Patricia Briggs Mercy Thompson: Hopcross Jilly

by Patricia Briggs

  “Have you been to the reservation before?” he asked abruptly as we crossed the river just outside Pasco on the highway to Walla Walla.

  “No.” The fae reservation in Nevada welcomed visitors. They had built a casino and small theme park to attract tourists. The Walla Walla reservation, however, actively discouraged anyone who wasn’t fae from entering. I wasn’t quite certain if it was the Feds or the fae themselves responsible for the unfriendly reputation.

  Zee tapped unhappily on his steering wheel with hands that belonged to a man who’d spent his lifetime repairing cars, tough and scarred with oil so ingrained not even pumice soap would remove it.

  They were the right hands for the human that Zee had pretended to be. When the Gray Lords, the powerful and ruthless beings who ruled the fae in secret, forced him to admit what he was to the public a few years ago, a decade or more after the first fae had come out, Zee hadn’t bothered to change his outward appearance at all.

  I’d known him for a little over ten years, and the sour old man face was the only one I’d ever seen. He had another; I knew that. Most fae lived among humans under their glamour, even if they admitted what they were. People are just not ready to deal with the fae’s true appearance. Sure, some of them looked human enough, but they also don’t age. The thinning hair and the wrinkled, age-spotted skin were sure signs that Zee wasn’t wearing his true face. His sour expression, though, was no disguise.

  “Don’t eat or drink anything,” he said abruptly.

  “I’ve read all the fairy tales,” I reminded him. “No food, no drink. No favors. No thanking anyone.”

  He grunted. “Fairy tales. Damned children’s stories.”

  “I’ve read Katherine Briggs, too,” I offered. “And the original Grimm’s.” Mostly looking for some mention of a fae who could have been Zee. He wouldn’t talk about it, though I think he’d been Someone. So finding out who he’d been had become something of a hobby of mine.

  “Better. Better, but not much.” He tapped his fingers on the wheel. “Briggs was an archivist. Her books are only as correct as her sources and mostly they are dangerously incomplete. The stories of the Brothers Grimm are more concerned with entertainment than reality. Both of them are nur Schatten…only shadows of reality.” He looked at me, a quick searching glance. “Uncle Mike suggested you might be useful here. I thought it was a better repayment than might otherwise come your way.”

  To kill the sorcerer vampire, who was gradually being taken over by the demon that made him a sorcerer, Zee’d risked the wrath of the Gray Lords to loan me a couple of the treasures of the fae. I’d killed that vampire all right, and then I’d killed the one who’d made him. As in the stories, if you use a fairy gift once more than you have permission for, there are consequences.

  If I’d known this was going to be repayment for favors rendered, I’d have been more apprehensive from the start: the last time I’d had to repay a favor hadn’t ended well.

  “I’ll be all right,” I told him despite the cold knot of dread in my stomach.

  He gave me a sour look. “I had not thought about what it might mean to bring you into the reservation after dark.”

  “People do go to the reservation,” I said, though I wasn’t really sure of it.

  “Not people like you, and no visitors after dark.” He shook his head. “A human comes in and sees what he should, especially by daylight, when their eyes are easier to fool. But you…The Gray Lords have forbidden hunting humans, but we have our share of predators and it is hard to deny nature. Especially when the Gray Lords who make our rules are not here—there is only I. And if you see what you should not, there are those who will say they are only protecting what they have to…”

  It was only when he switched into German that I realized that he had been talking to himself for the last half of it. Thanks to Zee, my German was better than two requisite years of college classes had left it, but not good enough to follow him when he got going.

  It was after eight at night, but the sun still cast her warm gaze on the trees in the foothills beside us. The larger trees were green still, but some of the smaller bushes were giving hints of the glorious colors of fall.

  Near the Tri-Cities, the only trees were in town, where people kept them watered through the brutal summers or along one of the rivers. But as we drove toward Walla Walla, where the Blue Mountains helped wring a little more moisture out of the air, the countryside got slowly greener.

