A Stroke Of Midnight   ::   Гамильтон Лорел

”

“Well, isn’t this going to be a disaster,” Galen said.

We had a dead reporter in the Unseelie sithen, and a mass of live reporters still on the premises. Disaster didn’t even begin to cover it.



CHAPTER 3

I ’D SEEN MORE VIOLENCE IN THE COURTS THAN IN ALL MY YEARS as a private detective in Los Angeles, but I’d seen more death in L.A. Not because I was included in murder cases—private dicks don’t do murder cases, at least not fresh ones—but because most of the things that live in faerie land are immortal. By definition, the immortal don’t die very often. I could count on one hand how many fresh crime scenes the police had called us in on and still have fingers left over. Even those cases were because the Grey Detective Agency could boast some of the best magic workers on the West Coast. Magic is like everything else; if you can do good with it, some people will find a way to do bad with it. Our agency specialized in Supernatural problems, Magical solutions. It was on the business cards and everything.

I’d also learned that all bodies are an it, not he, not she—it. Because if you think of the dead body as a he or a she, they begin to be real for you. They begin to be people, and they aren’t people, not anymore. They’re dead, and outside of very special circumstances they are just inert matter. You can have sympathy for the victim later, but at the crime scene, especially in the first moments, you serve the victim better by not sympathizing. Sympathy steals your ability to think. Empathy will cripple you. Detachment and logic, those are your salvation at a fresh murder. Anything else leads to hysterics, and I was not only the most experienced detective in the hallway, I was also Princess Meredith NicEssus, wielder of the hands of flesh and blood, Besaba’s Bane. Besaba was my mother, and my conception had forced her to wed my father and live, for a time, at the Unseelie Court. I was a princess and I might one day be queen. Future queens do not have hysterics. Future queens who are also trained detectives aren’t allowed hysterics.

The problem was that I knew one of these bodies. I’d known her alive and walking around. I knew that she liked classical literature. When she was cast out of the Seelie Court and had to come to the Unseelie Court, she’d changed her name, as many did, even among the Seelie. They changed their names so they wouldn’t be reminded daily of who and what they had once been, and how far they had fallen. She called herself Beatrice, after the love interest in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Dante’s Inferno. She said, “I’m in hell, I might as well have a name to match.” I’d taken world literature as one of my forced electives in college. When I finished the class, I gave most of my books to Beatrice, because she would read them and I wouldn’t. I could always buy extra copies of the handful of books that I actually enjoyed. Beatrice couldn’t. She couldn’t pass for human, and she didn’t like being stared at.

I stared at her now, but she wouldn’t mind. She wouldn’t mind anything ever again. Beatrice looked like a delicate human-size version of the tiny demi-fey that still clung to Rhys’s hair. Once Beatrice had been able to be that small, but something happened at the Seelie Court, something she would never talk about, and she lost the ability to change sizes. She’d been trapped at around four foot two, and the delicate dragonfly wings on her back had been useless. The demi-fey do not levitate, they fly, and in the larger size, their wings can’t lift them.

Blood had formed a wide, dark pool around her body. Someone had come up behind her and slit her throat. To get that close to her, it had to have been someone she trusted, or someone with enough magic to sneak up on her. Of course, they had also needed enough magic to negate her immortality. There weren’t that many things in faerie that could do both.

“What happened, Beatrice?” I said softly. “Who did this to you?”

Galen came up beside me. “Merry.”

I looked up at him.

“Are you all right?”

I shook my head, and looked down the hallway to our second body. Out loud I said, “I’ll be fine.”

“Liar,” he said softly, and he tried to bend over me, tried to hold me. I didn’t push him away, but I moved back. Now wasn’t the time to cling to someone. According to our culture, I should have been touching someone. But the handful of guards that had come to L.A. with me had only worked at the Grey Detective Agency for a few months. I’d been there a few years. You didn’t huddle at crime scenes. You didn’t comfort yourself. You did your job.

Galen’s face fell a little, as if I’d hurt his feelings. I didn’t want to hurt him, but we had a crisis here. Surely he could see that. So why, as so often happened, was I having to waste energy worrying about Galen’s feelings when I should have been doing nothing but concentrating on the job? There were moments, no matter how dear he was to me, that I understood all too well why my father had not chosen Galen for my fiancé.

I walked toward the second body. The man lay just short of the hallway’s intersection with another, larger hallway. He was on his stomach, arms outspread. There was a large stain of blood on his back, and more of it curling down along the side of his body.

Rhys was squatting by the corpse. He looked up as I approached. The demi-fey peeked out at me through Rhys’s thick white hair, then hid her tiny face, as if she were afraid. The demi-fey usually went around in large groups like flocks of birds or butterflies. Some of them were shy when on their own.

“Do we know what killed him yet?” I asked.

Rhys pointed to the narrow hole in the man’s back. “Knife, I think.”

I nodded. “But they took the blade with them. Why?”

“Because there was something special about the knife that might give them away.”

“Or they simply did not want to lose a good blade,” Frost said. He took the two steps that moved him from the big corridor to the smaller one. He’d been coordinating the guards who were keeping everyone away from the crime scene. I had enough guards with me to close off both ends of the hallway, and I’d done it.

When we’d arrived, the hallway had been protected by floating pots and pans, courtesy of Maggie May, the chief cook for the Unseelie Court. Brownies can levitate objects, but not themselves for some reason. She’d gone with Doyle to see if she could get any more sense out of the scullery maid who had found the bodies.