Divine Misdemeanors_A Novel

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  “I take it his costar is fey, not human,” I said, moving in close to Rhys so the reporters just feet away wouldn’t hear.

  “His main leading ladies, yes, but he’s done some with humans.”

  I looked at Rhys, and his one eye sparkled with appreciation of my surprise. I said, “Rhys, I couldn’t be with Uther and not be hurt, and I’m only part human.”

  “My understanding is that the humans are more fluffers and foreplay.”

  Galen leaned in and said, “I don’t know, I thought the fey-on-fey films were more shocking. Watching all that go on in such a small place …” He made a face. The sidhe are not easily squicked, so the fact that he made that face said a lot about the squick factor of the film.

  “You watched them?” I said.

  “Uther wanted to see them, and he didn’t want to watch alone. He invited the men at the agency over to sort of hold his hand.”

  I wanted to call and tell Lucy what we’d learned from Jordan but I didn’t dare do so this close to running recorders and sharp-eared reporters.

  Sholto drew me in against his body abruptly. Saraid’s hand just appeared and was holding the arm of a man with a tape recorder in his hand. “Please, do not touch the princess,” she said, in a voice that did not match her brilliant smile.

  “Sure, sorry,” he mumbled.

  She let go of his arm, but he stayed so close to Galen that if we did get to move forward he’d have to move so Galen could step forward at all. The reporter said, “Princess Meredith, what do you think of the reporters going through the window of your cousin’s deli?”

  “I hope no one was hurt.”

  A woman screamed from just in back of him, “Meredith, did you ever sleep with Uther?”

  I just shook my head.

  A wave of policemen moved in and began pushing them back, helping us move forward. Sholto kept me pressed against him. Shielding me from as much of the cameras as he could. I was happy to be moving, and happier not to be trapped with the questions. I was used to sex questions about me and the men in my life, but Uther and the other detectives at the agency, except for Roane, whom I’d actually dated, were off that list. I liked it better that way.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  UTHER RODE IN THE FAR BACK OF THE SUV WITH HIS KNEES TUCKED to his chin and his upper body bent until his head was almost between his shins. He looked squished and totally uncomfortable. Jeremy had driven him to the scene in the van, where he fit in the back, but the boss man had to stay behind and continue to try to help the police. I sat in the middle seats with Galen on one side and Sholto on the other. Saraid rode in the small jump seat that was the last seat in the back, which was one of the reasons Uther was wedged so close. Cathbodua rode in front with Rhys. I turned as far as the seat belt would let me so I could see Uther.

  He looked like what he was, someone impossibly tall shoved into a normal-size space. But the unhappiness on his face wasn’t about the fit; he was used to trying to fit into a world made for smaller folk.

  “How did I miss this whole Constantine problem?” I asked.

  He made an umph sound. “You and I once discussed you helping me lift my long fast. You said no, and I respect that. If I started talking to you about pornographic movies featuring another Jack-in-Irons, I feared you might misconstrue my motives.”

  “You thought I’d take it as flirting?” I asked.

  He nodded, settling his lips around the curve of his curling tusks the way another man might settle a toothpick. It was a thinking gesture for him.

  “Bragging perhaps, or even seduction. I’ve had more human women proposition me since Constantine’s movies than ever in my life.” He crossed his big arms over his chest.

  Galen turned beside me so he could see the big man, too. “And why is that a problem?” he asked.

  “You watched the films. No human woman could survive.”

  “Now, that’s bragging,” Saraid said, turning toward him.

  “It isn’t,” he said. “It’s truth. I’ve seen what my brethren can do to a human woman. It was one of the worst things I’d ever seen done to a human by a fey, and that includes the nightflyers of the sluagh.” He remembered Sholto too late and gave a glance his way. “I mean no offense, Lord Sholto.”

  “None taken,” Sholto said, managing to turn so he could both see the big man better and have an excuse to touch my thigh through my hose. Was it nerves, and if so, why? Why did the conversation make him nervous?