  “The worst of it is,” Zee said, finally switching to English, “I don’t think you’ll be able to tell us anything we don’t already know.”

  “About what?”

  He gave me a sheepish look, which sat oddly on his face. “Ja, I am mixing this up. Let me start again.” He drew in a breath and let it out with a sigh. “Within the reservation, we do our own law enforcement—we have that right. We do it quietly because the human world is not ready for the ways we have to enforce the law. It is not so easy to imprison one of us, eh?”

  “The werewolves have the same problem,” I told him.

  “Ja, I bet.” He nodded, a quick jerk of a nod. “So. There have been deaths in the reservation lately. We think it is the same person in each case.”

  “You’re on the reservation police force?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “We don’t have such a thing. Not as such. But Uncle Mike is on the Council. He thought that your accurate nose might be useful and sent me to get you.”

  Uncle Mike ran a bar in Pasco that served fae and some of the other magical people who lived in town. That he was powerful, I’d always known—how else could he keep a lid on so many fae? I hadn’t realized he was on the Council. Maybe if I’d known there was a council to be on, I might have suspected it.

  “Can’t one of you do as much as I can?” I held up a hand to keep him from answering right away. “It’s not that I mind. I can imagine a lot worse ways to pay off my debt. But why me? Didn’t Jack’s giant smell the blood of an Englishman for Pete’s sake? What about magic? Couldn’t one of you find the killer with magic?”

  I don’t know much about magic, but I would think that a reservation of fae would have someone whose magic would be more useful than my nose.

  “Maybe the Gray Lords could make magic do their bidding to show them the guilty party,” Zee said. “But we do not want to call their attention—it is too chancy. Outside of the Gray Lords…” He shrugged. “The murderer is proving surprisingly elusive. As far as scent goes, most of us aren’t gifted in that way—it was a talent largely given only to the beast-minded. Once they determined it would be safer for all of us to blend in with humans rather than live apart, the Gray Lords killed most of the beasts among us that had survived the coming of Christ and cold iron. There are maybe one or two here with the ability to sniff people out, but they are so powerless that they cannot be trusted.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He gave me a grim look. “Our ways are not yours. If one has no power to protect himself, he cannot afford to offend anyone. If the murderer is powerful or well connected, none of the fae who could scent him would be willing to accuse him.”

  He smiled, a sour little quirk of his lips. “We may not be able to lie…but truth and honesty are rather different.”

  I’d been raised by werewolves who could, mostly, smell a lie at a hundred yards. I knew all about the difference between truth and honesty.

  Something about what he said…“Uhm. I’m not powerful. What happens if I say something to offend?”

  He smiled. “You will be here as my guest. It might not keep you safe if you see too much—as our laws are clear on how to deal with mortals who stray Underhill and see more than they ought. That you were invited by the Council, knowing what you are—and that you are not quite human—should provide some immunity. But anyone who is offended when you speak the truth must, by our guesting laws, come after me rather than you. And I can protect myself.”

  I believed it. Zee calls himself a gremlin, which
is probably more accurate than not—except that the word gremlin is a lot newer than Zee. He is one of the few kinds of fae with an affinity for iron, which gives him all sorts of advantages over the other fae. Iron is fatal to most of them.

  There wasn’t any sign that marked the well-maintained county road where we turned off the highway. The road wove through small, wooded hills that reminded me more of Montana than the barren, cheat-grass and sagebrush covered land around the Tri-Cities.

  We turned a corner, drove through a patch of thick-growing poplar, and emerged with twin walls of cinnamon-colored concrete block rising on either side of us, sixteen feet tall with concertina wire along the top to make guests feel even more welcome.

  “It looks like a prison,” I said. The combination of narrow road and tall walls made me claustrophobic.

  “Yes,” agreed Zee a bit grimly. “I forgot to ask, do you have your driver’s license with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. I want you to remember, Mercy, there are a lot of creatures in the reservation who are not fond of humans—and you are close enough to human that they will bear you no goodwill. If you step too far out-of-bounds, they will have you dead first and leave me to seek justice later.”

