Frost Burned

the same time put his body between me and the officer as his best “aw shucks” smile lit his face. “I’d spent most of the last day sitting on that fence.” He nodded toward the eight-foot concrete block fence that encircled the apartment complex. Then he saw the cop’s face. “I know, right? You’re wondering why I pulled guard duty when I look like the before picture on a gym advertisement. My dad is fae, though, and I’m stronger than I look. Anyway, Jesse was making—”
    “Jesse?”
    “Adam’s daughter, the one we were trying to keep safe from the bad guys,” said Tad, moving behind the officer so he could see his notes. “She spells it J-E?S-S?E. And I’m Tad—like ‘tadpole’—short for Thaddeus, but don’t go there, and my last name is Adelbertsmiter.” He spelled that for him, too. Twice.
    The officer turned to force Tad to give him some space, but Tad just followed him around.
    “Thank you,” the officer said firmly. “What happened to the wall?” He looked at me, but Tad answered that, too.
    “I was eating Jesse’s brownies when someone rang the doorbell. I sent Jesse, Gabriel, and the kids into one of the bedrooms and went to answer the door.”
    “So you let him in?”
    “Do I look like I’m five?” asked Tad indignantly. “No. I asked who it was and he said he was UPS and had a package for us. I told him to leave it on the porch ’cause I was naked, just out of the shower.”
    “I thought you were eating brownies,” said the officer, who seemed to have resigned himself to having Tad hanging over his shoulder.
    “I was.” Tad shook his head. “I lied to the guy. I was there to keep the kids safe, no way was I opening the door to some stranger. There are things out there who can take it for an invitation—and you don’t invite evil into your home.”
    “No,” said the officer faintly, “I can see that you wouldn’t.”
    Tony rubbed his mouth to hide a smile. Tony had seen Tad in full-blown Look-At-Me mode before. It wasn’t that Tad was lying to the police officer, but, like a good stage magician, he’d keep the police looking where he wanted them to look. I didn’t know what Tad was trying to cover up, but with Adam here and safe, I didn’t really care.
    “I thought you fae couldn’t lie?” said one of the kids who was supposed to be cleaning Sylvia’s stuff off the ground.
    Tad nodded at him. “Yeah, that’s only the true fae and some of the halfies. All that kind of stuff doesn’t apply to me. ’Cause I lie and”—he spread his arms to invite everyone to admire—“I’m still here.”
    Behind me, Adam laughed quietly.
    “Anyway,” continued Tad, now talking to the crowd instead of the police, “the supposed UPS guy, he said he needed a signature. I told him to leave a form and we’d pick the package up at the UPS office—and that’s when he unlocked the door with some kind of picklock or magic, I wasn’t paying attention because he tried to hit me with a stun gun. When that didn’t work, he drew a freaking sword and tried to take off my head.”
    “A
sword
?” said the officer, who was starting to look as though he was having trouble keeping up.
    Tad nodded. “I know, right? Weirded me out, too. I guess he was pretty old, ’cause he knew what he was doing with that thing. I took two years of aikido at school, and he made a monkey out of me.” I wondered if anyone would notice that although Tad was pretty banged up, there were no sword cuts. “I drew him back farther into the apartment to give the kids a chance to escape. Sometime in there, he tossed me through the wall.”
    All the people who were cleaning up the mess near him and the policemen and policewoman who were listening to his story looked at Tad—because he didn’t look like he’d been tossed through a wall. Tad wasn’t good-looking, his ears were too big and they stuck out and his nose was flattened as if he’d gone three rounds with George Foreman, but when he wanted people to watch him, they did. It wasn’t magic; it was force of personality.
    “Half fae,” he told them again. “Sometimes it helps.” He looked up at the hole, too, and shook his head and winced. “Doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt. I ran back up and kept him occupied while the kids escaped. I tossed the desk at him, knocked him out the same hole he’d knocked me through, and by then you guys were pretty close. He picked himself up and ran.”
    Apparently we weren’t going to talk about