Divine Misdemeanors_A Novel

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  “You mean the star tip and the flashy outer covering?” Carmichael asked. She shook her head, sending her brown ponytail bobbing over her lab coat. “Some of the stones had metaphysical properties that helped amp up the magic, but it was all just to make it pretty and to hide this.”

  I stared at the long, smoothly polished wood. “Why hide it?”

  “Don’t look at it with just your eyes, Merry,” Barinthus said. He towered over all of us in his long cream trench coat. He was actually wearing a suit under the coat, though he’d left the tie off. It was the most clothes I’d seen him in since he got to California. He’d put his hair back in a ponytail, but even contained, the hair still moved a little too much for ordinary hair, as if even standing here in this very modern building with all the latest, greatest scientific equipment around us there was still some invisible current of water playing with his hair. He wasn’t doing it on purpose; it was just his hair this close to the ocean, apparently.

  I didn’t like that—it sounded like an order—but I did it, because he was right. Most humans have to work at seeing magic, doing magic. I was part human, but in one way I was all fey. I had to shield every day, every minute, to not see magic. I had shielded heavily when I entered this area of the forensics labs because it was the room where they kept the really powerful magical items that they didn’t know what to do with, or were in the process of de-magicking, or figuring out a way to destroy that wouldn’t blow up other things. Some magic items once made are difficult to destroy safely.

  I had upped my shields because I didn’t want to have to wade through all the magic in the room. The anti-magic boxes kept the things from working, but didn’t keep the wizards from being able to study them. It was a very nice bit of magical engineering. I took a deep breath, let it out, and dropped my shields just a little bit.

  I tried to concentrate on just the wand, but of course there were other things in the room, and not all of them reacted to just vision. Something in the room called out, “Free me of this prison and I will grant you a wish.” Something else smelled like chocolate, no, hard cherry candy, no, it was like the scent of everything sweet and good, and with the scent there was a desire to find it and pick it up so I could have all that goodness.

  I shook my head and concentrated on the wand. The pale wood was covered in magical symbols. They crawled over the wood, glowing yellow and white, and here and there a spark of orange/red flame, but it wasn’t fire exactly, it was as if the magic were sparking. I’d never seen that before.

  “It’s almost like the magic has a short in it,” I said.

  “That’s what I said,” Carmichael said.

  Wilson said, “I thought it might be extra power like little pieces of magical battery meant to up the spell.” He was tall, taller than all the men except for Barinthus, with short pale hair that was going from gray to white. Wilson was barely thirty. His hair had gone gray after he’d detonated a major holy relic meant to bring about the end of the world. Anything meant to bring about the end of the world that might actually do it was always destroyed. The problem was that destroying something that powerful wasn’t always the safest occupation. Wilson was on the magical equivalent of the bomb squad. He was one of a handful of human wizards across the country certified for high-holy-relic disposal. Some of the other magic bomb techs thought Wilson had literally had a decade of his life span blown away with his old hair color.

  He pushed his wire-framed glasses more firmly up his nose. He still looked like a really tall bookish computer nerd, and he was except that he was a bookish magic nerd, and according to the other magic techs either the bravest of them or one crazy motherfucker. I was quoting. The fact that only Wilson and Carmichael were still working on it and that it was in this room meant that the wand had done something unpleasant.

  “Did the policeman who Gilda hit with this wand die or something?” I asked.

  “No,” Carmichael said.

  “No. What have you heard?” Wilson asked.

  She frowned at him.

  “What?” he asked.

  I said, “This room is only for things that scare the police. Major relics, things designed to do bad things that you haven’t figured out how to de-magick or destroy yet. What did Gilda’s wand do to earn a place here?”

  The two wizards looked at each other.

  “Whatever you hold back,” Jeremy said, “may be the key to deciphering this wand’s power.”

  “Tell us what you see first,” Wilson said.

  “I’ve told you what I think,” Jeremy said.

