Charlaine Harris - Deadlocked

“Of course,” I said, because it hadn’t been my intent to accuse Mr. Cataliades of ignoring his own kin. I’d just been curious. Time to change the subject, before I told him that my own fairy godmother had gotten kil ed defending me. “Are you gonna tel me who’s after the cluviel dor?”

He looked profoundly sorry for me. There was a lot of that going around. “Let’s get rid of this body first, shal we?” he said. “Do you have any disposal suggestions?”

I so seldom had to dispose of a human body myself, I was at a loss. Fairies turned into dust, and vampires flaked away. Demons had to be burned. Humans were very troublesome.

Mr. Cataliades, picking up on that thought, turned away with a smal smile. “I hear Diantha coming,” he remarked. “Maybe she’l have a plan.”

Sure enough, the skinny girl glided into the room from the back door. I hadn’t even heard her enter or detected her brain. She was wearing an eye-shattering combination: a very short yel ow-and-black striped skirt over royal blue leggings, and a black leotard. Her black ankle boots were laced up with broad white laces. Today, her hair was bright pink. “Sookieyoudoingokay?” she asked.

It took me a second to translate, and then I nodded. “We got to get rid of this,” I said, pointing to the body, which was absolutely obvious in a kitchen the size of mine.

“Thatshutsonedoor,” she said to her uncle.

He nodded gravely. “I suppose the best way to proceed is to load him into the trunk of his car,” Mr. Cataliades said. “Diantha, do you think you could assume his appearance?”

Diantha made a disgusted face but quickly bent to Donald Cal away’s face and stared into it. She plucked a hair from his head, closed her eyes.

Her lips moved, and the air had that magic feel I’d noticed when my friend Amelia had performed one of her spel s.

In a moment, to my shock, Donald Cal away was standing in front of us staring down at his own body.

It was Diantha, completely transformed. She was even wearing Cal away’s clothes, or at least that was the way she appeared to my eyes.

“Fuckthisshit,” Cal away said, and I knew Diantha was in charge. But it was beyond strange to see Mr. Cataliades and Donald Cal away carrying out Cal away’s body to his car, unlocked with the keys extracted from the corpse’s pocket.

I fol owed them out, watching careful y to make sure nothing fel or leaked from the body.

“Diantha, drive to the airport in Shreveport and park the car there. Cal a cab to pick you up, and have it drop you off at … at the police station.

From there, find a good place to change back, so they’l lose the trail.”

She nodded with a jerk and climbed into the car.

“Diantha can keep his appearance al the way to Shreveport?” I said, as she turned the car around with a grind of the wheel. She (he) waved gaily as she took off like a rocket. I hoped she made it back to Shreveport without getting a ticket.

“She won’t get a ticket,” Mr. Cataliades answered my thought.

But here came Jason in his pickup.

“Oh, hel ,” I said. “His sweet potatoes aren’t ready.”

“I need say good-bye, anyway,” Mr. Cataliades said. “I know there are some things I haven’t told you, but I must go now. I may have taken care of the hel hounds, but yours aren’t my only secrets.”

“But …”

I might as wel not have spoken. With the startling speed he’d shown when the hel hounds were chasing him, my “sponsor” disappeared into the woods.

“Hey, Sis!” Jason bounded out of his truck. “Did you just have a visitor? I passed a car. You got my sweet potatoes ready?”

“Ah, not quite,” I said. “That was a drop-in I didn’t expect, a guy wanting to sel me life insurance. You come in and sit, and they’l be ready in about forty-five minutes.” That was an exaggeration, but I wanted Jason to stay. I was scared to be alone. That was not a familiar feeling, or one I liked.

Jason was wil ing enough to come in and gossip with me while I stood at the kitchen counter adding ingredients to the sweet potatoes, mashing them, pouring them over the prepared crust, and putting the dish in the oven.

“How come there’s water everywhere?” Jason said, getting up from the chair to mop it off with a dry dish towel.

“I dropped a pitcher,” I said, and that was the end of Jason’s curiosity. We talked about the suggested wedding dates, the du Rone babies, Hoyt and Hol y’s marriage and Hoyt’s idea that they have a double ceremony (I was sure Hol y and Michele would nix that), and the big reconciliation between Danny and Kennedy, who had been spotted kissing passionately in public at the Sonic.

As I was pul ing the casserole out of the oven and preparing to add the final layer, Jason said, “Hey, I guess you heard that al our old furniture got busted up? That stuff the antiques dealer took? What was her name, Brenda? I hope you got money up front. It wasn’t on consignment or nothing, right?”

I’d frozen after lifting out the dish halfway, but I made myself continue with my task. It helped that Dermot came in then, and since he and Jason looked so much alike, Jason got the biggest kick out of tel ing Dermot how good he was looking, every single time he saw our great-uncle.

“No, I already got cash for that stuff,” I said, when the mutual admiration society had had its moment. And I got the distinct impression from Jason’s head that he’d already forgotten that he’d asked me.

By the time I’d finished my work and sent Jason on his way with the hot dish, Dermot had volunteered to fix hamburgers for our supper. Cooking was something else that he was interested in now, thanks to the Food Network and Bravo. While Dermot was frying the burgers and getting out anything we might want to put on the buns, I looked around the kitchen very careful y to make sure there weren’t any traces of the incident.

Oh, come on, I said to myself. Donald Callaway’s murder. “Incident,” my round, rosy ass. It turned out to be a good thing I checked, because under the kitchen table I spied a pair of dark glasses that must have fal en out of Cal away’s shirt pocket. Dermot didn’t comment when I straightened and slid them into a drawer.

“I don’t guess you’ve heard from Claude or Nial ,” I said.

“No. Maybe Nial has kil ed Claude, or maybe now that Claude is in Faery, he just doesn’t care anymore about those of us left here,” Dermot said, sounding simply philosophical.

I real y couldn’t argue with him that those scenarios were impossible, because I knew enough about fairies and enough about Claude to know that they were actual y likely. “Are some of the guys coming to run out in the woods tonight?” I said. “I guess Bel enos and Gift told you about last night.”

“Those two won’t be here tonight,” Dermot said, rather grimly. “I am making them work tonight as punishment. They hate cleaning the bathrooms and kitchen, so that’s their duty after the club closes. They may come tomorrow night if they behave themselves. I’m sorry about your car, Niece.”

Al the fae were cal ing me Sister now, and Dermot almost always cal ed me Niece. There were a lot worse names they could have chosen, but al this familial terminology felt awful y intimate. “The car’s running okay,” I said, though I’d have to get the bumper fixed sooner or later. Probably later.

The seat belt had to be replaced pronto. And I was a little taken aback that Dermot was punishing the sharp-toothed elf and his running buddy as he would little children, giving them the unpopular cleanup duty. But out loud I said, “At least they were able to get the car out of the ditch. I’m only worried they’l get spotted on someone else’s land or that they’l run into Bil .”