Divine Misdemeanors (24 page)

Saraid nodded, then asked, “May I rise, your highness?”

I sighed. “Yes, please.”

Dogmaela dropped to one knee in front of me as the other woman stood. “I am sorry, Princess, I did not give you the honor due your station.”

“Please, stop that,” I said.

She looked up, clearly puzzled. I stood and offered her my hand. She took it, frowning. “Have you noticed that the men don’t kneel for me?”

The women exchanged glances. “The queen did not insist upon it always, but our prince did,” Saraid said. “Just tell us which greeting you prefer and we will give it to you.”

“A hello will be fine.”

“No,” Barinthus said, “it will not.”

I turned and gave him a less-than-friendly look. “This is not your business, Barinthus.”

“If you do not have their respect then you have no control over the sidhe,” he said.

“Bullshit,” I said.

He actually looked shocked, as if it wasn’t a term he’d thought to hear from me. “Meredith …”

“No, I’ve had all I’m taking from you today. All the bowing and scraping in the world didn’t make any of them respect Cel or Andais. It made them afraid of them, and that is not respect, that is fear.”

“You threatened me with the full hands of flesh and blood. You want me to fear you.”

“I’d prefer your respect, but I think you will always see me as the daughter of Essus, and no matter how much you might care for me you can’t see me as fit to rule.”

“That is not true,” he said.

“The fact that I gave up the crown to save Frost’s life has made you doubt me.”

He turned so I couldn’t see his face, which was answer enough. “It was the choice of a romantic, not a queen.”

“And am I a romantic, and not a king?” Doyle asked, moving a little toward the other man.

He looked from one to the other of us, and then said, “It was most unexpected that you, Darkness, would make such a choice. I thought
you would help make her into the queen we needed. Instead she has made you into something soft.”

“Are you calling me weak?” Doyle asked, and I didn’t like the tone in his voice at all.

“Enough!” I didn’t mean to shout it, but that’s how it came out.

They all looked at me. “I’ve seen our courts ruled by fear my whole lifetime. I say that we will rule here out of fairness and love, but if there are those among my sidhe who will not take fair treatment or love from me, then there are other options.” I walked toward Barinthus. It was hard to be tough when I had to crane my neck so far up to meet his eyes, but I’d been tiny among them all my life and I managed.

“You say you want me to be queen. You say you want me to be harsh, and you want Doyle to be harsh. You want us to rule the way the sidhe need to be ruled, correct?”

He hesitated, and then nodded.

“Thank the Goddess and the consort that I am not that kind of ruler, because if I was I would kill you as you stand there so arrogant, so full of your power from only a month beside the sea. I should kill you now, before you gain more power, and that is exactly what my aunt and my cousin would do.”

“Andais would send her Darkness to kill me.”

“I already told you I am too much my father’s daughter for that.”

“You would try to kill me yourself,” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“And you could only defend yourself,” Rhys said, “by killing both Essus’s daughter and his grandchildren. I think you’d let her kill you before you’d do that.”

Barinthus turned on Rhys. “Stay out of this, Cromm Cruach, or did you forget that I know your first name, a much older name?”

Rhys laughed and it startled Barinthus. “Oh, no, Mannan Mac Lir, you can’t play true naming with me. I am no longer that name, and haven’t been in so long that it is no longer a true name at all.”

“Enough of this,” I said, my voice calmer this time. “We are leaving, and I want you, Barinthus, at the main house tonight.”

“I will be glad of dinner with my princess.”

“Pack an overnight bag. You’re going to be at the main house for a while.”

“I would prefer to remain near the sea,” he said.

“And I don’t care what you would prefer. I say that you will move into the main house with the rest of us.”

He looked almost pained. “It has been so long since I lived near the sea, Meredith.”

“I know. I’ve seen you swimming in the water of it happier than I’d ever seen you and I would have let you stay here by your element, but today you proved that it goes to your head like some rich liquor. You are drunk with the nearness of wave and sand, and I say that you will go to the main house and sober up.”

Anger filled his eyes, and his hair did that odd underwater movement in the air again. “And if I refuse to move to the main house?”

“Are you saying that you will disobey a direct order from your ruler?”

“I am asking what you will do if I do not comply,” he said.

