Free Loose Changeling: A Changeling Wars Novel by A.G. Stewart Page A

quick, small Fae that like to giggle? I’ve been hearing and seeing things in my office for a week. If someone’s trying to kill me, maybe what I’ve been seeing in my cubicle has something to do with that. Maybe I can find some clues. Besides, work always calms me down and makes me feel better.”
    He raised his eyebrow, as if he didn’t believe my story about the Fae in my cubicle, but then he nodded. “Not a bad idea. Only for a couple of hours. Then we leave again.” He pulled the car over into the left-turn lane. I'd stopped paying attention to where we were or where we were headed. After a few more turns, we came out onto a street I definitely recognized, and we pulled into the parking lot of a three-story office building downtown. A large, silver “FG” was emblazoned on the side of the building, next to the logos of two other companies. “If you think it will help your concentration.”
    “Definitely.” I found the rhythms of daily work soothing. Though the kitchen at home was my favorite spot there, I still had to share it with Owen and his perpetually messy ways. My desk at work was my very own space—always neat, organized, and quintessentially me.
    “I’ll be here in the parking lot,” Kailen said. “Two hours. Be back down here by eleven thirty or I’ll have to come up and get you. And that would be awkward for all parties involved.”
    “I can say I have a doctor’s appointment,” I said. “It won’t be a problem.” I practically jumped out of the car as soon as it stopped, my mind already on my checklist of tasks, rearranging items until I found the best fit for the largest number of things I could complete in two hours, in order of highest priority to lowest. The sooner I could find my concentration, the sooner I could turn Jane back into a person, meet the Aranhods, find out what they wanted with me, and hopefully return to life as normal.
    I breezed through the front doors, swiped my card at the elevator, and rode up to the second floor. It wasn’t until I stepped out of the elevator that I remembered my torn sleeve. I didn’t have another change of clothes. Maybe if I hurried past Anne, the office secretary, no one would notice.
    I’d had a few brilliant ideas in my day. This, however, wasn’t one of them. Anne looked up as soon as I opened the door, auburn curls brushing over her shoulders. “Oh, Nicole!” she said, blue eyes wide. “I thought you were sick.” She sat behind a low counter, head and shoulders above the monitor of her computer.
    I didn’t hate Anne. She’d always greeted me in a cheery manner, did her work serviceably well, and made sympathetic noises at all the right places in a conversation. But she had a tendency to pry, and the last thing I wanted to encounter this morning was a busybody.
    “Sick,” I said. “Yes, well…”
    “You look great,” Anne said. “Are you wearing heels? You look like you’ve been somewhere sunny. Got a bit of a glow to your complexion. Sick seems to suit you, if that’s what it is.” She fired off each sentence, one after another, as valiantly as a soldier at a cannon.
    I had my ballet flats on, and I certainly hadn’t spent any time in the sun recently. Were these the changes Kailen had referred to, and if so, had they made me so different that Anne hadn’t even noticed my torn sleeve?
    Anne took in a sharp breath. “Oh, what’s happened to your sleeve?”
    There it was. I opened my mouth to tell her that I felt better than I had that morning and stopped myself. What was the point? “You know what?” I said slowly, the words tipping from my mouth. “I wasn’t sick at all. This morning I didn’t feel like coming in, so I made my husband call you.”
    “You didn’t!” Anne said, her eyes bright. Her face said “shock,” but her eyes said “please tell me more.” So I did.
    “I’ve never done it before,” I said. I hadn’t. “I wanted to see what it would be like. But you know what?”
    “What?”