Divine Misdemeanors (2 page)

“I’ve already checked, Merry. There are no other homicides even close to this one. No demi-fey killed in a group. No costumes. No book illustration left. This is one of a kind.”

“Maybe it is, but you helped teach me that killers don’t start out this good. Maybe they just planned it perfectly and got lucky that it was this perfect, or maybe they’ve had other kills that weren’t this good, this thought-out, but it would be staged, and it would have this feel to it.”

“What kind of feel?” she asked.

“You thought film not just because it would give you more leads, but because there’s something dramatic about it all. The setting, the choice of victims, the display, the book illustration; it’s showy.”

She nodded. “Exactly,” she said.

The wind played with my purple sundress until I had to hold it to keep it from flipping up and flashing the police line behind us.

“I’m sorry to drag you out to something like this on a Saturday, Merry,” she said. “I did try to call Jeremy.”

“He’s got a new girlfriend and keeps turning off his phone.” I didn’t begrudge my boss, the first semi-serious lover he’d had in years. Not really.

“You look like you had a picnic planned.”

“Something like that,” I said, “but this didn’t do your Saturday any good either.”

She smiled ruefully. “I didn’t have any plans.” She stabbed a thumb in the direction of the other police. “Your boyfriends are mad at me for making you look at dead bodies while you’re pregnant.”

My hands automatically went to my stomach, which was still very flat. I wasn’t showing yet, though with twins the doctor had warned me that it could go from nothing to a lot almost overnight.

I glanced back to see Doyle and Frost, standing with the policemen. My two men were no taller than some of the police—six feet and some inches isn’t that unusual—but the rest stood out painfully. Doyle had been called the Queen’s Darkness for a thousand years, and he fit his name, black from skin to hair to the eyes behind their black wraparound sunglasses. His black hair was in a tight braid down his back. Only the silver earrings that climbed from lobe to the pointed tip of his ears relieved the black-on-black of his jeans, T-shirt, and leather jacket. The last was to hide the weapons he was carrying. He was the captain of my bodyguards, as well as one of the fathers to my unborn children, and one of my dearest loves. The other dearest love stood beside him like a pale negative, skin as white as my own, but Frost’s hair was actually silver, like Christmas tree tinsel, shining in the sunlight. The wind played with his hair so that it floated outward in a shimmering wave, looking like some model with a wind machine, but even though his hair was near ankle-length and unbound, it did not tangle in the wind. I’d asked him about that, and he’d said simply, “The wind likes my hair.” I hadn’t known what to say to that so I hadn’t tried.

His sunglasses were gunmetal gray with darker gray lenses to hide the paler gray of his eyes, the most unremarkable part of him, really. He favored designer suits, but he was actually in one of the few pairs of blue jeans he owned, with a silk T-shirt and a suit jacket to hide his own weapons, all in grays. We actually had been planning on an outing
to the beach, or I’d have never gotten Frost out of slacks and into jeans. His face might have been the more traditionally handsome of the two, but it wasn’t by much. They were as they had been for centuries, the light and dark of each other.

The policemen in their uniforms, suits, and more casual clothes seemed like shadows not as bright, not as alive as my two men, but maybe everyone in love thought the same thing. Maybe it was not being immortal warriors of the sidhe but simply love that made them stand out to my eye.

Lucy had gotten me through the police line because I’d worked with the police before, and I was actually a licensed private detective in this state. Doyle and Frost weren’t, and they had never worked with the police on a case, so they had to stay behind the line away from any would-be clues.

“If I find out anything for certain that seems pertinent about this kind of magic, I will let you know.” It wasn’t a lie, not the way I worded it. The fey, and especially the sidhe, are known for never lying, but we’ll deceive you until you’ll think the sky is green and the grass is blue. We won’t
tell
you the sky is green and the grass is blue, but we will leave you with that definite impression.

“You think there’ll be an earlier murder,” she said.

“If not, this guy, or girl, got very lucky.”

Lucy motioned at the bodies. “I’m not sure I’d call this lucky.”

“No murderer is this good the first time, or did you get a new flavor of killer while I was away in faerie?”

