Free Deadlocked by Charlaine Harris

can. I had to fish my electric bill out after I tossed it along with a furniture-sale flyer. I opened it to check the amount. Claude had better return from Faery; he was a reckless energy user, and my bill was almost double its normal size. I wanted Claude to pay his share. My water heater was gas, and that bill was way up, too. I put the Shreveport newspaper on the kitchen table to read later. It was sure to be full of bad news.
    I showered and redid my hair and makeup. It was so hot that I didn’t want to wear slacks, and shorts would not suit Eric’s sense of formality. I sighed, resigned to the inevitable. I began looking through my summer dresses. Luckily, I’d taken the time to shave my legs, a habit Eric found both fascinating and bizarre. My skin was nice and brown this far into the tanning season, and my hair was a few shades lighter and still looked good from the remedial trim the hairdresser Immanuel had given it a few weeks previously. I put on a white skirt, a bright blue sleeveless blouse, and a real broad black leather belt that had gotten too tight for Tara. My good black sandals were still in pretty fair shape. My hand paused over the drawer of my dressing table. Within it, camouflaged with a light dusting of face powder, lay a powerful fairy magical object called a cluviel dor.
    I’d never thought of carrying it around on my person. Part of me was afraid of wasting the power of the cluviel dor. If I used it recklessly, it would amount to using a nuclear device to kill a fly.
    The cluviel dor was a rare and ancient fairy love gift. I guess it was the fae equivalent of a Fabergé Easter egg, but magical. My grandfather—not my human one, but my half-human, half-fairy grandfather, Fintan, Dermot’s twin—had given it to my grandmother Adele, who had hidden it away. She had never told me she had it, and I had only just discovered it during the attic clean-out. It had taken me longer to identify it and to learn more about its properties. Only the part-demon lawyer Desmond Cataliades knew I had it … though perhaps my friend Amelia suspected, since I’d asked her to teach me about what it could do.
    Up until now, I’d hidden it just like my grandmother had. You can’t go through life carrying a gun in your hand just in case someone wants to attack you, right? Though the cluviel dor was a love gift, not a weapon, its use might have results just as dramatic. Possession of the cluviel dor granted the possessor a wish. That wish had to be a personal one, to benefit the possessor or someone the possessor loved. But there were some awful scenarios I’d imagined: What if I wished an oncoming car wouldn’t hit me, and instead it hit another car and killed a whole family? What if I wished that my gran were alive again, and instead of my living grandmother, her corpse appeared?
    So I understood why Gran had hidden it away from casual discovery. I understood that it had frightened her with its potential, and maybe she hadn’t believed that a Christian should use magic to change her own history.
    On the other hand, the cluviel dor could have saved Gran’s life if she’d had it at the moment she was attacked; but it had been in a secret drawer in an old desk up in the attic, and she had died. It was like paying for a Life Alert and then leaving it up in the kitchen cabinet out of reach. No one could take it, and it couldn’t be used for ill; but then again, it couldn’t be used for good, either.
    If making one’s wish might lead to catastrophic results, it was almost as perilous to simply possess the cluviel dor. If anyone—any supernatural—learned I had this amazing object, I would be in even more danger than my normal allotment.
    I opened the drawer and looked at my grandmother’s love gift. The cluviel dor was a creamy green and looked not unlike a slightly thick powder compact, which was why I kept it in my makeup drawer. The lid was circled with a band of gold. It would not open; it had never opened.