A Stroke Of Midnight   ::   Гамильтон Лорел

”

“The Secret Service are sworn to give their life for the president but they don’t belong to the president.” The reporter emphasized the word belong.

Doyle leaned closer to the mike, forcing him to put one arm against the back of my chair, so I was framed in the curve of his body. The cameras exploded so that I was blind again. I allowed myself to lean in against Doyle, partly for the picture, and partly because I liked it.

“Perhaps I misspoke,” Doyle said, with all my Christmas brightness framed against his blackness.

“Are you having sex with the princess?” a female reporter asked.

“Yes,” he said simply.

They actually almost sighed as a group in eagerness. Another woman said, “Frost, are you sleeping with the princess?”

Doyle stepped back and let Frost come up to the mike again, though I would have preferred keeping him away from it. He was brave and he came and bent over the mike, bent over me. But Frost wouldn’t play for the cameras. His face was arrogant, and perfect, and showed nothing, even though his grey eyes were bare to the camera’s glare. He always said he thought it was beneath us to play to the media. But I knew now that it wasn’t arrogance that made him not play, it was fear. A phobia, if you will, of cameras and reporters and crowds. He leaned over stiffly, and said, “Yes.”

This shouldn’t have been news to any of them. Publicly I’d returned to faerie to seek a husband. The sidhe don’t breed much, so the royals get to marry only if they get pregnant first. The queen and I had explained this at another press conference, when I first visited home. But she’d kept the guards away from the mikes, and there was something about the guards admitting it, on mike, that excited the media. Almost as if it was dirtier because they were saying it.

“Are the two of you having sex with the princess at the same time?”

“No.” Frost fought not to frown. We were lucky the reporter hadn’t asked if they slept together with me. Because that we did. The fey sleep in big puppy piles. It’s not always about sex; sometimes it’s about safety and comfort.

Frost stepped back to the wall, stiff and unhappy. The reporters were yelling even more sexual questions at him. Madeline helped us out. “I think our Killing Frost is a little shy at the mike, boys and girls. Let’s pick on someone else.”

So they did.

They yelled out names and questions to the men. One or two of the guards onstage had never been paraded in front of the media at all. I wasn’t certain that Adair or Hawthorne had ever seen a television or a movie. They were in full-plate mail, though Adair’s looked like it was formed of gold and copper, and Hawthorne’s was a rich crimson, a color no metal had ever been. Adair’s was metal; Hawthorne’s just looked like metal, though I couldn’t say what it was made out of. Something magical. They had both chosen to keep their helmets on. Adair, I believe, because the queen had shorn his hair as a punishment for trying to refuse my bed. Hawthorne’s hair still fell in thick black-green waves to his ankles. I had no idea why he kept his helmet on. They must have been roasting in front of this many electric lights, but having decided to wear the helmets, they’d wear them until they fainted. Well, Adair would. I didn’t know even that much about Hawthorne. They knew what a camera was because the queen was fond of her Polaroid, but beyond that and indoor plumbing, technology was a stranger to them. I wondered how they felt about being thrown to the lions. Their faces would show nothing. They were the Queen’s Ravens, they knew how to hide what they felt.

Thankfully, no one yelled their names, probably because no one knew who they were.

Madeline finally picked a question, and a victim for them. “Brad, you had a question for Rhys.”

The reporter stood up a little taller, and most of the others sat down like disappointed flowers. “Rhys, how was it being a real detective in Los Angeles?”

Rhys was on the far end near the edge of the dais. He was the shortest of the purebred sidhe, only five and a half feet tall. His white curls fell to his waist, capped with a cream-colored fedora with a slightly darker band. The trench coat he wore over his suit matched the hat. He looked like a cross between an old-time detective with better fashion sense, a male stripper, and a pirate. The stripper came from the pale blue silk T-shirt that clung to his muscular chest and washboard abs. The pirate came from the fact that he wore a patch over one eye. It wasn’t affectation, but to save the press from seeing what was left after a goblin had torn out his eye, laid scars down a boyishly handsome face. The remaining eye was three rings of blue. He could have used glamour to hide the scars, but when he realized the scars didn’t bother me, he’d stopped bothering. He thought the scars gave him character, and they did.

Rhys had always been a huge film noir fan, and the reporter clearly remembered that. I liked her better for it.

He put one hand flat on the table and the other across my shoulders as he moved into the mike, similar to what Doyle had done. But Rhys knew how to play to the camera better because he’d been doing it longer. He took off the fedora and shook his hair out, so it fell around his shoulders in thick white curls.

“I loved being a detective in L.A.”

“Was it like in the movies?” someone asked.

“Sometimes, but not very much. I ended up doing more bodyguard work than actual detective work.”

The next question was interesting. “There were rumors that some of the stars you and the other guards protected wanted more body than guarding?”

That was a hard one, because a lot of the clients had asked or indicated a willingness for sex. The men had either ignored the invitation or said no. So technically the answer was yes, but if he said yes, then all the semi-famous, or even famous, for whom Rhys had bodyguarded would be in the tabloids tomorrow, and it would be our fault. Our former boss, Jeremy Grey, deserved better than that from us. So did our clients. And the right kind of clients would stay away from Grey’s Detective Agency, and the wrong kind would come and be disappointed.

I leaned into the microphone, and said suggestively, “I’m afraid that Rhys was too busy bodyguarding me to bodyguard anyone else.”

That got me laughter and distracted them all. We were back to sex questions about us, and those we could answer.

“Is Rhys good in bed?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Is the princess good in bed?”

“Very.”

See, easy questions.