That earned me another long silence. I still had my hands out in plain view, but they were getting tired. As a show of good faith, I stepped away from the wall, glass crunching under my boots, and stood in the open, facing them through the frame of the shattered door.
The woman had gotten to her feet. She stood twice as tall as Fleischhacker. An inappropriate curiosity about the physical mechanics of their relationship crossed my mind. I pushed it back before I started imagining possibilities.
Fleischhacker had his small fists clenched at his sides. He wore a plaid shirt over a pair of jeans and a pair of sneakers, all probably purchased from the kids’ section. Despite his goblin features, his attire made him look almost normal. Especially in such domestic surroundings.
“Why would you want to help us?” he asked.
The woman absently ran her fingers through his curly black hair. Otherwise, she remained rigid, and her eyes shined with fear.
I decided to go with the honesty policy. “Frankly, I don’t know. I guess I’m not cold-hearted enough to kill you in front of your pregnant…wife?”
“Yes,” he snapped. “Wife.” He took a few short steps forward and tilted his head while studying me. “That still doesn’t explain why you want to help. Or even what you could do to help.”
Another good point. What the hell did I think I could do for them that they hadn’t already tried themselves?
“I…I don’t know.”
“What do you know, you little twat?”
The woman whapped him on the back of his head. “Frazier.”
He ducked his head. “Sorry, dear.”
“I think we should hear him out,” she said.
Fleischhacker glowered, but he nodded. “Take your boots off and leave them on the mat.”
To one side of the entryway lay a rubber mat with a collection of shoes and boots lined up against the wall. “Seriously?”
He pointed at the floor of the dining room. “You see that carpet? It’s brand new. Leave your boots on the mat.”
I stepped inside and did as instructed. Fleischhacker and his wife led me in my stocking feet into the living room. This room looked as normal as the dining room. Modern furnishings, some framed abstracts on the walls, more spotless carpeting. An incense burner sat on an end table by the TV, the wisp of smoke rising from it filling the room with woodsy scent.
The woman offered me her hand. “I’m Carrie.”
I took her hand. Her skin was soft and warm. “Sebastian.”
Fleischhacker and Carrie sat on a loveseat that had the legs removed so it sat lower to the floor. Carrie’s knees bent up a little, while Fleischhacker’s feet touched the floor evenly.
I took a seat in a puffy leather armchair which threatened to swallow me if I leaned back. I doubted Fleischhacker spent any time in it.
“Why haven’t you moved away?” I asked right off the bat.
Fleischhacker scowled. “When the housing market crashed, we ended up with a house worth half of what we owed on it. And when Carrie tried to take maternity leave from her job, they figured out a legal way to fire her. Some horseshit about restructuring.” He made air quotes when he said that last word. “We can’t afford to move. And with the baby almost here…” He threw up his hands. “The medical bills aren’t going to pay themselves.”
“How have you dodged the Ministry for this long?”
“They didn’t put open season on me until a few days ago. I thought I was being careful enough. But you still managed to find me.”
“Others will, too.” I looked him straight in his solid black eyes. I doubted I saw the same thing in them that Carrie did. Love truly was blind. “Your financial issues. Is that why you’re dealing the dust?”
He held out a hand to stop me, but the question was already out of my mouth.
Carrie turned a quizzical eye toward her husband.
Uh oh. I guess the wife hadn’t known about her hubby’s little side job.
“What’s he talking about?”
I shrunk back from the immediate tension that bloomed between them. Nothing worse than getting stuck as a witness to a domestic squabble.
Fleischhacker fumbled for words while he gazed around the room as if one of the walls might have the right thing to say painted on it. Without a straight answer coming from him, Carrie did the worst possible thing I could have imagined at that moment.
She turned to me.
“What are you talking about? Dealing? Dust?”
Okay, there was something worse than witnessing a tiff between lovers—getting dragged into the middle of it. “I…uh…I don’t think it’s my place to say.”
