Justin Gustainis - Those Who Fight Monsters Tales of Occult Detectives

“Tolliver’s given me leave to ask you a few questions,” Pete said.

The magic in the room, slithering and sliver, came to a boil when the Queen spoke. “I am in mourning. I have nothing to say.”

Pete normally didn’t open herself to the Black. Being a Weir meant she was a repository rather than a conductor, and too much magic could turn her to cinder, surely as fire. She felt it, though. Every flux and flow. Every push and pull. And the Queen was at the center of something that was alien and frozen as the surface of another planet. Pete bit her lip, and let the magic lap at the back of her mind.

“You know who we look at in my world, when someone dies?” she asked quietly. “Family. Parents. Wives. Brothers. Family knows you best. Family can hate you more than anyone else in the world.”

The Queen shot a glance at the other man, who was slender as Tolliver was enormous. He cleared his throat. “Perhaps Miss Caldecott would care to examine the body and the scene of the deed?”

Pete knew when she was being brushed off, but she didn’t expect the young woman next to the Queen to pipe up. “I’ll come.”

“Snowblood, no,” the man insisted. “You’ll only upset yourself.”

“Shut up, Crowfoot,” she hissed. “You may have my aunt fooled but you don’t fool me!”

“Snowblood!” The Queen’s voice snapped like the lightning outside. “That’s enough.”

“All right,” Pete spread her hands. “You, young miss — you’re with me. The rest of you, stay put. I’ll have more questions once I’ve seen the body.”

The prince was kept in a chamber below the Court, older than the building above, cool arches dripping water into drains that lead to places only rats would know. Pete scented the familiar rotten-orchid scent of decay, along with something foreign, a bit like char. Blood, she guessed. Fae blood.

“Snowblood’s quite a name,” she said to the girl. “You the queen’s niece?”

“Yes,” Snowblood said tightly. “And the prince’s intended.”

The body was covered with a sheet, whiter than white — like any white in Faerie — but dotted all over with blossoms of red, like a first bloom after a snowfall. Pete stopped her hand before she moved it back.

“The prince … he’s your cousin.”

Snowblood lifted one boneless shoulder. “That’s the way it works, isn’t it?”

Pete let that one go. It wasn’t like royals and inbreeding were strangers. “And Crowfoot?”

“He’s the leader of the majority. The Seelie Council.” Snowblood paused. “He’s perfectly hideous.”

“Politicians usually are,” Pete said, and twitched the sheet back. She wasn’t looking at the prince, but at Snowblood’s face. The girl betrayed absolutely no reaction. Her eyes were dull and glassy as a stagnant pond.

“Crowfoot wanted to marry me. Before my cousin,” Snowblood said. Pete looked at the body. It was a clean job, exit wounds in the chest ragged and black and, when she rolled the body, two stab wounds in the back, angled upward into the heart and lungs.

Pete realized something. “I don’t know his name,”

“Oh,” Snowblood said carelessly. “Don’t you? It’s Caliban. Like the play.”

“Half-savage mortal man?” Pete said. “Bloody odd choice, for your firstborn son.”

“Yes,” Snowblood agreed tonelessly. “For your firstborn.”

“Mind if I ask you some questions while I get this business done?” Pete asked. The little stone room didn’t have any tools, but she got out her pen light and flashed it over Caliban’s hands and fingers. They were limpid, like flower bulbs. The damp wasn’t doing him any favors of preservation.

“I suppose not,” Snowblood sighed. She sat on a ledge, kicking her feet and dislodging mortar.

“Caliban was a fencer?” Pete asked. She examined the wounds more closely. They hadn’t even had time to bleed much.

“A good one,” Snowblood said, perking for the first time. “He could beat any man but Tolliver. Tolliver wanted him made a captain of the Ash Guard, rather than taking up his royal duties. Caliban was merciless in battle and in the court. Tolliver said he didn’t have the delicacy for politics, but he had the blood for battle. They’re similar, I suppose.”

“Both big smashy bastards?” Pete peeled back the prince’s eyelid and checked his eyes. Wishing for a glove, she stuck a finger in his mouth and checked his tongue as well.

“I suppose,” Snowblood said. “Tolliver knew him better than anyone. Better than me.”

“Ah,” Pete said. She stepped back and looked at the dead prince. She had a fair notion now, but it was only a notion. She didn’t have any facts.

“And the Queen, at last,” she asked Snowblood. “Some dodgy magic on her — what’s that about?”

Snowblood chewed one shockingly crimson lip. “The Unseelie took her, many years ago, kept her for a time before Tolliver and the Ash Guard brought her back. They placed a wasting curse. It’s held at bay with other magic, but she was with them a long time. It clings.”

It did, indeed. The winding, smoky trail of the curse was apparent to Pete even now, here, layers and layers below the Queen’s chamber. “Bit of a short stick for her,” Pete said. “Might explain that temper.”

“Rowan did the right thing bringing you here,” Snowblood said suddenly. Pete cocked an eyebrow at her as she pulled the bloody sheet over Caliban’s face once more.

“Really?”

“This is rotten,” Snowblood said. “It’s not the kind of thing we do. Not the Fae.”

“‘Course,” Pete muttered, thinking that every fairy tale in her world would disagree with the slender girl. “I’m done. Can you do me a favor and get everyone together in one room? The smaller and hotter the better?”

Snowblood looked curious, but she bit down on her question and merely nodded. “Of course.”

“I’ll be in after a time,” Pete said. “Can you have Rowan show me the place where he died?”

That’d give the Queen and her entourage time to get good and pissy about being locked up.

“Just you and me,” Pete told Caliban, after Snowblood’s footsteps faded away. The prince made no reply.

Caliban’s rooms would be opulent even by Las Vegas standards. Heavy velvet in waterfalls of blue and green and midnight purple cascaded from the walls. The bed was gold, and enormous. A mirror made in the shape of an oak leaf stared back at Pete from the ceiling.

“He did like his creature comforts, eh?” she said to Rowan.

He shrugged, staying far away from the bloodstain in the center of the rich blue carpet. Pete didn’t even smell the coppery — or charred, she supposed, as this was a Fae–scent that usually accompanied a fresh stabbing scene. The prince’s chamber was heavily perfumed, and a garden of scents cloyed at Pete’s nose.

She noted that the door locked from the inside with a heavy bolt, and the windows were barred over with grates that had rusted into place.

Pete brushed off her knees reflexively and stood, coming back to Rowan. “I’ve seen enough. Go join the others, and I’ll make an entrance in a bit.”

Rowan obeyed, and Pete was alone again, with the last moments of Caliban’s life.

She could hear the Fae long before she came upon the door to what the guard told her was Crowfoot’s private library. They were complaining. Vociferously. That was good. She wanted them off balance and receptive to the truth.

The member of the Ash Guard outside the door tightened his grip on his short blade when she approached. “Lady,” he said, just the proper amount of deference in the tone.

“You can just call me Pete,” Pete told him. “What’s your name?”

“Juniper,” he said. Pete winced. The flower names, to her mind, were just cruel.