  “You said this might be sidhe workmanship. I want to know what some sidhe think of it.” Wilson looked from one to another of us; his face was very serious now. He was studying us the way he’d study anything magical that interested him. Wilson had the unsettling tendency to see the fey as another type of magical thing sometimes, as if he’d study us to see what we’d do.

  The men looked at me. I shrugged and said, “Magical symbols in white and yellow are crawling over the wood with those odd sparks of orangey red. The symbols aren’t static but seem to be still moving. That’s unusual. Magical symbols glow sometimes to the inner eye, but they aren’t this … fresh, like the paint hasn’t dried.”

  The men with me nodded. “That’s why I thought it might be a sidhe creation,” Jeremy said.

  “I don’t follow,” I said.

  “The last time I saw magic that stayed that fresh, it was an enchanted item made by one of your people’s great wizards. They hide the core of the magic behind metalwork, or living greenery that is kept fresh by the magic, but it’s all pretend, Merry. It’s just meant to hide the core.”

  “I understand what you’re saying, but why does that make it sidhe workmanship?”

  “Your people are the only ones I’ve ever seen who could keep magic interlaid over something this fresh and vital.”

  “We’ve never seen anything able to do this,” Wilson said.

  “What makes it sidhe?” I asked.

  “It isn’t,” Barinthus said.

  We looked at him.

  Jeremy looked a little uncomfortable, but he looked at the tall man and asked, “Why isn’t it sidhe magic?”

  Barinthus managed to look as disdainful as I’d ever seen him. He didn’t get along with Jeremy. I’d thought it was personal at first, but realized it was some prejudice Barinthus had against Jeremy being a Trow. It was like a racial thing for Barinthus, as if a Trow wasn’t worthy enough to be the boss of us.

  “I doubt I could explain it in a way you would understand,” Barinthus said.

  Jeremy’s face darkened.

  I turned to Wilson and Carmichael, smiling, and said, “Could you excuse us for a minute? I’m sorry, but if you could just step over there somewhere.”

  They looked at each other, then at Jeremy’s angry face and Barinthus’s haughty figure, and they went to stand away from us. No one wants to be standing right next to the seven-foot-tall man when he starts a fight.

  I turned back to the seven-foot-tall man. “Enough,” I said, and I poked a finger into his chest, hard enough to move him a little. “Jeremy is my boss. He pays us most of the money that clothes and feeds all of us, including you, Barinthus.”

  He looked down at me, and two feet is enough distance to make haughty work really well, but I’d had all I was taking from this ex-sea god.

  “You aren’t bringing in any money. You don’t contribute a damned thing to the upkeep of the fey here in L.A., so before you go all high and mighty on us, I’d think about this. Jeremy is more valuable to me and to the rest of us than you are.”

  That got through the haughtiness, and I saw uncertainty on his face. He hid it, but it was in there. “You didn’t say that you needed me to contribute in that way.”

  “We may be getting Maeve Reed’s houses for free, but we can’t keep letting her feed the army of us. When she comes back from Europe she may want her house back, all her houses back. What then?”

  He frowne
d.

  “Yeah, that’s right. We are more than a hundred people, counting the Red Caps, and they’re camping out on her estate because the houses already won’t hold everyone. You don’t get it. We have what amounts to a faerie court, but we don’t have a royal treasury, or magic to clothe and feed us. We don’t have a faerie mound to house us all that will just grow bigger as we need it.”

  “Your wild magic created a new piece of faerie inside the gates of Maeve’s land,” he said.

  “Yes, and Taranis used that piece of faerie to kidnap me, so we can’t use it to house anyone until we can guarantee that our enemies can’t use it to attack us.”

  “Rhys has a sithen now. More will come.”

  “And until we know that our enemies can’t use that new piece of faerie to attack us, too, we can’t move many people in there.”

  “It’s an apartment building, Barinthus, not a traditional sithen,” Rhys said.

  “An apartment building?”

