Laurell Hamilton - Divine Misdemeanors

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.

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 looks 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.