Sunshine

“The glove compartment,” I said absently. A fetch was usually roughly the shape of the thing to be fetched—something that was trying to find or fetch a person was often a sort of elongated star shape, with a bead or a crystal or a chip at its center for the heart, and smaller beads or crystals or chips for the head, hands, and feet. I was sure I would have noticed my mother giving me a fetch…and besides, she wasn’t that stupid. Eight years with my dad had made her less easy to fool than most ordinary people about anything to do with magic, and she was constitutionally hard to fool about anything anyway.

When had I noticed that the clutter, including eight or a dozen loose charms, in the glove compartment had turned into a matted snarl? I’d opened it—when?—to look at a map. I’d been sitting in the driver’s seat. Several things had plopped out onto the floor. I’d heard them rustling around, the way charms will, and, still looking at my map, I’d groped around on the floor for them. I picked up one or two, but I could still hear the rustling. They were creeping across the floor under the passenger seat, humping themselves over the drive shaft, and one or two of them had made it under the driver’s seat, which was fast moving for charms. I still hadn’t paid a lot of attention. I’d scavenged around under the driver’s seat and pulled out anything that squirmed, and shoved the whole lot back into the glove compartment without looking at any of it.

But if there’d been a fetch under the driver’s seat, then the wards would have mobbed and then tried to disable it.

That had been a day or two or three after I’d taken that inconclusive ride to No Town with Pat and Jesse.

Watch your back, Pat had said.

“SOF,” I said in disbelief. No, in what I wished was disbelief. In a belief that made me feel like I’d been dropped down an elevator shaft into icy water. “Someone in SOF did this to me. In SOF.” And whoever it was wasn’t going to like it at all that it hadn’t worked. No genuinely innocent member of the human public should be able to denature a fetch.

“My dear,” said Yolande. “Large organizations are inevitably corrupt. The more powerful the organization, the more dangerous the corruption. When I was young I wanted to belong to one of the big wardcraft corporations—Zammit, or Drusilla, if I proved skillful enough. Several of my master’s apprentices went to such places, and he was always gloomy and preoccupied for weeks—months—after he’d ‘lost’ one of us. That was always how he’d describe it—that he’d lost Benedict, he’d lost Ancilla. I was lucky; I was a slow learner. By the time I was ready to choose how I would pursue my vocation, I was ready to stay where I was, and go on working with my master. There were only three of us for many years: Chrysogon, Hippolyte, and myself, other than our master, and a few apprentices who came and went.”

Note, I thought, the next time I meet someone with a really strange name, ask them if they’re a wardskeeper.

“It is still better that SOF exist than it not exist. One must also earn a living; there is no equivalent in the SOF world for my master’s small group of wardskeepers.”

She was right there. The Sentinel Guild are pretty sad and the Vindicators are worse.

“The SOF fellow who came here once: he is your friend.”

“Pat,” I said. “Is he?”

“He is not perfect,” she said. “But nor am I. Nor are you. Nor is your dark companion. But yes, he is your friend. He wishes the defeat of the evil of the dark, as do we all.”

Depends, I thought, on what you mean by the evil of the dark. Or maybe by “we.”

“Pat is not only interested in—in what you can do for SOF. Or for his career.”

“Don’t forget my cinnamon rolls, which make strong men weak and strong women run from the bus station in high heels over our cobblestones to get to Charlie’s in time. If you know all that, can you tell me who planted the fetch?”

“No, I’m afraid not. I know about Pat because he sat in one place waiting for you for twenty minutes once, and that place happens to lie under the remit of one of my more ambitious wardings, and it went on taking—er—notes as long as he sat there.”

I doubted I could persuade the goddess to come sit quietly under the oak at the end of Yolande’s drive for twenty minutes.

“I told you I had spoken to my master about you. I also spoke to Chrysogon. We believe we can create something for you but it would be better, stronger, if—”