  “I’ll mind my tongue,” I told him.

  He snorted with uncomplimentary amusement. “I’ll believe that when I see it. I wish Uncle Mike were here, too. They wouldn’t dare bother you then.”

  “I thought this was Uncle Mike’s idea.”

  “It is, but he is working and cannot leave his tavern tonight.”

  We must have traveled half a mile when the road finally made an abrupt right turn to reveal a guardhouse and gate. Zee stopped his truck and rolled down the window.

  The guard wore a military uniform with a large BFA patch on his arm. I wasn’t familiar enough with the BFA (Bureau of Fae Affairs) to know what branch of the military was associated with them—if any. The guard had that “Rent-a-Cop” feel, as if he felt a little out of place in the uniform even as he relished the power it gave him. The badge on his chest read O’DONNELL.

  He leaned forward and I got a whiff of garlic and sweat, though he didn’t smell unwashed. My nose is just more sensitive than most people’s.

  “ID,” he said.

  Despite his Irish name, he looked more Italian or French than Irish. His features were bold and his hair was receding.

  Zee opened his wallet and handed over his driver’s license. The guard made a big deal of scrutinizing the picture and looking at Zee. Then he nodded and grunted, “Hers, too.”

  I had already grabbed my wallet out of my purse. I handed Zee my license to pass over to the guard.

  “No designation,” O’Donnell said, flicking the corner of my license with his thumb.

  “She’s not fae, sir,” said Zee in a deferential tone I’d never heard from him before.

  “Really? What business does she have here?”

  “She’s my guest,” Zee said, speaking quickly as if he knew I was about to tell the moron it was none of his business.

  And he was a moron, he and whoever was in charge of security here. Picture IDs for fae? The only thing all fae have in common is glamour, the ability to change their appearance. The illusion is so good that it affects not only human senses, but physical reality. That’s why a 500-pound, ten-foot-tall ogre can wear a size-six dress and drive a Miata. It’s not shapeshifting, I am told. But as far as I’m concerned, it’s as close as makes no never mind.

  I don’t know what kind of ID I would have had them use, but a picture ID was worthless. Of course, the fae tried really hard to pretend that they could only take one human form without ever saying exactly that. Maybe they’d convinced some bureaucrat to believe it.

  “Will you please get out of the truck, ma’am,” the moron said, stepping out of the guardhouse and crossing in front of the truck until he was on my side of the vehicle.

  Zee nodded. I got out of the car.

  The guard walked all the way around me, and I had to restrain my growl. I don’t like people I don’t know walking behind me. He wasn’t quite as dumb as he first appeared because he figured it out and walked around me again.

  “Brass doesn’t like civilian visitors, especially after dark,” he said to Zee, who had gotten out to stand next to me.

  “I am allowed, sir,” Zee replied, still in that deferential tone.

  The guard snorted and flipped through a few pages on his clipboard, though I don’t think he actually was reading anything. “Siebold Adelbertsmiter.” He pronounced it wrong, making Zee’s name sound like Seabold instead of Zeebolt. “Michael McNellis, and Olwen Jones.” Michael McNellis could be Uncle Mike—or not. I didn’t know any fae named Olwen, but I could count the fae I knew by any name on one hand with fingers left over. Mostly the fae kept to themselves.

  “That’s right,” Zee said with false patience that sounded genuine; I only knew it was false because Zee had no patience with fools—or anyone else for that matter. “I am Siebold.” He said it the same way O’Donnell had.

  The petty tyrant kept my license and walked back to his little office. I stayed where I was, so I couldn’t see exactly what he did, though I could hear the sound of computer keys being tapped. He came back after a couple of minutes and returned my license to me.

  “Stay out of trouble, Mercedes Thompson. Fairyland is no place for good little girls.”