“Nope. Most murders are pretty standard. Violence level and victim differs but you’re about eighty to ninety percent more likely to be killed by your nearest and dearest than by a stranger, and most killing is depressingly ordinary.”

“This one’s depressing,” I said, “but it’s not ordinary.”

“No, it’s not ordinary. I’m hoping this one perfect scene kind of got it out of the killer’s system.”

“You think it will?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “No, I don’t.”

“Can I alert the local demi-fey to be careful, or are you trying to withhold the victim profile from the media?”

“Warn them, because if we don’t and it happens again, we’ll get accused of being racists, or is that speciesist?” She shook her head, walking back toward the police line. I followed her, glad to be leaving the bodies behind.

“Humans can interbreed with the demi-fey, so I don’t think speciesist applies.”

“I couldn’t breed with something the size of a doll. That’s just wrong.”

“Some of them have two forms, one small and one not much shorter than me.”

“Five feet? Really, from eight inches tall to five feet?”

“Yes, really. It’s a rare ability, but it happens, and the babies are fertile, so I don’t think it’s quite a different species.”

“I didn’t mean any offense,” she said.

“None taken, I’m just explaining.”

We were almost to the police line and my visibly anxious boyfriends. “Enjoy your Saturday,” she said.

“I’d say you too, but I know you’ll be here for hours.”

“Yeah, I think your Saturday will be a lot more fun than mine.” She looked at Doyle and Frost as the police finally let them move forward. Lucy was giving them an admiring look behind her sunglasses. I didn’t blame her.

I slipped the gloves off even though I hadn’t touched a thing. I dropped them onto the mass of other discarded gloves that was on this side of the tape. Lucy held the tape up for me and I didn’t even have to stoop. Sometimes short is good.

“Oh, check out the flowers, florists,” I said.

“Already on it,” she said.

“Sorry, sometimes I get carried away with you letting me help.”

“No, all ideas are welcome, Merry, you know that. It’s why I called you down here.” She waved at me and went back to her murder
scene. We couldn’t shake because she was still wearing gloves and carrying evidence.

Doyle and Frost were almost to me, but we weren’t going to get to the beach right away either. I had to warn the local demi-fey, and try to figure out a way to see if the mortality had spread to them, or if there was magic here in Los Angeles that could steal their immortality. There were things that would kill us eventually, but there wasn’t much that would allow you to slit the throat of the winged-kin. They were the essence of faerie, more so even than the high court nobles. If I found out anything certain I’d tell Lucy, but until I had something that was useful I’d keep my secrets. I was only part human; most of me was pure fey, and we know how to keep a secret. The trick was how to warn the local demi-fey without causing a panic. Then I realized that there wasn’t a way. The fey are just like humans—they understand fear. Some magic, a little near-immortality, doesn’t make you unafraid; it just gives you a different list of fears.

FROST TRIED TO HUG ME, BUT I PUT A HAND ON HIS STOMACH, TOO
short to really touch his chest. Doyle said, “She’s trying to appear strong in front of the policemen.”

“We shouldn’t have let you come see this now,” Frost said.

“Jeremy could have given a fey’s opinion.”

“Jeremy is the boss and he’s allowed to turn his phone off on a Saturday,” I said.

“Then Jordan or Julian Kane. They are psychics and practicing wizards.”

“They’re only human, Frost. Lucy wanted a fey to see this crime scene.”

“You shouldn’t have to see this in your condition.”

I leaned in and spoke low. “I am a detective. It’s my job, and it’s our people up there dead on the hillside. I may never be queen, but I’m the closest they have here in L.A. Where else should a ruler be when her people are threatened?”

Frost started to say something else, but Doyle touched his arm. “Let it go, my friend. Let us just get her back to the vehicle and be-gone.”

I put my arm through Doyle’s leather-clad arm, though I thought it was too hot for the leather. Frost trailed us, and a glance showed
that he was doing his job of searching the area for threats. Unlike a human bodyguard, Frost looked from sky to ground, because when faerie is your potential enemy, danger can come from nearly anywhere.

