Laurell Hamilton - Divine Misdemeanors

“I’ll live. See to Barinthus,” I said.

Doyle hesitated, then did what I asked. Rhys was checking for a pulse on Patterson. He made sure the gun was kicked away from his hand, but when he turned and saw me looking, he shook his head. Patterson was dead.

I heard sirens. The neighbors had called because of the gunshots. Of all the times for someone in L.A. to call the cops.

Doyle helped Barinthus sit up. The big man winced and said, “I’d forgotten how much it hurts to get shot.”

“It’s not fatal,” Doyle said.

“It still hurts.”

“I thought you gave me the lecture about how the sea can’t be hurt,” I said.

He smiled at me. “If I hadn’t said it, would you have let me come?”

I thought about it. “I don’t know.”

He nodded. “It’s time I pulled my weight,” he said.

Cathbodua flew from the balcony, her raven-feather cloak looking more like wings than ever before. She knelt by me. “How bad is it?”

“Not sure,” I said. “Is Julian …?”

“He’ll live and he’ll heal, but he is hurt. Usna is with him now.” She held pressure on the makeshift bandage. Doyle was applying pressure on Barinthus’s side, and Rhys had put his gun out of sight and had his detective’s license out in plain sight when the police hit the door.

They didn’t shoot us, and they didn’t arrest us. It helped that we had so many wounded and that I was Princess Meredith Nic Essus. Every once in a while it doesn’t suck to be the celebrity.

I had to have stitches in my arm, but they were the kind that dissolved into the wound because the other kind of stitches would be grown over by the body before the doctor could get them out. I wasn’t sure I healed that fast but I was glad the doctor knew enough about the fey to take the precaution.

Lucy was as mad as I’d ever seen her. “You could have been killed.”

“He worked for the police, Lucy. I was afraid if we called you guys in it would get back to him.”

“None of our people would have talked to that serial-killing son of a bitch.”

“I couldn’t risk Julian, especially since it was my fault that they took him.”

“How was it your fault?” she asked.

“I put myself out as bait and we protected ourselves and our demi-fey, our fey, but we didn’t think to guard Julian and the others.”

“Why did they take him?” she asked.

“He comes over and gets a little skin-hunger fix now and then.”

“Is that code for sex?”

“No, it’s exactly what it sounds like. He comes over to get cuddled and we send him back home with his virtue intact. He slept over the other night for the first time and apparently the bad guys saw him leave in the morning. They assumed he was another lover.”

“Don’t you have enough already?”

I nodded. “Some days too many.”

“They didn’t find out that Julian is gay?”

“Doyle said that when someone is heterosexual they think that first.”

She nodded as if that made sense to her. “You know that Lieutenant Peterson is screaming for us to arrest someone.”

“On what charges? Forensics can look at the blood patterns, but she attacked me. If Doyle hadn’t used his knife when he did it would be a lot worse than this.” I motioned at the bandaged arm.

“And I’ve seen Barinthus down the hallway. The doctors say that he’ll live, but that if he’d been human he wouldn’t have.”

“It’s hard to kill an ex-god,” I said.

She patted my shoulder. “You know we do know our job, Merry. We could have backed you on this.”

“Your boss’s boss doesn’t even like me at a crime scene for fear I’m going to get hurt by some overzealous reporter. Do you really think he’d have agreed to me walking in there to save Julian?”

She looked around the room, then leaned in and spoke quietly. “I’ll deny this if asked in public, but no. They’d have never let you go in.”

“I couldn’t let my friend die because we screwed up and didn’t put a guard on all my friends.” That made me think. “How is Julian doing?”

“He’s still in surgery. It looks like he’s going to pull through but he was cut up some. You don’t want to see the picture the little psycho bitch was using this time. It was a medical text on anatomy.” Lucy shuddered. “She hadn’t gotten too far when you got to him, but it would have been the worst of the lot, and they weren’t going to kill him first.”

“She wasn’t pretending that she was killing to gain power or magic. She’d admitted to herself that she liked the pain and the killing.”

“How do you know all that?”

“She told me some of it before she died.”

“What, she did a villain speech?”

“Something like that.”

“Patterson is the one who made Gilda’s wand. She knows everyone who bought items from him and she’s agreed to help us track all of them down for leniency.”

“Is she going to see jail?”

“One of the serial killers was a police employee, Merry. We’re having enough bad PR with the fey community without jailing the Fairy Godmother of L.A.”

“How are the fey reacting to Gilda ratting them out for the magical items?”

“She says it’s for their own good. The items are a danger to the community and she had no idea that her wand was evil.” Lucy made air quotes as she said evil.

“To hear Gilda, she’s crusading to destroy the work of the evil serial killer personally.”

“I trust Gilda to land on her feet in the public eye,” I said.

“Jeremy and the gang are out in the waiting room. Adam, Julian’s life partner, went all to pieces.”

“He hasn’t really recovered from his brother’s death yet.”

Lucy looked solemn. “I remember that one. You’re having a hell of a year, Merry.”

What could I say to that? I agreed with her.

There was a knock at the door and Doyle, Frost, and Galen came in. “I think that’s my cue to give you some alone time.” She said hi to all of them and left us to it.

Doyle took my good hand in his. “I almost let her kill you.”

“We almost let her kill you,” Rhys said and put a hand on my thigh under the sheet.

Galen just stood there looking down at me.

“You going to say ‘I told you so’?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I saw what she did to Julian, and I saw the picture she was trying to copy. We couldn’t let someone do that to Julian.”

“But if we hadn’t baited them in the first place he wouldn’t have been a target.”

“Or if we’d thought to put guards on our human friends and coworkers it wouldn’t have happened,” Rhys said.

Doyle nodded. “I thought of ‘us’ as only the sidhe and fey in the house with us. I forgot that our family is larger than that. It’s Jeremy and everyone at the agency. It’s Lucy and some of the other police officers. It’s the soldiers whom you saved and whom Goddess seems to have such an interest in. I have to stop thinking like a god who only had a small section of land and start thinking bigger.”

I winced a little at the wording. “All Steve wanted was for Bittersweet to be big enough to be his lover for real.”

“But what did Bittersweet really want?” Rhys asked.

“Death,” Doyle said.

“What?” I asked.

“She saw me, Merry. She saw me on the balcony, I know she did, and she still went for the knife. She still attacked you and gave me her back.”

“Maybe she just didn’t think you could hit a target that small from that distance at that angle with a blade,” Rhys said. “Most of us couldn’t have risked that throw so close to Merry.”

“I do not miss,” he said.