“I will exile you from this coast. I will send you back to the Unseelie Court and you can find out firsthand how Andais sacrifices the blood of all the fey to try to control the magic that remakes her kingdom. She thought that if I left, the magic would stop and she would be able to control it again, but the Goddess herself is moving again. Faerie is alive again, and I think all you old ones have forgotten what that means.”

“I have forgotten nothing,” he said.

“That is a lie,” I said.

“I would never lie to you,” he said.

“Then you lie to yourself,” I said. I turned to the others. “Come on, everybody. We have a crime scene to visit.”

I started for the door and most of the people in the room followed me out. I called back over my shoulder. “Be at the main house
tonight in time for dinner, Barinthus, or be on a plane back to St. Louis.”

“She will torture me forever if I go back,” he said.

I stopped in the doorway and the crowd of guards had to make an opening so I could see him. “And isn’t that exactly what you threatened to do to Galen just minutes ago?”

He looked at me, just looked at me. “You are still moved by your heart and not your head, Meredith.”

“You know what they say. Never come between a woman and what she loves. Well, don’t threaten what I love, for I will move the Summerlands themselves to protect what is mine.” The Summerlands was one of our words for Heaven.

“I will be there for dinner,” he said, and he bowed. “My Queen.”

“I look forward to it,” I said, and that last I didn’t mean at all. The last thing I wanted at the main house was an egotistical, angry ex-deity, but sometimes decisions aren’t about what you want, but about necessity. Right now, we needed to go to a crime scene and try to earn the paychecks that helped support the mass of people we’d become. If only my title had come with more money, more houses, and less trouble, but I’d yet to meet a princess of faerie who wasn’t in trouble of some kind. Fairy tales are true in one respect. Before you get to the story’s end, bad things and hard choices are lived through. In a way I’d come to my happily ever after ending, but unlike fairy tales, in real life there’s no ending, happy or otherwise. Your story, like your life, goes on. One minute you think you have your life relatively under control, and then the next minute you realize that all that control was just an illusion.

I prayed to the Goddess that Barinthus wouldn’t force me to kill him. It would hurt my heart to do it, but as we walked out into the California sunshine and I slid my sunglasses on, there was something hard and cold inside me. It was a surety that if he pushed hard enough I would do exactly what I’d threatened. Maybe I was more my aunt’s niece than I cared to think about.

DOYLE AND FROST, WITH USNA DRIVING, TOOK THE SUV, AND USNA
used glamour to make him appear as me. It had surprised me that he had his driver’s license, but apparently years before I was born he had left faerie to explore the country. When I’d asked why, he’d replied, “Cats are curious.” And I knew just by the look on his face that that was all the answer I would get.

Usna wasn’t good enough at glamour to walk through a crowd. One bump and the illusion would have shattered, which was why he wasn’t going with me. There’d be a crowd where I was going. But we were hoping the more elementary illusion would lure the press from the outer gates, so we could drive off unmolested.

But his partner, Cathbodua, was good enough to go with us. There was a moment when she stood in the middle of the living room in her raven-feather cloak with that shoulder-length hair mingling with the feathers so that she, like Doyle, was dark enough that where one blackness ended and the other began the eye couldn’t sort out. It made her skin seem to almost float against all the darkness.

Then the feathers smoothed out, and she was wearing the long black trench coat that it so often appeared to be. Cathbodua only had to soften her skin from the otherworldly paleness to a more human shade of pale. Most of the women had been so little photographed
with me that they wouldn’t even have to change anything but their eyes, hair, and some clothing. Saraid turned her golden hair to a brown-gold and her skin to a sun-kissed tan. Her blue-and-star eyes were simply blue. She was still beautiful, but she could pass for human. Even the fact that she was six feet even and naturally thin didn’t make her stand out here in L.A. the way it would have back in the midwest. There were a thousand tall, gorgeous women here who had started out trying for acting and had had to settle for a day job.

