Karen Chance - Death's Mistress

“Like what?”

“Heightened memories, mostly. With sharper sensations, Dolby surround sound, the works.”

“Like hallucinations?”

“Like heightened memories, Claire. It’s no big deal.”

She didn’t look convinced. “And you can control them? You can snap out of these memories whenever you want?”

“Yes,” I said easily. “Now, do you want to eat, or do you want to lecture me some more?”

The look on her face said this wasn’t over. But her stomach growled, momentarily overruling her head. I flopped onto the love seat, passed around oyster pails, paper plates and chopsticks and we dug in.

“God, I missed this,” she told me a few minutes later, her mouth full of chow mein.

“What?”

“Greasy human takeout.”

“They don’t have the equivalent in Faerie?”

“No. They also don’t have TV, movies, iPods or jeans.” Her hand ran over the threadbare denim covering her knee. “Damn, I missed jeans.”

I laughed. “I thought you’d like being waited on hand and foot—”

“And having servants follow me everywhere, and having to dress up every damn day and having everybody defer to me but nobody talk to me?” She rolled her eyes. “Oh, yeah. It’s been great.”

“Heidar talks to you, doesn’t he? And Caedmon?” Heidar was Claire’s big blond fiancé. Caedmon was his father, the king of one branch of the Light Fey.

“Yes, but Heidar’s gone half the time, patrolling the border, and Caedmon’s holed up in high-level meetings deciding God knows what while I’m supposed to hang around and, I don’t know, knit or something!”

“You don’t knit.”

“I’ve been so bored, I’ve been thinking of learning.”

“Sounds like you need a vacation.”

She chewed noodles and didn’t say anything.

I tugged off my boots and chucked them by the door, enjoying the feel of the smooth old boards under my feet. They’d absorbed a lot of heat through the day, and were giving it off in steady warmth that contrasted nicely with the cooler air. A few moths fluttered around the old ship’s lantern overhead, which was swinging slightly in the breeze.

“Are you going to tell me what’s wrong?” I finally asked, when Claire had finished most of her whiskey and still hadn’t said anything.

She’d been staring out at the night, but now she shifted those emerald eyes to me. “How do you know anything is? Maybe I decided to take that vacation.”

“In the middle of the night?”

“You keep odd hours sometimes—”

“With no shoes, no luggage and no escort?”

She frowned and gave it up. “I don’t want you involved in this. I only came this way because I didn’t have a choice. The official portals are all guarded since the war.”

“The ones we know about,” I agreed.

“I mean on the fey side,” she said, as if it were obvious that her own people would be trying to prevent her from leaving.

“Okay, back up. You came through the portal in the basement—”

“Because nobody knows about it. Uncle used it to bring in his bootlegging supplies, so he kept it quiet.”

“And you needed to slip away unnoticed because…?”

“I told you, I don’t want—”

“I’m already involved,” I pointed out. “You’re here. You’re obviously in some kind of trouble. I’m going to help whether you like it or not, so you may as well tell me.”

“I don’t want your help!”

“I don’t care.”

Claire glared at me. She had one of those faces that could really only be appreciated when she was animated. Ivory pale, with an aquiline nose humanized by a wash of freckles and a strong chin, it was pretty enough in repose. But with emerald eyes flashing, color high and that glorious mop of hair blowing around her face, she was beautiful.

She was also one of the few people I knew with more of a hair-trigger temper than me. It was always possible to get the truth out of her, if you made her mad enough. “I’m here to save the life of my son. All right?” she snapped.

I focused on the little boy. He was the usual pink-cheeked, chubby-limbed baby as far as I could tell. He was currently poking at a couple of chess pieces, trying to get them to fight each other.

He had taken them out of the game and put them in the circle made by the round wicker bottom of the table. He was watching them avidly through the open side of his makeshift combat ring, waiting for some mayhem, but they weren’t obliging. One had hunched down to clean his sword, and the other was having a smoke. Tiny rings wreathed its head for a moment, before the wind pulled them away.

“They’re friends,” I told him. He’d accidentally picked up two trolls instead of one of each.

Puzzled blue eyes looked up at me.

“They’re allies,” Claire said harshly, and a flash of comprehension crossed his features.

A chubby hand rooted around in the game and plucked out an ogre, its small tusks gleaming behind a metal faceplate. He put it into the ring and immediately both trolls fell on it. He frowned and pulled one of them off, making it an even contest.

“He doesn’t know the word ‘friend’?” I asked, a little appalled.

“In Faerie, you have allies and enemies,” Claire said, getting up to get a refill. “Friends are a lot more rare.”

Stinky had joined the little prince, and they had their heads together, one shining blond, one fuzzy brown with pieces of egg roll in it. I picked them out as Claire came back with what looked like a double. “He looks healthy enough to me,” I commented. “What’s wrong with him?”

“Nothing! And it’s going to stay that way.”

“Why wouldn’t it?”

“Because he had the bad luck to be born a boy,” she said bitterly.

“Come again?”

“The fey don’t allow women to rule—at least, our branch doesn’t—so a girl wouldn’t have been a threat.”

“A threat to who?”

“Take your pick! Everyone at court has had hundreds of years to make plans based on the idea of the king being childless. Then, a century ago, he had Heidar, but no one cared because he can’t inherit.”

I nodded. Heidar’s mother had been human, and he’d inherited his heavier bone structure and more substantial musculature from her. It was the same blood that ensured he could never take the throne. The law said that the king had to be more than half fey, and Heidar was a flat fifty percent.

“But then I came along,” Claire said, after taking a healthy swallow of her drink. “And I’m slightly more than half fey. So when Heidar and I announced that I was pregnant, everyone did the math and freaked out. Courtiers who’d hoped their daughters would snag the king realized that Caedmon had no more need to marry now that he had an heir through his son. The daughters in question, the male relatives who’d hoped to inherit if he died with no legitimate heir, the people who had spent a fortune sucking up to said relatives—they were all furious.”

“But murder—”

“The ‘accidents’ started almost as soon as he was born,” she said, quietly livid.

“What kind of accidents?”

“In the first month alone, he almost drowned in the bathwater, was set upon by a pack of hunting dogs and had the ceiling of his nursery collapse. And things only got worse from there.”

“And Heidar didn’t do anything?”

“The maid was fired, the dogs were put down and the ceiling was reinforced—none of which helped the fact that my son was surrounded by a bunch of killers.”

I sipped my own drink for a minute, trying to think up a tactful way of putting this. It wasn’t easy. Tact was Mircea’s forte, not mine. “Is it at all possible that at least some of these things really were accidents?” I finally asked.