Divine Misdemeanors_A Novel

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  The voice that answered Doyle’s question was high pitched though definitely male, but it was querulous with that tone that usually means great age in a human. I’d never heard that tone in the voice of a fey. “Why, I saved a parking spot for you, cousin.”

  “We are not kin, and how did you know to save a parking place for us?” Doyle asked, and there was now no hint of his weakness in the car in his deep voice.

  He ignored the question. “Oh, come. I’m a shape-shifting, illusion-using goblin, and so was your father. Phouka is not so far from Fear Dearg.”

  “I am the Queen’s Darkness, not some nameless Fear Dearg.”

  “Ah, and there’s the rub,” he said in his thin voice. “It’s a name I’m wanting.”

  “What does that mean, Fear Dearg?” Doyle asked.

  “It means I ha’ a story to tell, and it would best be told inside the Fael, where your host and my boss awaits ye. Or would ye deny the hospitality of our establishment?”

  “You work at the Fael?” Doyle asked.

  “I do.”

  “What is your job there?”

  “I am security.”

  “I didn’t know the Fael needed extra security.”

  “Me boss felt the need. Now I will ask once more, will you refuse our hospitality? And think long on this one, cousin, for the old rules still apply to my kind. I have no choice.”

  That was a tricky question, because one of the things that some Fear Deargs were known for was appearing on a dark, wet night and asking to warm before the fire. Or the Fear Dearg could be the only shelter on a stormy night, and a human might wander in, attracted by their fire. If the Fear Dearg were refused or treated discourteously, they would use their glamour for ill. If treated well, they left you unharmed, and sometimes did chores around the house as a thank-you, or left the human with a gift of luck for a time, but usually the best you could hope for was to be left in peace.

  But I could not hide behind Frost’s broad body forever, and I was beginning to feel a little silly. I knew the reputation of the Fear Dearg, and I also knew that for some reason the other fey, especially the old ones, didn’t care for them. I touched Frost’s chest, but he wouldn’t move until Doyle told him to, or I made a fuss. I didn’t want to make a fuss in front of strangers. The fact that my guards sometimes listened more to each other than to me was still something we were working out.

  “Doyle, he has done nothing but be courteous to us.”

  “I have seen what his kind does to mortals.”

  “Is it worse than what I’ve seen our kind do to each other?”

  Frost actually looked down at me then, being alert for whatever threat might, or might not, be coming. The look even through his glasses said that I was oversharing in front of someone who was not a member of our court.

  “We heard what the gold king did to you, Queen Meredith.”

  I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. The gold king was my maternal uncle Taranis, more a great-uncle, and king of the Seelie Court, the golden throng. He’d used magic as a date-rape drug, and I had evidence in a forensic storage unit somewhere that he had raped me. We were trying to get him tried among the humans for that rape. It was some of the worst publicity the Seelie court had ever had.

  I tried to peer around Frost’s body and see who I was talking to, but Doyle’s body blocked me, too, so I talked to the empty air. “I am not queen.”

  “You are not queen of the Unseelie Court, but you are queen of the sluagh, and if I belong to any court left outside the Summerlands, it is King Sholto’s sluagh.”

  Faerie, or the Goddess, or both, had crowned me twice that last night. The first crown had been with Sholto inside his faerie mound. I had been crowned with him as King and Queen of the Sluagh, the dark host, the nightmares of faerie so dark that even the Unseelie would not let them skulk about their own mound, but in a fight they were always the first called. The crown had vanished from me when the second crown, which would have made me high queen of all the Unseelie lands, had appeared on my head. Doyle would have been king to my queen there, and it was once traditional that all the kings of Ireland had married the same woman, the Goddess, who had once been a real queen whom each king “married,” at least for a night. We had not always played by the traditional human rules of monogamy.

  Sholto was one of the fathers of the children I carried, so the Goddess had shown all of us. So technically I was still his queen. Sholto had not pressed that idea in this month back home; he seemed to understand that I was struggling to find my footing in this new, more-permanent exile.

