Laurell Hamilton - Divine Misdemeanors

Galen called from the door. “Are you coming inside?” He was frowning a little. I wondered how long I’d been standing there talking to Royal.

“You may not use your glamour but you’ve distracted me again,” I said.

“The fact that I distract you isn’t glamour, my goddess of white and red.”

“Then what is it?” I asked, tired of the games.

He smiled, obviously pleased with himself. “Your magic calls to mine. We are both creatures of warmth and lust.”

I frowned at him.

Sholto loomed over me, and certainly over Royal. “I do not think the princess is a creature of any kind, little man.” The flock of tiny fey in his ponytail stopped playing hide-and-seek in his long fall of hair, as if they were listening.

Royal looked up at him. “Perhaps the word ‘creature’ is ill chosen, King Sholto. It was perverse of me to forget the queen’s pet name for you.”

Sholto was suddenly very still beside me. He had hated Queen Andais calling him “her Perverse Creature.” He had confessed to me he feared one day being just that as the Killing Frost and the queen’s Darkness. Feared one day he would simply be the queen’s “Creature.”

“You are like some winged bug I can smash with a careless swat. Your glamour can’t change that, or give you the full-sized women you seem to prefer.”

“My glamour has given me full-size, as you call it, more than once, King Sholto,” Royal said. Then he smiled, and I knew just from his expression that whatever he was about to say I wouldn’t like it. “Merry can speak to my glamour and just how much she enjoyed it.”

Sholto’s face showed just how unhappy that made him. He turned that scowl to me. “You didn’t,” he said.

“No,” I said, “but if I hadn’t been stopped I might have. If you’ve never had a demi-fey who carried sex magic try their wiles on you, then you don’t understand. It’s more powerful glamour than most of the sidhe still have.”

“Remember, King, we hide in plain sight from the humans as real butterflies, moths, dragonflies, and flowers. They never see through our disguises, and that’s not always true with sidhe glamour.”

“Then why don’t you help trail people for her detective agency?” Sholto asked.

“We could if they would stay in certain parts of the city, but they tend to go places with too much metal.” Royal shivered, and it wasn’t a good shiver.

Two of the tiny fey still riding in Sholto’s hair took to the air as if the thought was too frightening even for listening. The three left in his hair hid like children hearing the monster under the bed.

“It is beyond most of us to travel through some parts of the city,” Royal said.

“So your glamour is only good for soft things,” Sholto said.

Royal looked at him, but a smile curved his delicate lips. “Our glamour is very, very good with soft things.”

“I believe Merry when she says something, so if she says you are that good at it, then I believe her, but I also know she’s forbidden you to try your wiles on her again.”

“It’s my week to take Queen Niceven’s weekly donation. I think Merry will want me to use my glamour for that.”

Sholto had only to move his eyes to come back to my face from the little man on my shoulder. “Why are you still donating blood to Niceven through her surrogates?”

“We need allies at the courts, Sholto.”

“Why do you need them if you never plan to go back and rule?”

“Spies,” Royal whispered. “The demi-fey are the proverbial flies on the wall, King Sholto. No one looks at us, no one notices how often we are about.”

He looked from one to the other of us. “And I thought it was Doyle’s spy network that was getting such accurate information.”

“The Darkness has his sources, but none as sweet as Merry has,” Royal said, and I knew he was playing it up to see if he could irritate the other man. Royal took great pleasure any time he could make one of my full-sized lovers jealous. It pleased him inordinately.

Sholto frowned at him, then laughed. The sound startled Royal and me. The little man on my shoulder jumped, while I was simply puzzled. The fey in Sholto’s hair flew skyward and went over the house and away into the blue.

“What is so funny, oh King of the Sluagh?” Royal asked.

“Does your glamour make men jealous, too?”

“As for Merry’s reaction to me, so your jealousy, King Sholto. Neither is magic.”

Sholto’s face sobered and he studied the little man, not unhappily, but he truly studied him. He did it long and hard enough that Royal hid his face in my hair. I’d noticed this was a social gesture for all the demi-fey. They did it when they were embarrassed, afraid, being coy, or even simply out of other things to do. Royal didn’t like being the object of such concentration by Sholto.

Mungo bumped my hand and I petted his sleek head. For the dogs to react meant that it wasn’t just Royal who was getting tension from Sholto’s reaction to the demi-fey.

I stood and petted my dogs, letting some of the tension bleed off into the gesture. “We should get inside,” I said at last.

Sholto nodded. “Yes, we should.” He offered me his arm and I took it. He led me inside as Royal whispered in my ear, “The sluagh like the goblins still eat us like prey.”

It made me stumble up the small steps to the porch. Sholto caught me. “Are you all right?”

I nodded. I could have asked Sholto, but if the answer was yes, I didn’t want to know, and whether it was yes or no, it was still an insulting question. How do you ask a man who you are supposed to love and who is the father of your child if he commits a little cannibalism on the side?

“You’re afraid to ask,” Royal whispered like one of those cartoon devils on my shoulder.

That made me lean in against Sholto and whisper just inside the door, “Do the sluagh still hunt the demi-fey?”

He frowned and then shook his head. He looked at Royal, now hiding more seriously in my hair. “We do not hunt the small ones for food, but sometimes they are very irritating and we have to cleanse our faerie mound of them. How my people clean our house of them is their own business. I don’t tolerate them in my kingdom, because you’re right, you forget they are there, and I don’t tolerate spies.”

Royal slid completely behind my neck so that he put his arms and legs on either side of my neck and held on as if I were the trunk of a tree.

“Hide all you want, Royal, but I won’t forget you’re there,” Sholto said.

I could feel Royal’s heart thudding against my spine. I was about to be sympathetic, but then I felt him lay a kiss against the back of my neck. It can be a very erotic spot, and as he laid soft kisses against my skin, I felt that totally involuntary reaction low in my body. I made him move.

I was in the bedroom changing for dinner when there was a knock on the door. “Who is it?”

“It’s Kitto.”

I was down to my dark brown bra with its lace trim, and still in my skirt, hose, and heels, but he was on the list of people who I didn’t have to hide from. I smiled and said, “Come in.”

He peered around the door as he opened it, as if unsure of his welcome. I’d managed a few minutes alone and he knew I valued my rare privacy, but I hadn’t seen him in two days, nearly three, and I’d missed him. But the moment I saw his black curls and his huge almond-shaped eyes with their swimming blue color, like looking into one of those perfect pools that dotted the neighborhood, I smiled more widely. The thin black of his elliptical pupils no longer detracted from the beauty of his eyes for me. It was just Kitto’s eyes, and I loved all of his face, the delicate bones in that soft triangle. He was the daintiest of all my men. He was four feet even, more than a foot shorter than I, but it was four feet of broad shoulder, narrow waist, tight ass, and everything he needed to be male, just done in a perfect miniature package. He was wearing designer jeans and a tight T-shirt that showed off the new muscles that weight-lifting had given him. Doyle made all the men work out.