A Faerie's Curse (Creepy Hollow #6) by Rachel Morgan Page A

Chase rescued her and gave her a choice: join his team or face the Guild.”
    â€œAnd she chose you guys, of course.”
    â€œYes. She lived with me for a few years, then announced on her seventeenth birthday last year that she wanted a place of her own.” We head upstairs toward the mountain’s entrance hall. “I was a little worried in the beginning that she would simply run away,” Lumethon continues, “but she’s been fiercely loyal to us since the moment Chase took her in. And a valuable addition to the team. Exceptionally stealthy. The places she’s snuck into would blow your mind.”
    Right, and here I am using invisibility to sneak into places. No wonder Ana looks at me with such disdain. “So she would have done a great job with last night’s mission.”
    â€œYes, she probably would have done that one if you hadn’t joined us, but since last night’s mission involved stealing from one of our own clients, we needed to be absolutely certain that whoever we sent wouldn’t be caught. Anyway, enough about that,” she says as we cross the entrance hall and stop by the faerie door. “It’s desensitization time.”
    I shudder inwardly at the thought of the systematic desensitization I’ve been forced to endure every day since I admitted to the rest of my team that I have a phobia of confined spaces. “Yeah, I know. Let’s get it over with. Where are we going this time?”
    â€œBack to Rosenhill Manor Art Gallery.”
    â€œOh, I love it there.”
    Lumethon smiles. “That’s why we’re going back.”
    I follow her through the faerie door to the lake house, where I place my hand on her shoulder as she writes a doorway spell on the wall. Moments later, we walk into the exquisite gardens of Rosenhill Estate. Green lawns, rose bushes and weatherworn statues surround us as we walk uphill toward the old manor house that was once the home of a Seelie Court lord. Now it houses room after room of magnificent art.
    Luna, the old elf lady who saved Chase from his own misery and despair in the months after he ceased to be Draven, knew about this place. She never had the opportunity to visit the manor house herself, but she’d heard tales of the breathtaking artwork contained within and told Chase all about it. After she died and Chase found himself with her artistic ability, he came here for inspiration.
    Lumethon and I walk through the grand entrance of the manor house and pay for a ticket each. Wooden floorboards creak beneath our feet as we walk toward the first room. A kaleidoscope of color drips from every inch of all four walls, the pattern continuously changing as the enchanted paint shifts again and again into a seemingly endless series of designs. It’s mesmerizing, but not exactly relaxing. This isn’t the room we came here for.
    We pass through a room with sculptures that move fluidly from one form into another, and then a room filled with floating glass spheres that each contain miniature scenes constructed entirely from pieces of scrap metal. Another room seems sure to burn up at any moment as flames lick their way across every canvas. It’s an enchantment of the paint, though—paint I’ve been lucky enough to use once—so the canvases remain intact.
    We end up in the water-themed room—my favorite and the most suitable for our purposes. A stream of glittering, silvery water flows diagonally across the floor from one corner of the room to the other where it disappears into the wall. Flat round stones floating above its surface allow visitors to jump across from one side to the other. The canvases on the walls depict scenes of lakes, waterfalls and oceans with enchanted water paint twinkling, twisting and rushing but never leaving any canvas. Lumethon and I use the rocks to get to the other side of the stream where a tree trunk resting on its side serves as a seat. “Are you