  All I could think to say aloud was, “I didn’t think the Fear Dearg owed allegiance to any court.”

  “Some of us fought with the sluagh in the last wars. It allowed us to bring death and pain without the rest of you good folk”—and he made sure the last phrase held bitterness and contempt in it—“hunting us down and passing sentence on us for doing what is in our nature. The sidhe of either court have no lawful call on the Fear Dearg, do they, kinsman?”

  “I will not acknowledge kinship with you, Fear Dearg, but Meredith is right. You have acted with courtesy. I can do no less.” It was interesting that Doyle had dropped the “Princess” he normally used in front of all lesser fey, but he had not used queen either, so he was interested in the Fear Dearg acknowledging me as queen, and that was very interesting to me.

  “Good,” the Fear Dearg said. “Then I will take you to Dobbin, ah, Robert, he now calls himself. Such richness to be able to name yerself twice. It’s a waste when there are others nameless and left wanting.”

  “We will listen to your tale, Fear Dearg, but first we must talk to any demi-fey who are at the Fael,” I said.

  “Why?” he asked, and there was far too much curiosity in that one word. I remembered then that some Fear Dearg demand a story from their human hosts, and if the story isn’t good enough, they torture and kill them, but if the story is good enough they leave them with a blessing. What would make a being thousands of years old care that much for stray stories, and what was his obsession with names?

  “That is not your business, Fear Dearg,” Doyle said.

  “It’s all right, Doyle. Everyone will know soon enough.”

  “No, Meredith, not here, not on the street.” There was something in the way he said it that made me pause. But it was Frost’s hand squeezing my arm, making me look at him, that made me realize that a Fear Dearg might be able to kill the demi-fey. He might be our killer, for the Fear Dearg walked outside many of the normal rules of our kind, for all this one’s talk of belonging to the kingdom of the sluagh.

  Was our mass murderer standing on the other side of my boyfriends? Wouldn’t that have been convenient? I felt a flash of hope flare inside me, but let it die as quickly as it had risen. I’d worked murder cases before, and it was never that easy. Murderers did not meet you on the street just after you’d left the scene of their crime. But it would be nifty if just this once it really was that easy. Then I realized that Doyle had realized the possibility that the Fear Dearg might be our murderer the moment he saw him; that was why the extreme caution.

  I felt suddenly slow, and not up to the job. I was supposed to be the detective, and Lucy had called me in because of my expertise on faeries. Some expert I turned out to be.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THIS FEAR DEARG WAS SMALLER THAN I BUT ONLY BY A FEW INCHES. He was just under five feet. Once he’d have probably been average size for a human. His face was wizened, with grayish whiskers sticking out from his cheeks like fuzzy muttonchop sideburns. His nose was thin, long, and pointed. His eyes were large for his face and up-tilted at the corners. They were black, and seemed to have no iris until you realized that, like Doyle’s, his irises were simply as black as his pupils, so you had trouble seeing them.

  He walked ahead of us up the sidewalk, with its happy couples walking hand in hand and its families all smiling, all laughing. The children stared openly at the Fear Dearg. The adults took quick loo
ks at him, but it was us that they stared at. I realized that we looked like ourselves. I hadn’t thought to use glamour to make us look human, or at least less noticeable. I had been too careless for words.

  The parents did double takes, then smiled, and tried to make eye contact. If I did that, they might want to talk, and we really needed to warn the demi-fey. Normally I tried to be friendly, but not today.

  Glamour was the ability to cloud the minds of others so that they saw what you wished them to see, not what was actually there. It had always been my strongest magic, until a few months ago. It was still the magic I was most familiar with, and it flowed easily across my skin now.

  I spoke low to Doyle and Frost. “We’re getting stared at, and the press isn’t here to complain.”

  “I can hide.”

  “Not in this light you can’t,” I said. Doyle had this uncanny ability to hide like some kind of movie ninja. I’d known he was the Darkness, and you never see the dark before it gets you, but I hadn’t realized that it was more than just centuries of practice. He could actually wrap shadows around himself and hide. But he couldn’t hide us, and he needed something other than bright sunlight to wrap around himself.

