“Gilly wanted me to call and tell you she loves you and hopes you’ll be home in time for dinner, and that you should bring back ice cream. Chocolate would be best.”

I suppressed a smile. “She’s watching you make the call, isn’t she?”

“You better believe it. If she wasn’t, I would’ve just called Information. But you know how she gets. She’s got ears like a rabbit.” Cliff chuckled. Our affection for each other didn’t come close to our love for that little girl. “That’s from your side of the family, you know.”

“Most good things are, but yes, she gets her hearing from me,” I said, fiddling with the mirror. Was that a figure or a fingerprint? I couldn’t tell. The man I was following was so far out of my league that he could be strolling naked down an otherwise empty street and still keep me from seeing him.

Abandoning my efforts to make the mirror behave, I pulled a spray bottle full of greenish water out of the glove compartment and liberally misted the glass. Call it experience or call it intuition, but I know a good don’t-look-here spell when I fail to see it. A very good don’t-look-here spell, if I had to break it with a marsh water charm. That’s the sort of trick the purebloods disdain as being practically beneath the humans.

Beggars can’t be choosers, and it didn’t matter if the charm was cheap, because it worked; as soon as the water hit the mirror, the reflection of a tall redheaded man snapped into focus, standing just in front of the restaurant I’d been staking out for the last six hours. A valet pulled up in a sleek-lined sports car painted that particular shade of red peculiar to expensive vehicles and hookers’ lipstick.

The valet could see him, yet I hadn’t been able to: he was only blocking himself against fae eyes. He knew he was being trailed.