Doyle was keeping an eye out too, but his attention was divided by trying to keep me from twisting an ankle in the sandals that looked great with the dress but sucked for uneven ground. They didn’t have too tall a heel, they were just very open and not supportive. I wondered what I’d wear when I got really pregnant. Did I have any practical shoes except for jogging ones?

The major danger had passed when I’d killed my main rival for the throne and given up the crown. I’d done everything I could to make myself both too dangerous to tempt anyone and harmless to the nobles and their way of life. I was in voluntary exile, and I’d made it clear that it was a permanent move. I didn’t want the throne; I just wanted to be left alone. But since some of the nobles had spent the last thousand years plotting to get closer to the throne, they found my decision a little hard to believe.

So far no one had tried to kill me, or anyone close to me, but Doyle was the Queen’s Darkness, and Frost was the Killing Frost. They had earned their names, and now that we were all in love and I was carrying their children, it would be a shame to let something go wrong. This was the end of our fairy tale, and maybe we had no enemies left, but old habits aren’t always a bad thing. I felt safe with them, except that while I loved them more than life itself, if they died trying to protect me I’d never recover from it. There are all sorts of ways to die without dying.

When we were out of hearing of the human police, I told them all my fears about the killings.

“How do we find out if the lesser fey here are easier to kill?” Frost asked.

Doyle said, “In other days it would have been easy enough.”

I stopped walking, which forced him to stop. “You’d just pick a few and see if you could slit their throats?”

“If my queen had asked it, yes,” he said.

I started to pull away from him, but he held my arm in his. “You knew what I was before you took me to your bed, Meredith. It is a little late for shock and innocence.”

“The queen would say, ‘Where is my Darkness? Someone bring me my Darkness.’ You would appear, or simply step closer to her, and then someone would bleed or die,” I said.

“I was her weapon and her general. I did what I was bid.”

I studied his face, and I knew it wasn’t just the black wraparound sunglasses that kept me from reading him. He could hide everything behind his face. He had spent too many years beside a mad queen, where the wrong look at the wrong moment could get you sent to the Hallway of Mortality, the torture chamber. Torture could last a long time for the immortal, especially if you healed well.

“I was lesser fey once, Meredith,” Frost said. He’d been Jack Frost, and, literally, human belief plus needing to be stronger to protect the woman he loved had turned him into the Killing Frost. But once he had been simply little Jackie Frost, just one minor being in the entourage of Winter’s power. The woman he had changed himself completely for was centuries in her human grave, and now he loved me: the only non-aging, non-immortal sidhe royal ever. Poor Frost—he couldn’t seem to love people who would outlive him.

“I know you were not always sidhe.”

“But I remember when he was the Darkness to me, and I feared him as much as any. Now he is my truest friend and my captain, because that other Doyle was centuries before you were born.”

I studied his face, and even around his sunglasses I saw the gentleness—a piece of softness that he’d only let me see in the last few weeks. I realized that just as he would have had Doyle’s back in battle, he did the same now. He had distracted me from my anger, and put himself in the way of it, as if I were a blade to be avoided.

I held out a hand to him, and he took it. I stopped pulling against Doyle’s arm, and just held them both. “You are right. You are both right. I knew Doyle’s history before he came to my side. Let me try
this again.” I looked up at Doyle, still with Frost’s hand in mine. “You aren’t suggesting that we test our theory on random fey?”

“No, but in honesty I do not have another way to test.”

I thought about it, and then shook my head. “Neither do I.”

“Then what are we to do?” Frost asked.

“We warn the demi-fey, and then we go to the beach.”

“I thought this would end our day out,” Doyle said.

“When you can’t do anything else, you go about your day. Besides, everyone is meeting us at the beach. We can talk about this problem there as well as at the house. Why not let some of us enjoy the sand and water while the rest of us debate immortality and murder?”

“Very practical,” Doyle said.

I nodded. “We’ll stop off at the Fael Tea Shop on the way to the beach.”

“The Fael is not on the way to the beach,” Doyle said.

“No, but if we leave word there about the demi-fey, the news will spread.”

“We could leave word with Gilda, the Fairy Godmother,” Frost said.