Лорел Гамильтон - A Caress Of Twilight

"How much business are you losing to us?" I asked, and for some reason my voice carried into the sudden silence.

Ethan turned on me, probably to say something else unfortunate. Julian grabbed his arm; it looked like a firm grip from where I was sitting. Ethan's body reacted as if he'd been hit, and for a second, I thought we'd get to see a fight.

"Just go, Ethan," Julian said, voice low.

Ethan yanked free of Julian. He gave a stiff little bow to Ms. Reed. "I'll go. But I just want you to understand that I know the Seelie are different from what the Unseelie are."

"I have not set foot in the Seelie Court for over a century, Mr. Kane. I will never be a member of it again."

Ethan frowned; I think he'd thought Ms. Reed would agree with him. Normally, he was sullen and unpleasant, but not to this degree. We must have really been cutting into their business.

Ethan fumbled over some more apologies, then stomped out. After the door slammed behind us, I said, "Is he like that often?"

Julian shrugged. "Ethan isn't fond of a lot of people."

"I'm feeling terribly neglected here, Julian, with Ethan gone and all," Maeve said.

I blinked at her smiling, carefully beautiful face. She looked so sincere, even her blue-blue eyes sparkled with the force of it. She was working just a little hard at being charming, and human. It would have been a whole lot easier to be charming if she'd dropped the glamour she was wasting in order to appear humanly — rather than inhumanly — beautiful.

Julian glanced at me, then turned his full smiling self on Maeve Reed. In his own way Julian was turning on the charm, too. I realized with a start that he had his own personal glamour. It might have been actual conscious magic, but I doubted it. Most personal glamour that bolsters charisma is accidental for humans. Most of the time.

I watched them doing a minor job of shining at each other, and realized that the charm wasn't for our benefit. I glanced behind me at Frank. He was staring at her as if he'd never really seen a woman before, or at least not one like this. Maeve Reed was trying to be inhumanly charming, but still humanly beautiful, for the benefit of her human bodyguards, not us. She would have used more special effects if the show had been for us.

"Ms. Reed," Julian gushed, moving in to take her elbow, steering her away from us, "we would never neglect you. You're not only our client, but one of the most precious objects we've ever been asked to guard. We would lay our lives down for you. What more can men do when they worship a woman?"

I thought he was laying it on a bit thick, but I hadn't spent any time around Maeve Reed. Maybe she liked the compliments thick.

She managed a delicate blush that I knew was magic and not real. I could feel it in the air. Sometimes the most simple physical changes take the most magic. She slid her arm through his and lowered her voice enough that we couldn't hear what was said. Oh, we could have eavesdropped, but that would have been rude and she would probably have sensed the spell. We didn't want to antagonize the goddess; not yet, anyway.

They turned back to face us, both smiling, both charming, her grip on his arm very firm. Something in Julian's eyes was trying to give me a message, but I couldn't quite read it behind his hip yellow tinted glasses.

"Ms. Reed has persuaded me to remain at her side for the duration of your visit." He raised an eyebrow as he spoke.

And finally I got the message. Ms. Reed had hired Kane and Hart to protect her from us. She was afraid of the Unseelie Court, enough that she wouldn't be alone with us without backup, both magical and physical. Although her magic thrummed through this house, this land, these walls, she still feared us. You'd think the fey wouldn't be so superstitious, especially about other fey, but they often are. My father said it came from knowing almost nothing about any other fey culture but the one we were born into. Ignorance breeds fear.

There'd been so much magic inside Maeve's walls that almost from the moment we'd driven through the gates I'd begun to not «hear» it. It was a skill you learned if you spent too much time in and around major-brouhaha magic. You had to deaden its touch, or you spent all your time sensing the constant magic around you, and it deadened you to newer spells, more immediate dangers. It was like being bombarded by a hundred radio stations at once. If you tried to listen to all of them, you heard nothing.

I looked into Maeve Reed's smiling, unreadable face and shook my head. I turned to look at Doyle. I tried to ask with my eyes and face how rude and how human I was allowed to be today.

He seemed to understand, because he gave a tiny nod. I took it to mean I could be as rude and human as I wanted. I hoped that was what it meant, because I was just about to pay several mortal insults to the golden goddess of Hollywood.

I walked around the couch to greet the goddess. Kitto followed me, and I had to make him stay-by the couch. Left to his own devices, he'd have stayed glued to my side like an overly devoted puppy.

I smiled toward Maeve and Julian. " I can't tell you what an honor it is to meet you, Ms. Reed." I held out my hand, and she took one hand off of Julian's arm long enough to shake.

She gave me just the tips of her fingers; it wasn't so much a handshake as a touch. I'd seen a lot of women who didn't know how to shake hands, but Maeve hadn't even really tried. Maybe I was supposed to take her hand and kneel, but if she was waiting for genuflecting, she was in for a long wait. I had one queen and one queen only. Maeve Reed may have been a queen of Hollywood, but that just wasn't the same thing.

I knew my face looked puzzled, but I couldn't decide what was going on behind that lovely face of hers. We needed to know.

"You really did hire Kane and Hart to protect you from us, didn't you?"

Maeve turned a perfect look on me, pleasant, bemused, incredulous: eyes wide, beautifully lipsticked mouth open in a small o . It was a look for a camera, for a screen that would make her face twenty feet tall. It was a face to win over audiences and the heads of studios.

It was a great face, but it wasn't that great. "A simple yes or no will suffice, Ms. Reed."

"I'm sorry," she said, voice apologetic, face soft, eyes a little confused. Her grip on Julian's arm was too tight; it gave a lie to that casual confused act.

"Did you hire Kane and Hart to protect you from us?"

She gave the laugh that People magazine had once called the five-million-dollar laugh, the one where her eyes crinkled and her face shone and her mouth was just a little open. "What a strange idea. I assure you, Ms. Gentry I am not afraid of you."

She'd avoided a direct answer. She wasn't afraid of me; that much had to be true, because it is taboo among us to truly lie. If Doyle hadn't suggested in the van that I be rude, I'd have let it go, because pursuing it relentlessly would have been more than rude; it would have been insulting, and duels had started over less. But only among highborn sidhe could one be expected to know the rules. We were counting on Maeve assuming I'd been raised by savages — Unseelies and humans.

"Are you afraid of my guards, then?" I asked.

The laughter was still making her face shine, her eyes sparkle as she looked at me. "Whatever gave you such an absurd idea?"

"You did."

She shook her head, sending that long yellow sheet of hair sliding around her body. The glow of the laughter still shone in her face, and her eyes were just a little more blue. I realized suddenly that it wasn't the glow of laughter, which should have faded, but a very subtle type of glamour. She was purposefully making herself glow, just a little. And if she was glowing, she was using magic to try to persuade me to believe her.