  Obviously O’Donnell had been sick the day they’d had sensitivity training. I wasn’t usually a hard-core stickler, but something about the way he said “little girl” made it an insult. Mindful of Zee’s wary gaze, I took my license and slipped it into my pocket and tried to keep what I was thinking to myself.

  I don’t think my expression was bland enough, because he shoved his face into mine. “Did you hear me, girl?”

  I could smell the honey ham and mustard he’d had on his dinner sandwich. The garlic he’d probably eaten last night. Maybe he’d had a pizza or lasagna.

  “I heard you,” I said in as neutral a tone as I could manage, which wasn’t, admittedly, very good.

  He fingered the gun on his hip. He looked at Zee. “She can stay two hours. If she’s not back out by then, we’ll come looking for her.”

  Zee bowed his head like combatants do in karate movies, without letting his eyes leave the guard’s face. He waited until the guard walked back to his office before he got back in the car, and I followed his lead.

  The metal gate slid open with a reluctance that mirrored O’Donnell’s attitude. The steel it was built of was the first sign of competence I’d seen. Unless there was rebar in the walls, the concrete might keep people like me out, but it would never keep fae in. The concertina wire was too shiny to be anything but aluminum, and aluminum doesn’t bother the fae in the slightest. Of course, ostensibly, the reservation was set up to restrict where the fae lived and to protect them, so it shouldn’t matter that they could come and go as they pleased, guarded gate or not.

  Zee drove through the gates and into Fairyland.

  I don’t know what I expected of the reservation; military housing of some sort, maybe, or English cottages. Instead, there were row after row of neat, well-kept ranch houses with attached one-car garages laid out in identical-sized yards with identical fences, chain link around the front yard, six-foot cedar around the backyard.

  The only difference from one house to the next was in color of paint and foliage in the yards. I knew the reservation had been here since the eighties, but it looked as though it might have been built a year ago.

  There were cars scattered here and there, mostly SUVs and trucks, but I didn’t see any people at all. The only sign of life, aside from Zee and me, was a big black dog that watched us with intelligent eyes from the front yard of a pale yellow house.

  The dog pushed the Stepford effect up to übercreepy.

  I turned to comment about it to Zee when I realized that my nose was telling me some odd things.

  “Where’s the wate
r?” I asked.

  “What water?” He raised an eyebrow.

  “I smell swamp: water and rot and growing things.”

  He gave me a look I couldn’t decipher. “That’s what I told Uncle Mike. Our glamour works best for sight and touch, very good for taste and hearing, but not as well for scent. Most people can’t smell well enough for scent to be a problem. You smelled that I was fae the first time you met me.”

  Actually he was wrong. I’ve never met two people who smell exactly alike—I’d thought that earthy scent that he and his son Tad shared was just part of their own individual essences. It wasn’t until a long time later that I learned to distinguish between fae and human. Unless you live within an hour’s drive of one of the four fae reservations in the U.S., the chances of running into one just weren’t that high. Until I’d moved to the Tri-Cities and started working for Zee, I’d never knowingly met a fae.

  “So where is the swamp?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “I hope that you will be able to see through whatever means our murderer has used to disguise himself. But for your own sake, Liebling, I would hope that you would leave the reservation its secrets if you can.”

  He turned down a street that looked just like the first four we’d passed—except that there was a young girl of about eight or nine playing with a yo-yo in one of the yards. She watched the spinning, swinging toy with solemn attention that didn’t change when Zee parked the car in front of her house. When Zee opened the gate, she caught the yo-yo in one hand and looked at us with adult eyes.

  “No one has entered,” she said.

  Zee nodded. “This is the latest murder scene,” he told me. “We found it this morning. There are six others. The rest have had a lot of people in and out, but except for this one”—he indicated the girl with a tip of his head—“who is a Council member, and Uncle Mike, there have been no other trespassers since his death.”

  I looked at the child who was one of the Council and she gave me a smile and popped her bubblegum.

  I decided it was safest to ignore her. “You want me to see if I can smell someone who was in all the houses?”