belt drawer. My reason told me the ratty object was just a decaying old bag, but my emotions told me it was something important because my grandmother