Divine Misdemeanors (3 page)

“No, she might keep the knowledge to herself so she can say later that I didn’t warn the demi-fey because I thought I was too good to care.”

“Do you truly think she hates you more than she loves her people?” Frost asked.

“She was the ruling power among the fey exiles in Los Angeles. The lesser fey went to her to settle disputes. Now they come to me.”

“Not all of them,” Frost said.

“No, but enough that she thinks I’m trying to take over her business.”

“We want no part of her businesses, legal or illegal,” Doyle said.

“She was human once, Doyle. It makes her insecure.”

“Her power does not feel human,” Frost said, and he shivered.

I studied his face. “You don’t like her.”

“Do you?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“There is always something twisted inside the minds and bodies of humans who are given access to the wild magic of faerie,” Doyle said.

“She got a wish granted,” I said, “and she wished to be a fairy godmother, because she didn’t understand that there is no such thing among us.”

“She’s made herself into a power to be reckoned with in this city,” Doyle said.

“You’ve scouted her, haven’t you?”

“She all but threatened you outright if you kept trying to steal her people away. I investigated a potential enemy’s stronghold.”

“And?” I asked.

“She should be frightened of us,” he said, and his voice was that voice of before, when he’d been only a weapon and not a person to me.

“We stop by the Fael, and then we’ll talk about what to do with the other godmother. If we tell her and she tells no one, then it is we who can say that she cares more about her jealousy of me than about her own people.”

“Clever,” Doyle said.

“Ruthless,” Frost said.

“It would only be ruthless if I didn’t warn the demi-fey some other way. I won’t risk another life for some stupid power play.”

“It is not stupid to her, Meredith,” Doyle said. “It is all the power she has ever had, or will ever have. People will do very bad things to keep their perceived power intact.”

“Is she dangerous to us?”

“In a full frontal assault, no, but if it is trickery and deceit, then she has fey who are loyal to her and hate the sidhe.”

“Then we keep an eye on them.”

“We are,” he said.

“Are you spying on people without telling me?” I asked.

“Of course I am,” he said.

“Shouldn’t you run things like that by me first?”

“Why?”

I looked at Frost. “Can you explain to him why I should know these things?”

“I think he is treating you like most royals want to be treated,” said Frost.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“Plausible deniability is very important among monarchs,” he said.

“You see Gilda as a fellow monarch?” I asked.

“She sees herself as such,” Doyle said. “It is always better to let petty kings keep their crowns until we want the crown and the head it sits upon.”

“This is the twenty-first century, Doyle. You can’t run our life like it’s the tenth century.”

“I have been watching your news programs and reading books on governments that are present-day, Merry. Things have not changed so very much. It is just more secret now.”

I wanted to ask him how he knew that. I wanted to ask him if he knew government secrets that would make me doubt my government, and my country. But in the end, I didn’t ask. For one thing, I wasn’t certain he’d tell me the truth if he thought it would upset me. And for another, one mass murder seemed like enough for one day. I had Frost call home and warn our own demi-fey to stay close to the house and to be wary of strangers, because the only thing I was sure of was that it wasn’t one of us. Beyond that I had no ideas. I’d worry about spies and governments on another day, when the image of the winged dead weren’t still dancing behind my eyes.

I DROVE TO THE FAEL TEA SHOP, AND DOYLE WAS RIGHT. IT WASN’T
close to the beach, where everyone would be waiting. It was blocks away in a part of town that had once been a bad area but had been gentrified, which used to simply mean claimed by the yuppies, but had come to mean a place that the faeries had moved into and made more magical. It would then become a tourist stronghold, and a place for teens and college students to hang out. The young have always been drawn to the fey. It’s why for centuries you put charms on your children to keep us from taking the best and brightest and the most creative. We like artists.

Doyle had his usual death grip on the door and the dashboard. He always rode that way in the front seat. Frost was less afraid of the car and L.A. traffic, but Doyle insisted that as captain he should be beside me. The fact that it was an act of bravery to him just made it cute, though I kept the cute comment to myself. I wasn’t certain how he would take it.