  Sholto continued, “I, too, have seen what the royals of the nightflyers do to human women. It is …” He simply shook his head. “It is the reason I forbade them from seducing outside our kingdom.”

  “Seduction, you call it,” Saraid said, and gave him a less-than-friendly look. “There are other names for it, Shadow Lord.”

  His triple yellow and gold eyes gave as cold a look as her blue, which is harder with a warmer color, but Sholto managed. “I am not a product of rape, if that’s the story that the Unseelie sidhe tell.”

  There was a tightening around the eyes that said he’d hit the mark, but all she said out loud was, “You were a babe. How do you know how your birth came about?”

  “I know who my father was, and he was not one to take his pleasure unwilling.”

  “So he says.” Saraid glared at him.

  His fingers began to rub back and forth on the hose that stood between him and my skin. I knew why he needed touch now. “Said, for he died before ever we came to this country. There are pleasures among the nightflyers that do not exist elsewhere.”

  She made a face, the face Sholto had been seeing on sidhe women from the moment he couldn’t hide the tentacles and extra bits. That old pain was still there etched in his handsome face. He could truly be sidhe now and have it just as a tattoo, but he didn’t forget how he’d been treated when he could do no more than hide it with glamour.

  I laid my hand on the side of his neck. He actually startled at the touch, and then seemed to realize that it was me and relaxed into it.

  “I do not think there are many among even the Unseelie who would take one of you, spine and all, and call it pleasure,” Saraid said.

  “Sholto’s father was not one of the royals, so the spine wasn’t there to be an issue,” I said. I curved my hand around his neck so my fingers could rest at his hairline and the warmth of the back of his neck under his ponytail.

  “So he says.” Saraid glared at him again.

  Galen’s voice was mild as he said, “So any sidhe woman who would bed a nightflyer would be a pervert of the worst sort?”

  She folded her arms across her chest and nodded. “To sleep with any of the sluagh is one of the few evils.”

  “I’m a pervert then,” I said.

  She looked startled, raising her eyes to me. “No, of course not. He is no longer the Queen’s Perverse Creature. He can be as sidhe as any other with his new magic.”

  I laughed then, and said, “Have all of you female guards been imagining him coming to my bed only with his sidhe body and none of his nightflyer parts?”

  Saraid was surprised again and didn’t try to keep it off her face. “Of course.”

  I leaned into Sholto, cuddling against his body as much as my seat belt and the turning in the seat would allow. “There are things that his extra bits can do that usually takes four men to accomplish, and even then the arms and legs get in the way.”

  Saraid looked ill.

  Sholto wrapped his arms around me and pulled me close, his head resting against my hair. I didn’t have to see his face to know he was wearing a satisfied expression.

  Galen put a hand on the other man’s shoulder. I felt Sholto tense a little, and then he relaxed again, though I knew he was puzzled. Galen had never shared a bed with the two of us. In fact, none of the other men had. Sholto wasn’t close enough friends with any of the other men to be that comfortable with them.

  “Sholto saved our lives by getting us to Los Angeles before Cel could come after Merry,” Galen
said. “No one else among all the sidhe still have the power of transporting that many others by magic except for the King of the Sluagh. He helped Merry take vengeance for her grandmother’s murder.”

  “After he killed the grandmother,” Cathbodua said, finally joining in from the front seat.

  Rhys said, “You weren’t there. You didn’t see the spell turn poor Hettie into a weapon to kill her own grandchild. If Sholto hadn’t killed her, Merry might be dead now, or I’d have had to kill my old friend. He saved me from that, and he saved Merry. Don’t talk about something unless you know what you are talking about.” His voice was as grim as I had ever heard it. He had been a frequent visitor at my Gran’s bed-and-breakfast, and had helped keep her company the three years I had had to hide away from even her.

  “If you say it is the truth, then I will believe you,” Cathbodua said.

  “I will take oath on it,” Rhys said.