  I pictured my hair simply red, human auburn, but not the spun garnet of my true color. I made my skin the paleness to go with the hair, but not the near pearlescent white of my own skin. I spread the glamour out to flow over Frost’s skin as we walked. His skin was the same moonlight white as my own, so it was easier to change his color at the same time. I darkened his hair to a rich gray and kept darkening it as we moved until it was a brunette shade that was black with gray undertones. It matched the white skin and made him look like he’d gone Goth. He was dressed wrong for it, but for some reason I found this color to be the easiest for me on him. I could have chosen almost any color if I had had enough time, but we were attracting attention, and I didn’t want that today. Once too many people “saw” us as us, the glamour might break under their knowledge. So it was down and dirty, change as we walked, and a thought out to the people who had recognized us, so that they would do a double take and think they’d been mistaken.

  The trick was to change hair and skin gradually, smoothly, and to make people not notice that you were doing it, so it was really two types of glamour in one. The first just simply an illusion of our appearance changing, and the second an Obi Wan moment where the people just didn’t see what they thought they saw.

  Changing Doyle’s appearance was always harder for some reason. I wasn’t sure why, but it took just a little more concentration to turn his black skin to a deep, rich brown, and the oh-so-dark hair to a brown that matched the skin. The best I could do quickly was to make him look vaguely Indian, as in American Indian. I left the graceful curves of his ears with their earrings, even though now that I’d changed his skin to a human shade, the pointed ears marked him as a faerie wannabe, no, a sidhe wannabe. They all seemed to think that the sidhe had pointy ears like something out of fiction, when in fact it marked Doyle as not pure-blooded, but part lesser fey. He almost never hid his ears, a defiant gesture, a finger in the eye of the court. The wannabes were also fond of calling the sidhe elves. I blamed Tolkien and his elves for that.

  I’d toned us down, but we were still eye-catching, and the men were still exotic, but I would have had to stop moving and concentrate fully to change them more completely.

  The Fear Dearg had enough glamour that he could have changed his appearance, too. He simply didn’t care if they stared. But then a phone call to the right number wouldn’t make the press descend on him until we had to call other bodyguards to get us to our car. That had happened twice since we came back to Los Angeles. I didn’t want a repeat.

  The Fear Dearg dropped back to talk to us. “I have never seen a sidhe able to use glamour so well.”

  “That’s high praise coming from you,” I said. “Your people are known for their ability at glamour.”

  “The lesser fey are all better at glamour than the bigger folk.”

  “I’ve seen sidhe make garbage look like a feast and have people eat it,” I said.

  Doyle said, “And the Fear Dearg need a leaf to create money, a cracker to be a cake, a log to be a purse of gold. You need something to pin the glamour to for it to work.”

  “So do I,” I said. I thought about it. “So do the sidhe that I’ve seen able to do it.”

  “Oh, but once the sidhe could conjure castles out of thin air, and food to tempt any mortal that was mere air,” the Fear Dearg said.

  “I’ve not seen …” Then I stopped, because the sidhe didn’t like admitting out loud that their magic was fading. It was considered rude, and if the Queen of Air and Darkness heard you, the punishment would be a slap, if you were lucky, and if you weren’t, you’d bleed for reminding her that her kingdom was lessening.

  The Fear Dearg gave a little skip, and Frost was forced a little back from my side, or he would have stepped on the smaller fey. Doyle growled at him, a deep rumbling bass that matched the huge black dog he could shift into. Frost stepped forward, forcing the Fear Dearg to step ahead or be stepped on.

  “The sidhe have always been petty,” he said, as if it didn’t bother him at all, “but you were saying, my queen, that you’d never seen such glamour from the sidhe. Not in your lifetime, eh?”

  The door of the Fael was in front of us now. It was all glass and wood, very quaint and old-fashioned, as if it were a store from decades before this one.

  “I need to speak with one of the demi-fey,” I said.

  “About the murders, eh?” he asked.

  We all stopped moving for a heartbeat, then I was suddenly behind the men and could only glimpse the edge of his red coat around their bodies.

