Free Charming Blue by Kristine Grayson Page A

her front yard like a defeated army. After she got out of the car, she discovered that they didn’t want to be classified as “little people” on a movie set, and they were tossed off for being unnecessarily political.
    It took three phone calls to settle that mess, and another to deal with shape-shifter revolt on the set of the latest Twilight knockoff. Mostly her job was either about finesse (the gnome crisis) or about plausible lies (the shape-shifter issue). And her lies weren’t even that plausible. No one really listened in Hollywood, so long as the problem got taken care of.
    She half expected to see Tank, but Tank didn’t show. Jodi left a message at the Archetype Place because that was the only way she knew how to reach Tank. But no one there had seen Tank for a week, which wasn’t that unusual. Tank did what Tank did, and usually without letting anyone know about it.
    Jodi got her dinner at In-n-Out Burger—simple cheeseburger, fries, and a vanilla shake. She’d planned to eat better for years, really, and she did exercise (didn’t everyone in LA?), but on days like this, days when she couldn’t quite deal with all the various stresses, she ate badly. On purpose.
    Still, she didn’t eat the burger in her car or at one of those never-quite-clean tables. She got takeout and brought it home.
    Home was a 1924 Spanish-style bungalow in Hancock Park. Jodi had bought the house new, although it had taken work. Back then, people who looked like her couldn’t buy homes in Hancock Park which was, at the time, the most upscale part of the budding city of Los Angeles. Jodi had a friend from the Kingdoms who did an appearance spell, so Jodi’s looks matched the neighborhood’s desires—only for her dealings with the bank. Once she purchased the house, she went back to her usual look. At the time, the neighbors thought she was the help and didn’t pay attention to her. But others did. Nat King Cole bought a house in the area in 1948, partly because he thought the neighborhood was friendly, since he’d been to parties at Jodi’s house. Instead, he was the one credited (correctly) with breaking the color barrier—since he was the first one to challenge it.
    Jodi just went around it, like she did so many other goofy and inexplicable things in the Greater World.
    She was feeling the weight of those things as she let herself into the house, balancing her purse, her phone, the bag of greasy food, and her briefcase. She put the phone in its recharging cradle on the occasional table beside the door—she was damned if she was going to talk to anyone tonight—then she kicked off her shoes, walked stocking-footed across the polished hardwood floor, and dropped her purse and briefcase along the way.
    She was tired, grumpy, and hungry. Normally, she would have set herself a plate at the breakfast nook in the kitchen, but she didn’t. She went straight to the family room off the pool, dropped the burger bag on the ratty coffee table she kept for just that purpose, turned on the big-screen TV on the wall, and set it to show her sixteen channels at the same time. She didn’t care which sixteen channels she watched; she just wanted faces and noise and something to think about besides hiring the magical and just how disturbing her conversation with Bluebeard had been.
    Of course, the TV found three local news channels and all of them were running stories on the Fairy Tale Stalker. No new photos, no new sketches, nothing except that there’d been another sighting or visitation or whatever the hell you wanted to call it, this time in Echo Park, an area of the city he hadn’t worked before.
    If indeed what the stalker was doing was work. She wasn’t so sure. It seemed to her it was someone magical getting his rocks off by scaring mortal women.
    She gave up, clicked on KTLA, and watched their coverage, feeling slightly dirty as she did so. She couldn’t quite get it out of her mind that she had talked with a man just that