  “That won’t be necessary,” she said, but she glanced back at all of us, and said, “I apologize, King Sholto, but perhaps Saraid or I should tell you why we have such a hatred of the nightflyers.”

  “I know that Prince Cel had made friends of a sort with one of the dispossessed royal nightflyers.” He pressed his face into my hair as he spoke, as if it were too awful to look straight at.

  “You knew the prince was using him to torture us.” Saraid’s voice was outraged, and her anger translated into a flash of warmth as her magic began to rise.

  “I killed him when I found out,” Sholto said.

  “What did you say?” Saraid asked.

  “I said, when I found out, I killed the nightflyer who was helping the prince torture you. Did you not wonder why it stopped?”

  “Prince Cel said he was rewarding us,” Cathbodua said.

  “He stopped because I killed his playmate and made of him an example so that no one else among us would be tempted to try to replace him in Cel’s fantasies. He told me before he died that the prince had made for himself a spine of metal so they could tear and rape together.” The slightest of tremors went through his body, as if the horror of it was still with him.

  “Then we owe you a debt, King Sholto,” Cathbodua said.

  A sound escaped Saraid. I turned in Sholto’s arms and found tears gliding down her face. “Thank Goddess, Dogmaela was not here to find out that our prince’s kindness was not a softening of him, but the action of a real king.” Her voice never showed the tears I could see. If you’d just heard the voice you wouldn’t have known.

  “It was that kindness, that promise of never doing that again to her, that helped him persuade Dogmaela to participate in a fantasy that required cooperation,” Cathbodua said.

  “Do not tell,” Saraid said. “We swore to never tell such things. It is enough that we endured them.”

  “There are things the queen made us do,” Rhys said, as he turned onto a side street, “that we never speak of either.”

  Suddenly Saraid was sobbing. She put her hands in front of her face and cried as if her heart would break. Between sobs she said, “I am so glad … to be here … with you, Princess … I could not do it … could not endure … I had decided to let myself fade.” Then she simply wept.

  Uther laid an awkward hand on her shoulder, but she didn’t seem to notice. I touched her hand where it lay against her face, and she turned and held my fingers with hers, still hiding her crying from our sight. Galen reached across and touched her shining hair.

  She wrapped her hand more tightly around mine, and then she lowered her other hand, her eyes still closed with her weeping. She held out that weeping hand. It was a moment before Sholto and I realized what she was doing. Then, slowly, hesitatingly, he reached out and took her hand.

  She grabbed onto him and held both our hands tightly as she shook and cried. It was only as the weeping began to quiet that she stared up at us, at him, with eyes shining blue and stars with tears. “Forgive me for thinking that all princes and all kings are like Cel.”

  “There is nothing to forgive, because the kings and princes are like that at the courts still. Look what the king did to our Merry.”

  “But you are not like that, and the other men are not like that.”

  “We have all suffered at the hands of those who were supposed to keep us safe,” Sholto said.

  Galen stroked her hair as if she were a child. “We’ve all bled for the prince and the queen.”

  She bit her lip, still clinging to our hands. Uther patted her shoulder. “You all make me glad that Jack-in-Irons are solitary faerie and beholden to no court.”

  Saraid nodded.

  And then Uther said, “I’m the only one who can reach you for a hug. Will you take it from someone as ugly as me?”

  Saraid turned to look at him, and Galen had to move his hand away so that she could. She looked surprised, but she looked into his eyes and saw what I’d always seen: kindness. She simply nodded.

  Uther slid his big arm across her shoulders. It was as careful and gentle a hug as I’d ever seen, and Saraid let herself fold into that hug. She let him hold her, and buried her face against his wide chest.

  It was Uther’s turn to look surprised, and then he looked pleased. His kind might be solitary faeries, but Uther liked people, and solitaire wasn’t his favorite game. He sat in the back, crammed into the tight space but he got to hold the shining, beautiful woman. He got to wrap her tears in his strong arm and hold her against a chest that was as deep, with a heart that was as big, as any I’d ever known.

