Лорел Гамильтон - A Stroke Of Midnight

“Then, according to Queen Andais, he will be king.”

“So it’s a race to get pregnant?”

“Yes.”

“Where is Prince Cel? No one has seen him in nearly three months.”

“I’m not my cousin’s keeper.” In fact, he was in prison for trying to kill me one too many times, and for other crimes that the queen didn’t want even the court to know. He should have been executed for some of them, but she’d bargained for her only child’s life. He was to be locked away for six months, tortured with the very magic he had used against sidhe-ancestored humans. Branwyn’s Tears, one of our most guarded ointments. It was an aphrodisiac that worked even against someone’s will. But more than that, it made your body crave to be touched, to be brought. He was chained and covered in Branwyn’s Tears. There were bets around the court that what little sanity he’d been born with would not survive it. The queen had given in to one of his guards only yesterday, to let the woman slack Cel’s need, save his sanity. And suddenly I had not one, but two, no, three attempts on my life, and one on the queen’s. It was more than a coincidence, but the queen loved her son.

Madeline was back in front of me, looking at me. “Are you all right, Princess?”

“Sorry, I’m getting a little tired. Did I miss a question?”

She smiled and nodded. “I’m afraid so.”

They repeated it, and I wished I’d missed it again. “Do you know where your cousin the prince is?”

“He’s here in the sithen, but I don’t know what he’s doing this exact moment. Sorry.”

I needed off this subject, off this stage. I signaled to Madeline, and she closed it down with a promise of a photo op in a day or two, when the princess was fully healed.

A tiny faerie with butterfly wings fluttered into camera range. This was a demi-fey. Sage, whom I’d “slept with,” could make himself human tall, but most of the demi-fey were permanently about the size of Barbie dolls, or smaller. The queen would not be happy about the little faerie fluttering in front of the cameras. When there was press in the sithen, the less-human-looking stayed away from them, and especially away from cameras, or faced the queen’s wrath.

The figure was a pale blue-pink with iridescent blue wings. She fluttered through a barrage of flashbulbs, shielding her eyes with a tiny hand. I thought she’d land on me, or maybe Doyle, but she flew the length of the stage to land on Rhys’s shoulder.

She hid herself in his long white curls. She whispered something in his ear, using his hair and hat as a shield. Rhys stood up and came to us smiling.

Doyle was standing beside me, but even that close I couldn’t hear what Rhys whispered to him.

Doyle gave a small nod, and Rhys left the room ahead of us with the tiny fey still tangled in his hair. I wanted to ask what could be important enough for Rhys to leave early in front of the press.

Someone shouted, “Rhys, why are you leaving?”

Rhys left the room with a wave and a smile.

Doyle helped me stand, then the rest of the guards closed around me like a multicolored wall, but the reporters weren’t finished.

“Doyle, Princess, what’s happened?”

“What did the little one say?”

The press conference was over; we got to ignore them. It might have been wise to give them an excuse, but Doyle either didn’t think we needed to bother or he didn’t know what to say. There was a tension in his arm where he touched me that indicated that whatever Rhys had said had shaken him. What does the Darkness fear?

My wall of bright-colored muscle marched me down the steps and out. When we were in the hallway, clear of the media, I still whispered. Modern technology was a wonderful thing, and we didn’t need some sensitive microphone picking us up. “What’s happened?”

“There are two dead bodies in one of the hallways near the kitchen.”

“Fey?” I asked.

“One, yes,” he said.

I stumbled in my high heels because I tried to stop, but his arm on mine kept us all moving. “What about the other?”

He nodded. “Yes, exactly.”

“Is it one of the reporters? Did one of them go wandering?”

Frost leaned in from the line of men. “It cannot be. We had spells that would make them unable to leave the safe path inside the sithen.”

Doyle glanced at him. “Then explain a dead human in our sithen with a camera beside his hand.”

Frost opened his mouth, then closed it. “I cannot.”

Doyle shook his head. “Nor can I.”

“Well, isn’t this going to be a disaster,” Galen said.

We had a dead reporter in the Unseelie sithen, and a mass of live reporters still on the premises. Disaster didn’t even begin to cover it.

I ’D SEEN MORE VIOLENCE IN THE COURTS THAN IN ALL MY YEARS as a private detective in Los Angeles, but I’d seen more death in L.A. Not because I was included in murder cases—private dicks don’t do murder cases, at least not fresh ones—but because most of the things that live in faerie land are immortal. By definition, the immortal don’t die very often. I could count on one hand how many fresh crime scenes the police had called us in on and still have fingers left over. Even those cases were because the Grey Detective Agency could boast some of the best magic workers on the West Coast. Magic is like everything else; if you can do good with it, some people will find a way to do bad with it. Our agency specialized in Supernatural problems, Magical solutions. It was on the business cards and everything.

I’d also learned that all bodies are an it, not he, not she—it. Because if you think of the dead body as a he or a she, they begin to be real for you. They begin to be people, and they aren’t people, not anymore. They’re dead, and outside of very special circumstances they are just inert matter. You can have sympathy for the victim later, but at the crime scene, especially in the first moments, you serve the victim better by not sympathizing. Sympathy steals your ability to think. Empathy will cripple you. Detachment and logic, those are your salvation at a fresh murder. Anything else leads to hysterics, and I was not only the most experienced detective in the hallway, I was also Princess Meredith NicEssus, wielder of the hands of flesh and blood, Besaba’s Bane. Besaba was my mother, and my conception had forced her to wed my father and live, for a time, at the Unseelie Court. I was a princess and I might one day be queen. Future queens do not have hysterics. Future queens who are also trained detectives aren’t allowed hysterics.

The problem was that I knew one of these bodies. I’d known her alive and walking around. I knew that she liked classical literature. When she was cast out of the Seelie Court and had to come to the Unseelie Court, she’d changed her name, as many did, even among the Seelie. They changed their names so they wouldn’t be reminded daily of who and what they had once been, and how far they had fallen. She called herself Beatrice, after the love interest in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Dante’s Inferno. She said, “I’m in hell, I might as well have a name to match.” I’d taken world literature as one of my forced electives in college. When I finished the class, I gave most of my books to Beatrice, because she would read them and I wouldn’t. I could always buy extra copies of the handful of books that I actually enjoyed. Beatrice couldn’t. She couldn’t pass for human, and she didn’t like being stared at.

I stared at her now, but she wouldn’t mind. She wouldn’t mind anything ever again. Beatrice looked like a delicate human-size version of the tiny demi-fey that still clung to Rhys’s hair. Once Beatrice had been able to be that small, but something happened at the Seelie Court, something she would never talk about, and she lost the ability to change sizes. She’d been trapped at around four foot two, and the delicate dragonfly wings on her back had been useless. The demi-fey do not levitate, they fly, and in the larger size, their wings can’t lift them.