  Rhys nodded. “It magically appeared on a street and moved two buildings so that it could appear in the middle of them, but it looks like a rundown apartment building. It’s definitely a sithen, but it’s like the old ones. I open a door one time and the next time there’s a different room behind the door. It’s wild magic, Barinthus. We can’t move people in there until I know what it does, and what plans it has.”

  “It is that powerful?” he said.

  Rhys nodded. “It feels it, yes.”

  “More sithens will come,” Barinthus said.

  “Maybe, but until they do, we need money. We need as many people as possible bringing in money. That includes you.”

  “You didn’t tell me that you wanted me to take the bodyguarding jobs he offered.”

  “Don’t call him ‘he’; his name is Jeremy. Jeremy Grey, and he’s been making a living out here among the humans for decades, and those skills are a hell of a lot more useful to me now than your ability to make the ocean come up and smash into a house. Which was childish, by the way.”

  “The people in question don’t need bodyguards. They simply want me to stand around and be stared at.”

  “No, they want you to stand around and be handsome and attract attention to them and their lives.”

  “I am not a freak to be paraded for cameras.”

  “No one remembers that story from the fifties, Barinthus,” Rhys said.

  One reporter had called Barinthus the Fish Man because of the collapsible webbing between his fingers. That reporter had died in a boating accident. Eyewitnesses said that the water just came up and slapped the boat.

  Barinthus turned away from us, his hands going into his coat pockets. Doyle said, “Frost and I have both guarded humans who didn’t need guarding. We have stood and let them admire us and pay money for it.”

  “You did one job and then you refused after that,” Frost said to Barinthus. “What happened to make you say no after that?”

  “I told Merry it was beneath me to pretend to guard someone when I should be guarding her.”

  “Did the client try to seduce you?” Frost asked.

  Barinthus shook his head; his hair moved more than it should have, like the ocean on a windy day. “Seduction is not crude enough for what the woman did.”

  “She touched you,” Frost said, and just the way he said it made me look at him.

  “You say that like it’s happened to you, too.”

  “They invite us to the parties to do more than guard them, Merry, you know that.”

  “I know they want media attention but none of you told me that the clients had gotten that out of hand.”

  “We’re supposed to be protecting you, Meredith,” Doyle said, “not the other way around.”

  “Is that why you and Frost are back to guarding mostly just me?”

  “See,” Barinthus said, “you’ve distanced yourself from it, too.”

  “But we help Meredith with her investigations. We didn’t just stop doing the parties and then hide away by the sea,” Doyle said.

  “Part of the problem is that you haven’t picked a partner,” Rhys said.

  “I don’t know what you mean by that.”

  “I work with Galen, and we watch each other’s backs, and make sure that the only hands that touch us are the ones we want touching each other. A partner isn’t just to watch your back in a battle, Barinthus.”

  That arrogance that Frost hid behind was back on Barinthus’s face, but I realized that for him it wasn’t just a version of a blank face.

  “Do you honestly believe that no one among the men is worthy to partner with you?” I asked.

  He just looked at me, which was answer enough, I supposed. He looked at Doyle. “Once I would have been happy to work with Darkness.”

  “But not now that I’ve partnered with Frost,” he said.

  “You have chosen your friends.”

  I wondered for a moment if Barinthus had a crush on Doyle, or did his words mean only what he said. The fact that I’d never realized he was more than my father’s friend had made me question a lot of things.

  “It’s okay,” Rhys said. “You and I have never gotten along.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Old news. If you want to stay here, then you need to contribute in a real way, Barinthus. You’re going to start by explaining to Jeremy and the nice police wizards why that isn’t sidhe magic.” I gave as good eye contact as I could with a two-foot height difference. I guess with the three-inch heels it was a little less, but it was still a neck-craning moment. It’s always hard to look tough when you’re looking that far up at someone.

  His hair flared out around him for all the world as if it were underwater, though I knew it would be dry to the touch. It was a new show of growing power, but I’d already noticed that it seemed to be an emotional reaction for him.