He managed to say, “I do like this car better than the other one you drive. It’s higher from the ground.”

“It’s an SUV,” I said, “more a truck than a car.” I was looking for a parking spot, and not having much luck. This was a section of town where people came to stroll on a lovely Saturday, and there were lots
of people, which meant lots of cars. It was L.A. Everyone drove everywhere.

The SUV actually belonged to Maeve Reed, like so much of our stuff. Her chauffeur had offered to drive us around, but the moment the police called, the limo stayed at home. I had enough problems with the police not taking me seriously without showing up in a limo. I’d never live that down, and Lucy wouldn’t live it down either, and that mattered more. It was her job. In a sense, the other police were right; I was just sightseeing.

I knew that part of the problem was the car itself, all that technology and metal. Except that I knew several lesser fey who owned cars and drove. Most of the sidhe had no trouble in the big modern skyscrapers, and they had plenty of metal and technology. Doyle was also afraid of airplanes. It was one of his few weaknesses.

Frost called out, “Parking spot.” He pointed and I maneuvered the huge SUV toward it. I had to speed up and almost hit a smaller car that was trying to outmuscle me for the spot. It made Doyle swallow hard and let out a shaky breath. I wanted to ask him why riding in the back of the limo didn’t bother him to this degree, but refrained. I wasn’t sure if pointing out that he was only this afraid in the front seat of a car would make him more afraid in the limo. That we did not need.

I got the parking spot, though parallel parking the Escalade wasn’t my favorite thing to do. Parking the Escalade was never easy, and parallel parking was like getting a master’s degree in parking. Would that make parking a semi the doctoral test? I really never wanted to drive anything bulkier than this SUV, so I’d probably never find out.

I could see Fael’s sign from the car, just a few storefronts down. We hadn’t even had to go around the block once; perfect.

I waited for Doyle to make his shaky way out of the car, and for Frost to unbuckle and come around to my door. I knew better than to simply get out without one of them beside me. They had all made very certain that I understood that part of being a good bodyguard was to train your guardee how to be guarded. Their tall bodies blocked
me at almost every turn when we were on the street. If there had been a credible threat I’d have had more guards. Two was minimum and precautionary. I liked precautionary—it meant no one was trying to kill me. The fact that it was a novelty that no one was trying said a lot about the last few years of my life. Maybe it wasn’t the happily ever after the tabloids were painting, but it was definitely happier.

Frost helped me down from the SUV, which I needed. I always had a moment of feeling childlike when I had to climb in or out of the Escalade. It was like sitting in a chair where your feet swing. It made me feel like I was six again, but Frost’s arm under mine, the height and solidness of him, reminded me that I was no longer a child, and decades from six.

Doyle’s voice came. “Fear Dearg, what are you doing here?”

Frost stopped in mid-motion and put his body more solidly in front of me, shielding me, because Fear Dearg was not a name. The Fear Dearg were very old, the remnants of a faerie kingdom that had predated the Seelie and the Unseelie courts. That made the Fear Dearg more than three thousand years old, at minimum. Since they did not breed, for they had no females, they were all simply that old. They were somewhere between a brownie, a hobgoblin, and a nightmare—a nightmare that could make a man think that a stone was his wife, or that a cliff into the sea a path of safety. And some delighted in the kind of torture that would have pleased my aunt. I’d once seen her skin a sidhe noble until he was unrecognizable and then she made him follow her on a leash like a dog.

The Fear Dearg could be taller than an average human or they could be shorter than me by a foot, and almost any size in between. The only sameness from one to the other was that they were not humanly handsome and they wore red.

The voice that answered Doyle’s question was high pitched though definitely male, but it was querulous with that tone that usually means great age in a human. I’d never heard that tone in the voice of a fey. “Why, I saved a parking spot for you, cousin.”

“We are not kin, and how did you know to save a parking place for
us?” Doyle asked, and there was now no hint of his weakness in the car in his deep voice.

He ignored the question. “Oh, come. I’m a shape-shifting, illusion-using goblin, and so was your father. Phouka is not so far from Fear Dearg.”

“I am the Queen’s Darkness, not some nameless Fear Dearg.”