Galen made his short curls a nondescript brown, and changed his eyes to match. He darkened his skin so he looked truly tanned, and he did subtle things to his face and body so that he looked ordinary. You’d seen a laughing, cute guy like him on every beach you’d ever been on. Rhys gave himself back the illusion of his missing eye, and painted both eyes to a good blue, but not too eye-catching. He simply piled his waist-length curls up under his fedora, left his signature trench coat at the beach house, and went in just the suit coat that he’d worn last to work, putting it over jeans and a T-shirt. The jeans were his, but the T-shirt he’d had to borrow. It fit through the shoulders, but lots of it was tucked into the stylishly faded jeans. He slipped back into his boots and he was dressed.

I came out of the bedroom with my hair an auburn that was almost brown. I’d also put it up into a French twist. The deep, chocolate-brown skirt suit was a little short for business, but I was short enough that long just wasn’t good on me. I’d borrowed a holster and gun from Rhys and put them at the small of my back so I would be armed. It still left him a gun, a sword, and a dagger. I had my own folding knife in a thigh holster under the skirt. The knife actually wasn’t just for defense; it was also so there would be some cold steel touching my naked flesh. Steel and iron help against faerie magic, but it’s best if they touch your skin. There were a lot of fey, even sidhe, who couldn’t have done glamour this detailed with cold metal touching their skin. My human and brownie ancestry helped me work magic no matter how much metal and technology surrounded me. The knife was nothing compared to the city itself. Out here by the ocean
it was easier for the rest of them, but there were lesser fey who couldn’t do much magic in the heart of any modern city.

The thought made me wonder about Bittersweet and whether Lucy had found her. I pushed the thought aside and checked the mirror one last time to make sure neither gun nor knife showed in the suit. The skirt was lightweight but flouncy, moving with me. I had a lot of skirts that were formfitting enough that even a small weapon showed against the material.

I walked back out into the great room. Galen met me, smiling. “I forgot you make your eyes brown, too.”

“Green eyes are too unusual. Humans remember them.”

He grinned at me, and moved to take me in his arms. I let him, pretty sure what he was going to say. “We should test the glamour and see if touching makes either of us lose our concentration.”

We kissed, and it was a nice, thorough kiss. He drew away and I was staring up into a pair of dark brown eyes set in a face more tan than his would ever be by nature.

I smiled.

It was Rhys who said, “Come on you two, we all know our glamour holds up. Amatheon and Adair checked in. The press took the bait with Doyle and Frost, so we can go do some work.” We followed him out the door, dropping each other’s hands as we walked outside. I trusted the other guards that the main force of the press had gone away, but if we hung all over each other like lovers, no amount of glamour would keep them from snapping pictures, and not all glamour holds up to cameras. We don’t know why, but even with the best of us sometimes a picture will reveal the truth when the naked eye will not.

Sholto had gone ahead of us all.

“All doors are in place.”

“So you’ll just appear,” Galen said.

“Yes.”

“How do you make certain someone isn’t in the doorway when you appear.”

“I can feel if it’s empty,” he said.

“Nifty.”

“I didn’t know you could do doorways,” I said.

“Its a power that has returned since we were crowned.”

“Don’t tell Barinthus,” Galen said.

“I will not.” He’d been solemn when he said it. “But I will scout the area and if reporters seem aware you are on your way; tipped off, I believe they say.”

“They do,” I said with a smile.

“Then I will call if they have been tipped off.” He’d gone with his blond hair looking short, his golden eyes as brown as Galen’s and mine. Sholto even made his face less handsome so he wouldn’t even attract attention as a too handsome human.

Rhys drove since it was his car. We put Saraid in the front with him, and the rest of us scattered in the back. We could actually see the distant flash of police lights when Rhys pulled over into a small parking lot. Julian or Jordan Hart leaned against one of the company cars. It wasn’t until he turned and gave me that smile of his that I knew it was Julian and not his twin brother. They both had short, rich brown hair cut so it was short on the sides, but a little longer on top, where it was gelled into small spikes. But Jordan didn’t have such a careless, devil-may-care smile. He had a good smile. They both did. They’d made enough money from modeling to first start their own detective agency and then to buy into the Grey Detective Agency. They were both six feet of tanned and easy handsome, but Julian was lighter, more of a tease. Though oddly it was the teasing brother who had found a monogamous relationship and done happily so for more than five years. Serious brother Jordan was still quite the ladies’ man, though even in his single days Julian had never been a ladies’ man. A gentleman’s man, if that was a phrase, would have been more accurate.