Chapter Fourty-one

I had fallen asleep with Royal on one side, sleeping on his stomach as you had to do when you had moth wings on your back. Mistral wouldn’t share the bed with him, not even with the rose petals still on the sheets to prove that it was the Goddess who had decreed that Royal was supposed to be brought into a larger form. It wasn’t really Mistral’s fault, but I’d had enough of trying to make everyone feel good about themselves at the expense of my own feelings. There was no way to be fair about it. Either I cast Royal out with the afterglow of the amazing sex, his new form, and the blessing of the Goddess still riding both of us, which made me sad to think about, or I told Mistral either he shared with whom I wanted to share with, or he slept without me. He wouldn’t relent, and I was left, as with Barinthus, to stand my ground.

The bed was big enough so that Frost and Doyle slept on one side and Royal on the other. They both saw Royal being brought into his larger form as another blessing. So did most of the men, but for Mistral it was two days without me and then the demi-fey got the sex that he somehow thought was his right. I’d informed him that I wasn’t up to his level of rough sex that night, and that hadn’t gone over well either.

I’d woken to Frost beside me, one arm flung out and his silver hair flung across the bed so that Royal’s wings flickered awake in a pool of silver as if his wings were a piece of exotic jewelry set in a base of melted silver. Doyle was on the other side of Frost, propped up on one elbow watching me when I opened my eyes. He’d put Frost next to me the night before saying, “Rhys wasn’t touching your skin directly. I’m thinking that may be why he was awake to guard your dreaming vision. I will give up the chance to touch you this one night to guard your safety.”

Frost had tried to protest that he wanted to help guard me, but Doyle had been insistent, and as in most things, when the Darkness was insistent he got his way with the other men. Mistral and Barinthus were the two exceptions to that rule and even they usually let him persuade them.

I lay there covered in silver hair cradled between the warmth of Frost and Royal and watched over by my Darkness. It was a good way to wake up, and I was glad I hadn’t vision-traveled to the desert again. The news was already traveling about a mysterious black Humvee that was showing up and helping our troops. The media were speculating that it was a new special forces Hummer that was impervious to bullets and bigger things. The black coach was doing what I’d asked it to do. Maybe that’s why I didn’t have to rescue anyone else personally.

I wrapped the happy waking around me like a comforting blanket on a cold night even though the early California morning wasn’t actually cold, but rather chilly at best. But what Lucy wanted me to come see so bright and early made me feel cold down to my bones.

It was a small rose garden in the back of an older home. The rose bushes were all hybrid teas and were planted in a perfect circle, with only one small archway leading into it, a bench to one side for sitting and admiring, and a small musical fountain in the very center of it. I would have been happy to sit on the bench and listen to the water’s song, letting the scent of roses wash over me, except that under the perfume of roses were other smells, ones that I hadn’t wanted to smell again. The smell of roses would still remind me of the blessings of the Goddess, but this memory would pair it with blood and the smell of fear as the dead had given up their last moments of life, so that there was about the rose-scented morning a hint of charnel and outhouse.

Lucy said, “If they were human sized it would be a massacre, but they’re so tiny that even twenty of them doesn’t seem as real.”

I wasn’t sure I agreed, but I let her statement stand. But if the bodies had been bigger the killers wouldn’t have been able to hang them between the roses like some macabre clothesline. The dead demi-fey hadn’t even begun to change color yet. They were all pale and perfect like little dolls, except that what child would tie their dolls up by their wrists and string them up between rosebushes so that the bound bodies formed a circle with the roses? But the killers had left the archway open so that people could walk back and forth without stooping. There was a demi-fey male hanging from the archway’s top like some gruesome ornament. Their throats were pale and whole, untouched.

“There’s not as much blood. How did they die?” I asked.

“Look at their chests,” she said.

I started to say that I didn’t want to, but I squared my shoulders and bent closer to one of the female victims. She had a cloud of pale blond hair like spun sunshine. Her tiny eyes were a blue as bright as the sky above us, but beginning to cloud a little. I forced myself to look at the gauzy purple dress she was wearing and there was a pin through her chest. It was one of those long slender pins like you’d use for pinning a butterfly to a mount as you waited for it to die and for rigor mortis to give you the fanned wings and perfect display you wanted.

I stepped back from the body and looked at the double row of hanging victims. They were dressed like the first demi-fey victims in the gauzy dresses or kilts, depending on the sex of the fey in question, but they were the children’s book versions of the gauzy clothes covering everything. I knew, from very recent experience, that the demi-fey were very grown-up, and most of them liked to show more skin. Standing here in the cool morning air seeing the lifeless bodies with their wings flared out behind their bodies it was hard not think about Royal and how he’d risen above me with his wings framing him. I wondered if any of these demi-fey had been able to grow bigger?

“We have some hints that one of the killers is a demi-fey, but how could another demi-fey do this to their own kind?” Lucy asked.

“Whoever it is hates being a demi-fey. The pin through the heart like they were really the butterflies they resemble and not people shows a real hatred, or disdain,” I said.

She nodded and handed me the plastic-wrapped illustration. It was a scene from Peter Pan where his shadow is hanging up. It was not exact, not even close. “This one’s different,” I said.

“It’s not a close copy,” Lucy said.

“It’s almost as if the killers wanted to do this murder, this way, and searched for an image that would justify it, but the murders came first in the plan, not the picture.”

“Maybe,” she said.

I nodded. She was right; I was guessing. “If you don’t want my guesses then why am I here, Lucy?”

“You have somewhere better to be?” she asked, and there was an edge of hostility to it.

“I know you’re tired,” I said, “but you called me, remember?”

“I’m sorry, Merry, but the press is crucifying us, saying we aren’t working hard enough because the victims aren’t human.”

“I know that’s not true,” I said.

“You know it, but the fey community is scared. They want someone to blame, and if we can’t give them a killer then they’ll blame us. It didn’t help that we had to arrest Gilda on charges of magical malfeasance.”

“Bad timing,” I said.

She nodded. “The worst.”

“Did she give up the name of the person who made her wand?”

Lucy shook her head. “We offered to drop the charges if she’d give up the name but she seems to think that if we can’t find the manufacturer, we won’t be able to prove what the wand did.”

“It is hard to prove magic in a court. Your wizards will only be able to explain the magic on this one. Magic is easier to prove when you can demonstrate it for the jury.”

“Yeah, but there’s nothing to see when someone sucks some of your magic, or at least that’s what the wizards tell me,” Lucy said.