Free Pet Shop Boys: A Short Story by Kim Harrison

there.”
    I could hear Trent complaining as Quen closed the phone, cutting him off mid-protest. That wasn’t going to go over very well, I decided, and when Quen gestured for me to head out before him, I meekly fell into place, my thoughts turning to the hospital.
    Behind us people laughed and clinked glasses. Below, Cincinnati moved with her people, uncaring and unaware. It felt wrong now. Someone was stealing Rosewood babies. The “why” was ugly.
    Quen was silent all the way to the elevator. He avoided my eyes as I handed him my ticket to give to the coat-check woman. I could have given it to her myself, but high-society came with weird rules, and it was no skin off my nose. “You’re not going to tell him?” I said, hoping he wanted to use the time it would take to get to the hospital to come up with some story other than Quen wanting to hire me to babysit Trent.
    Gaze distant in thought, Quen shook out my shawl and I turned around, my head lowered. “You might be right,” he said, and I shivered as the silk settled over my bare skin. “I may have acted without thought.”
    It was an honest answer, but Quen might be right as well. Trent didn’t need a babysitter, but everyone needed someone to watch their back.

 
    A LSO BY K IM H ARRISON
    Books of the Hollows
    A Perfect Blood
    Pale Demon
    Black Magic Sanction
    White Witch, Black Curse
    The Outlaw Demon Wails
    For a Few Demons More
    A Fistful of Charms
    Every Which Way But Dead
    The Good, the Bad, and the Undead
    Dead Witch Walking
    And Don’t Miss
    The Hollows Insider
    Unbound
    Something Deadly This Way Comes
    Early to Death, Early to Rise
    Once Dead, Twice Shy
    Holidays Are Hell
    Dates from Hell
    And coming soon . . .
    Into the Woods
    and
    Ever After

 
    C OPYRIGHT
     
    This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
    “Pet Shop Boys” will appear in the collection Into the Woods , by Kim Harrison, available in October 2012 from Harper Voyager, an Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
    Excerpt from Ever After copyright © 2013 by Kim Harrison.
    PET SHOP BOYS . Copyright © 2012 by Kim Harrison. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
    EPub Edition SEPTEMBER 2012 ISBN: 9780062237682
    10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

 
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