“Ah, and there’s the rub,” he said in his thin voice. “It’s a name I’m wanting.”

“What does that mean, Fear Dearg?” Doyle asked.

“It means I ha’ a story to tell, and it would best be told inside the Fael, where your host and my boss awaits ye. Or would ye deny the hospitality of our establishment?”

“You work at the Fael?” Doyle asked.

“I do.”

“What is your job there?”

“I am security.”

“I didn’t know the Fael needed extra security.”

“Me boss felt the need. Now I will ask once more, will you refuse our hospitality? And think long on this one, cousin, for the old rules still apply to my kind. I have no choice.”

That was a tricky question, because one of the things that some Fear Deargs were known for was appearing on a dark, wet night and asking to warm before the fire. Or the Fear Dearg could be the only shelter on a stormy night, and a human might wander in, attracted by their fire. If the Fear Dearg were refused or treated discourteously, they would use their glamour for ill. If treated well, they left you unharmed, and sometimes did chores around the house as a thank-you, or left the human with a gift of luck for a time, but usually the best you could hope for was to be left in peace.

But I could not hide behind Frost’s broad body forever, and I was beginning to feel a little silly. I knew the reputation of the Fear Dearg, and I also knew that for some reason the other fey, especially the old ones, didn’t care for them. I touched Frost’s chest, but he wouldn’t move until Doyle told him to, or I made a fuss. I didn’t want to make
a fuss in front of strangers. The fact that my guards sometimes listened more to each other than to me was still something we were working out.

“Doyle, he has done nothing but be courteous to us.”

“I have seen what his kind does to mortals.”

“Is it worse than what I’ve seen our kind do to each other?”

Frost actually looked down at me then, being alert for whatever threat might, or might not, be coming. The look even through his glasses said that I was oversharing in front of someone who was not a member of our court.

“We heard what the gold king did to you, Queen Meredith.”

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. The gold king was my maternal uncle Taranis, more a great-uncle, and king of the Seelie Court, the golden throng. He’d used magic as a date-rape drug, and I had evidence in a forensic storage unit somewhere that he had raped me. We were trying to get him tried among the humans for that rape. It was some of the worst publicity the Seelie court had ever had.

I tried to peer around Frost’s body and see who I was talking to, but Doyle’s body blocked me, too, so I talked to the empty air. “I am not queen.”

“You are not queen of the Unseelie Court, but you are queen of the sluagh, and if I belong to any court left outside the Summerlands, it is King Sholto’s sluagh.”

Faerie, or the Goddess, or both, had crowned me twice that last night. The first crown had been with Sholto inside his faerie mound. I had been crowned with him as King and Queen of the Sluagh, the dark host, the nightmares of faerie so dark that even the Unseelie would not let them skulk about their own mound, but in a fight they were always the first called. The crown had vanished from me when the second crown, which would have made me high queen of all the Unseelie lands, had appeared on my head. Doyle would have been king to my queen there, and it was once traditional that all the kings of Ireland had married the same woman, the Goddess, who had once
been a real queen whom each king “married,” at least for a night. We had not always played by the traditional human rules of monogamy.

Sholto was one of the fathers of the children I carried, so the Goddess had shown all of us. So technically I was still his queen. Sholto had not pressed that idea in this month back home; he seemed to understand that I was struggling to find my footing in this new, more-permanent exile.

All I could think to say aloud was, “I didn’t think the Fear Dearg owed allegiance to any court.”

“Some of us fought with the sluagh in the last wars. It allowed us to bring death and pain without the rest of you good folk”—and he made sure the last phrase held bitterness and contempt in it—“hunting us down and passing sentence on us for doing what is in our nature. The sidhe of either court have no lawful call on the Fear Dearg, do they, kinsman?”

“I will not acknowledge kinship with you, Fear Dearg, but Meredith is right. You have acted with courtesy. I can do no less.” It was interesting that Doyle had dropped the “Princess” he normally used in front of all lesser fey, but he had not used queen either, so he was interested in the Fear Dearg acknowledging me as queen, and that was very interesting to me.