  “Is that a no, or a yes?” I asked.

  “I will try to explain,” he said at last.

  “Fine, good, let’s get this done so we can go home.”

  “Are you tired?” Frost asked.

  “Yes.”

  Barinthus said, “I am a fool. You may not look it yet, but you are with child. I should be taking care of you. Instead I am making things harder for you.”

  I nodded. “That’s about what I was thinking.” I led the way back to the police and Jeremy. We all gathered around the wand again. Barinthus didn’t apologize, but he did explain.

  “If it was truly sidhe workmanship it would not have the power flares. If I understand what electrical shorts are, then that’s accurate. The flaring points mark weak spots in the magic, as if the person who enchanted it didn’t have enough power to make the magic smoothly. The flaring points are also as Wizard Wilson says, moments when the power grows stronger. I believe one of those power flares is what harmed the policeman who was originally hurt.”

  “So if you had made it, or another sidhe, then the magical marks would be smooth and the power would be even,” Wilson said.

  Barinthus nodded.

  “Not to be rude,” Carmichael said, “but aren’t the sidhe less powerful than they once were magically?”

  There was that uncomfortable moment when someone says something that everyone knows, but no one is supposed to talk about. It was Rhys who said, “That would be true.”

  “Sorry, but if that’s true, then why couldn’t this be a sidhe with less control of his, or her, magic? Maybe it’s the best the wizard could do?”

  Barinthus shook his head. “No.”

  “Her logic is sound,” Doyle said.

  “You see the symbols; you know what they are for, Darkness. We are forbidden such magic, and have been for centuries.”

  “These symbols are old enough that I’m not familiar with all of them,” I said.

  “The wand is designed to harvest magic,” Rhys said.

  I frowned at him. “You mean to make your own magic grow more powerful?”

  “Nope.”

  I frowned harder.

&
nbsp; “It’s designed to steal other people’s power,” Doyle said.

  “But you can’t do that,” I said. “Not that we’re not allowed to do it, but it’s not possible to steal someone’s personal magic. It’s intrinsic to them, like their intelligence, or their personality.”

  “Yes and no,” he said.

  I was beginning to be tired, really tired. I hadn’t had any real pregnancy symptoms, but suddenly I was tired, achingly so. “Can I have a chair?” I asked.

  Wilson said, “I’m sorry, Merry, I mean, of course.” He went and got a chair.

  “You look pale,” Carmichael said. She started to touch my face like you’d check a child for fever, then stopped herself in mid-motion.

  Rhys did it for her. “You feel cool and clammy. That can’t be good.”

  “I’m just tired.”

  “We need to get Merry home,” Rhys said.

  Frost knelt by me, with me sitting he was about eye level with me. He put his hand against my face. “Explain to them, Doyle, and then we can get her home.”

  “This wand is designed to take magic from others. Merry is right, the magic cannot be stolen permanently from someone, but the wand is like a battery. It absorbs magic from different people and gives the wand’s owner more power, but she would have to feed the wand new power almost constantly. The spell is clever, and harkens back to the older days of our own magic, but it has the marks of something other than sidhe. Our magic, but not.”

  “I know what it reminds me of,” Rhys said. “Humans. Humans who were my followers, but who could do some of our magic. They were good, but it never translated exactly.”

  “The marks aren’t carved on the wood, or painted,” Carmichael said.

  “If it was sidhe magic, then we could trace the symbols on the wood with our finger and our will, but for most humans they needed something more real. Like the fact that our followers saw the marks of power on us and thought they were tattoos, so they painted themselves with woad for protection in battle.”

  “But that didn’t work,” Carmichael said.

  “It worked when we had power,” Rhys said, “and then when we lost enough power it was worse than useless to the people whom we were supposed to protect.” Rhys looked so unhappy. I had heard both him and Doyle tell stories of what had happened to their followers when they had lost so much power they could no longer protect them with magic.