  “Oh, ho,” the Fear Dearg said with a chuckle. “You think it’s me. You think I slit their throats for them.”

  “We do now,” Doyle said.

  The Fear Dearg laughed, and it was the kind of laugh that if you heard it in the dark, you’d be afraid. It was the kind of laugh that enjoyed pain.

  “You can talk to the demi-fey who fled here to tell the tale. She was full of all sorts of details. Hysterical she was, babbling about the dead being dressed like some child’s story complete with picked flowers in their hands.” He made a disgusted sound. “Every faery knows that no flower faery would ever pick a flower and kill it. They tend them.”

  I hadn’t thought of that. He was absolutely right. It was a human mistake, just like the illustration in the first place. Some fey could keep a picked flower alive, but it was not a common talent. Most demi-fey didn’t like bouquets of flowers. They smelled of death.

  Whoever our killer was, they were human. I needed to tell Lucy. But I had another thought. I tried to push past Doyle, but it was like trying to move a small mountain; you could push, but you didn’t make much progress. I spoke around him. “Did this demi-fey see the killings?”

  “Nay”—and what I could see of the Fear Dearg’s small wizened face seemed truly sad—“she went to tend the plants that are hers on the hillside and found the police already there.”

  “We still need to talk to her,” I said.

  He nodded the slip of his face that I could see between Doyle and Frost’s bodies. “She’s in the back with Dobbin having a spot of something to calm her nerves.”

  “How long has she been here?”

  “Ask her yourself. You said you wanted to talk to a demi-fey, not her specifically. Why did you want one to speak with, my queen?”

  “I wanted to warn the others that they might be in danger.”

  He turned so that one eye stared through the opening the men had left us. The black eye curled around the edges, and I realized he was grinning. “Since when did the sidhe give a rat’s ass how many flower faeries were lost in L.A.? A dozen fade every year from too much metal and technology, but neither faerie court will let them back in even to save their lives.” The grin faded as he finished, and left him angry.

  I fough
t to keep the surprise off my face. If what he’d just said was true, I hadn’t known it. “I care or I wouldn’t be here.”

  He nodded, solemn. “I hope you care, Meredith, daughter of Essus, I hope you truly do.”

  Frost turned and Doyle was left to give the Fear Dearg his full attention. Frost was looking behind us, and I realized we had a little line forming.

  “Do you mind?” a man asked.

  “Sorry,” I said, and smiled. “We were catching up with old friends.” He smiled before he could catch himself, and his voice was less irritated as he said, “Well, can you catch up inside?”

  “Yes, of course,” I said. Doyle opened the door, made the Fear Dearg go first, and in we went.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE FAEL WAS ALL POLISHED WOOD, LOVINGLY HAND CARVED. I knew that most of the interior woodwork had been recovered from an old West saloon/bar that was being demolished. The scent of some herbal and sweet musk polish blended with the rich aroma of tea, and overall was the scent of coffee, so rich you could taste it on your tongue. They must have just finished grinding some fresh for a customer, because Robert insisted that the coffee be tightly covered. He wanted to keep the freshness in, but it was more so that the coffee didn’t overwhelm the gentler scent of his teas.

  Every table was full, and there were people sitting at the curved edge of the bar, waiting for tables or taking their tea at the bar. There was almost an even number of humans to fey, but they were all lesser fey. If I dropped the glamour we would have been the only sidhe. There weren’t that many sidhe in exile in Los Angeles, but the ones who were here saw the Fael as a hangout for the lesser beings. There were a couple of clubs far away from here that catered to the sidhe and the sidhe wannabes. Now that I’d lightened Doyle’s skin, the ears marked him as a possible wannabe who’d gotten those pointy ear implants so he’d look like an “elf.” There was actually another tall man sitting at a far table with his own implants. He’d even grown his blond hair long and straight. He was handsome, but there was a shape to his broad shoulders that said he hit the gym a lot, and just a roughness to him that marked him as human and not sidhe, like a sculpture that hadn’t been smoothed quite enough.