  He held Saraid the rest of the way home, and in a way she held him right back, because sometimes and especially for a man, being able to be someone’s big strong shoulder to cry on helps you not need to cry so very much yourself.

  On that drive Uther wasn’t alone, and neither was Saraid. Sholto and Galen held me. Cathbodua even put a friendly hand on Rhys’s shoulder. The sidhe had lost the knack of comforting each other with touch. We’d been taught that that was something for the lesser fey, a sign of their weakness and the sidhe’s superiority. But I’d learned months ago that that was just a story to mask the fact that the sidhe no longer trusted each other enough to touch like that. Touch had begun to mean pain instead of comfort, but not here, not for us. We were sidhe and lesser fey, if you could call a nine-foot-tall man lesser, but in that moment we were all just simply fey and it was good.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  WE PULLED UP IN FRONT OF WHAT I’D STARTED TO THINK OF AS home, but it was Maeve Reed’s estate in Holmby Hills. She had assured us through e-mails and phone calls that she wanted us to stay as long as we needed to. I worried that eventually she’d grow tired of us all, but for today, and until she got back from Europe, it was home.

  The reporters who had followed us from the crime scene merged with the ones whom the neighbors were letting camp on their property, for a fee of course, and we were all home. Rhys hit the button that opened the gates in the tall stone wall and in we went. It had become automatic to ignore the shouted questions from the reporters who rushed forward. They stayed off the edge of Maeve’s property. I kept waiting for one of them to notice that they never, ever crossed that invisible line, but so far they hadn’t.

  We were within our rights, and so was Maeve, to prevent trespassing. We were even allowed to use magic to prevent it as long as said magic wasn’t harmful. We’d simply reinforced Maeve’s own wards, and the reporters stopped every time just like we wanted. It was nice that something was doing just what we wanted.

  I’d called Lucy on the ride over, and told her everything Jordan had told us. It helped, but not enough. Julian texted me and told me that his brother was fine and wouldn’t have to be held overnight at the hospital. Marshal the EMT wasn’t the only one who had started treating shocky psychics more seriously. Marshal had just been the first medical professional to admit why. I appreciated that.

  Rhys pulled up in front of the big main house because we’d moved into it from the guest house, giving the guest house over to our n
ewer members. I’d asked Maeve’s permission before the move, but again it left me wondering what we’d do when she rightfully wanted her house back. I put the thought away, and concentrated on the more immediate problems like a magical serial killer, and would Barinthus defy me or would he be here for dinner, or…

  Then the big double doors opened and Nicca and Biddy were there waving at us. He had his arm across her shoulders and she had hers around his waist. He was just a shade taller than her six feet of sidhe warrior. His long brown hair was in two knee-length braids on either side of his handsome face, but it was the smile in his brown face that made him truly beautiful. Biddy’s smile echoed his, though she was pale, her black curls cut short around her face. They both had brown eyes, and the baby probably would, too. She’d just started to show a little, though unless you knew what you were looking for under her shorts and tank top you wouldn’t know it was a baby.

  Her bare arms and legs were long, and showed muscles moving smooth under her skin as she came around to my side of the car. Nicca got Rhys’s door. He was a little less muscled than she was, though not by much, but the easy happiness that they seemed to feel for each other made me happy every time I saw it. They were the first of us to get officially married, and it seemed to agree with both of them.

  Biddy didn’t get the door for Cathbodua. She had seen where I was and got the back door, which actually meant she was letting Galen out first. “Welcome home, everybody,” Biddy said. She glowed not just with the pregnancy, but with love. Whenever I was around them I had hopes that the rest of our sidhe would pair up and it would be the beginning of a lot of happily ever after for a lot of our people.

  “Good to be home,” Galen said as he scooted out. Nicca got the door on the other side and Sholto scooted out, too. They both put their hands back in for me, and there was that awkward moment when the two men looked across the car at each other. But it was Galen, and most of the time he made things easier, not harder.