I didn’t have long to wait. They ambushed me as I came out of the agency after setting up a shoot.

“Hey, pretty.”

I didn’t even turn, even though it was a female voice calling, not a male.

One man, one woman, and they had me flanked. I rolled my eyes. “If you want to hire me, ask inside.”

“Not as a model.”

“If you were the ones behind the mind controlled kids, forget it. I don’t appreciate being manipulated like that.”

“Fine words from you.” The woman moved slightly in front of me. “We do know exactly who you are.”

“I’m not one for harmful pranks.” My father was…but also a lot of harmless ones. But I had never hurt anyone.

“They wouldn’t have been hurt. We had wards on them.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Could you really be sure of that, given you do know exactly who I am?”

“Please. We need your help.”

“Then you should have asked, not done that…whatever your motivation was.”

I did wonder what it was.

“We had to be sure you could tell the difference.”

I let out a breath. She sounded desperate. “Look. I help people. I protect people. But the way you tested me? It was wrong. It was absolutely and utterly wrong I can’t let that pass.”

“The person you’d be helping wasn’t involved.”

Angry, I brushed past her, quickening my pace away from them. They clearly weren’t up to taking me on, at least in physical combat. At that moment I really didn’t care who needed my help. Or what. I cared that they’d tried to trick me, and there was a part of me that was dismissing them as mortals.

Which meant I needed to get a grip. I wasn’t about to start acting like that, no matter how accurate to some things it might be.

Get a grip. Not an easy thing to do, now or ever. And the only person who could bring me back down to Earth was Kanesha.