Her cheeks turned a soft pink. She blasted me with a glare that would have made an ogre tremble in his oversized boots. I hunched my shoulders up, wishing I could pull my head in like a turtle and wait for this painful awkwardness to blow over.
No such luck.
“Don’t give me that,” she said. “You said you wanted to help us. Start by telling me the truth. If you can’t do that, you’re no help at all.”
“Carebear,” Fleischhacker said in a small voice. “It’s really nothing.”
She smacked his knee. “Shut up. Sebastian is trying to talk.”
I am?
Her pointed look spurred me on. I gave Fleischhacker an apologetic shrug. “Your husband is selling fairy dust to mortals. There’s this Ministry that governs—”
“I know all about the Ministry. And I know they’ve sent out people like you to murder him.”
“Okay,” I said slowly. “And your husband didn’t tell you why?”
He lowered his gaze and cringed.
“He told me,” Carrie went on, “that he’d been wrongly accused of using magic in a public place.”
I frowned. “That sort of thing doesn’t warrant a death sentence. The Ministry put a bounty on him because his reckless dust dealing resulted in three mortal deaths.”
Carrie looked back and forth between us. “Is this true?”
The goblin sneered in a crooked way only a goblin could. “No. No one I’ve sold to has died. I delivered to all my buyers just today.”
“Then why is the Ministry claiming otherwise?” I asked.
“Because they’re lying!” His cheeks turned more green than gray. “In their eyes, we’ve broken the wall in the worst way. But their laws, such as they are, won’t permit them to kill us outright.”
“I find that really hard to believe.”
“That’s because you’re a young, naive dolt.”
I let the insult roll off. There were plenty of political machinations to the Ministry I didn’t understand. And I’d heard Dad complain about them. But what Fleischhacker claimed seemed… What? Farfetched? I only had to look at my nation’s history to know the heights bigotry could reach.
“So you’re dealing the dust to fund an escape.”
He gave a sullen nod.
“What on earth are you thinking?” Carrie shouted and whapped his arm with the back of her hand.
“I was desperate. I am desperate.” He looked up at his wife with pleading eyes. “If we don’t get out of here soon they’re going to find us. They’ll…” He rested his small hand on Carrie’s swollen belly.
I frowned. “No one is going to hurt your child,” I said. “The contract is on you alone.”
He snorted and waved a hand at me. “I’m not talking about your stupid lot.”
“Then who?”
He folded his arms and turned his face away from me. With the kids’ clothes, he looked a lot like a spoiled kid getting his first real scolding.
Carrie watched her husband for a handful of seconds, then she shook her head and turned to me. “There’s this group,” she said. “They call themselves Purifiers.”
She didn’t have to say more. I could figure out the rest myself. Apparently the paranormal world had its own version of the KKK.
“You need to get out of here,” I said. “Now.”
Fleischhacker rolled his eyes. “We know that, idiot. But like I told you, we—”
“There has to be somewhere you can go.” The desperation in my voice startled me. Here I’d gone from wanting to turn Fleischhacker into a wick, and now I found myself invested in saving his life. I looked at Carrie’s belly.
Not just his life.
Carrie said, “Neither of us have family to go to. Our friends are here, so going to them would only put them in danger without making us any safer.”
I hung my head and pinched the bridge of my nose. I wanted to help them, but I couldn’t think of anything I could offer. I didn’t have any money to loan them. Of course, if I killed Fleischhacker, I’d have a nice chunk of change. How was that for irony? Anyway, one contract’s payout wouldn’t last long enough to get them in the clear.
“Well, we can’t hang around here much longer. There’ll be more hunters coming for you, and I doubt many of them will care what your family situation is.”
Carrie’s eyebrows drew together. “Where will we go?”
Another stupid idea popped into my brainless head.
“I know someone who can help.”
Fleischhacker sneered. “Who?”
“Someone who’s been in this business a lot longer than I have.”