Divine Misdemeanors (8 page)

He waved it away. “You’re splitting hairs, Merry, if it’s still all right to call you that, or do you prefer Meredith?”

“Merry is fine.”

He grinned up at my two men, who were intent on the far door and its opening. “The last time I saw these two they were the queen’s guard dogs.” He looked at me with those shrewd brown eyes. “Some men are drawn to power, Merry, and some women are more queen without a crown than others are with one.”

As if on cue the door opened and Gilda, Fairy Godmother of Los Angeles, swept into the room.

GILDA WAS A VISION OF LIGHT, LACE, AND SPARKLES. HER FLOOR-LENGTH
dress seemed to have been scattered with diamonds that caught the light so that she moved in a circle of bright white sparkles. The dress itself was pale blue, but the diamond flashes were so numerous they almost made an overdress that covered the pale blue lace, so the illusion was that there was a dress made of light and movement over the actual dress. It seemed a little flashy to me, but it matched the rest of her, from her crystal-and-glass crown towering over her blond ringlets to the two-foot-long wand complete with a starred tip.

She was like a magical version of a movie fairy godmother, but then she’d been a wardrobe mistress in the movies in the 1940s, so when the wild magic found her and offered her a wish, clothes were important to her. No one knew the truth about how she’d been offered the magic. She’d told more than one version over the years. Every version made her look more heroic. The last story was something about rescuing children from a burning car, I think.

She waved the wand around the room like a queen waving her scepter at her subjects. But there was a prickling of power as the wand moved past us. Whatever else was illusion about Gilda, the wand was real. It was faerie workmanship, but beyond that no one had been
able to say what the wand was, and where it had come from. Magic wands were very rare among us, because we didn’t need them.

When Gilda had made her wish, she hadn’t realized that almost everything she wanted marked her as fake. Her magic was real enough, but the way she did it, everything about her was more fairy tale than faery.

“Come here, little one,” she said, and just like that Bittersweet flew to her. Whatever sort of compulsion spell she had in her voice, it was strong. Bittersweet nestled into those golden ringlets, lost in the dazzle of light. Gilda turned as if to leave the room.

Lucy called, “Excuse me, Gilda, but you can’t take our witness just yet.”

“I am her queen. I have to protect her.”

“Protect her from what?” Lucy asked.

The light show made Gilda’s face hard to read. I thought she looked annoyed. Her perfectly bowed mouth made an unhappy moue. Her perfectly blue eyes narrowed a little around her long diamond-sparkled lashes. When I’d last seen her, she’d been covered in gold dust, from her eyelashes to a more formfitting formal dress. Gilda was always gilded, but it changed substance with her clothes.

“Police harassment,” she said. Again she turned as if to leave.

“We aren’t done with our witness,” Lucy said.

Robert said, “You seem in a hurry to leave, Godmother, almost as if you don’t want Bittersweet to speak with the police.”

She turned back then, and even through all the silly lights and sparkles she was angry. “You have never had a civil tongue in your head, brownie.”

“You liked my tongue well enough once, Gilda,” he said.

She blushed in that way that some blonds and redheads do, all the way into her hairline. “The police wouldn’t let me bring all my people inside here. If Oberon were here you wouldn’t dare say such things.”

Frost said, “Oberon? Who’s Oberon?”

She frowned at him. “He is my king, my consort.” Her eyes narrowed again, but more like she was squinting. I wondered if the diamond
lights were bright enough to affect her vision. She was acting as if they were.

Her face softened suddenly. “The Killing Frost. I had heard you were in L.A. I’ve been waiting for you to visit me.” Her voice was suddenly sweet and teasing. There was some power to her voice, but it washed over me like the sea on a stone. I didn’t think it was my improved shields. I think this compulsion spell was simply not meant for me.

She turned and said, “Darkness, the Queen’s Darkness, now exiled to our fair land. I’d hoped that you would both pay court to me. It has been so long since I’ve seen anyone from faerie. I would dearly love it if you would visit me.”

“Your magic will not work on us,” Doyle said in his deep voice.

A little shiver ran down her, making the top of her crown shake, the blue lace quiver, and the diamonds send little rainbows around the room. “Come over here and bring that big, deep voice with you.”

Frost said, “She’s insulting you.”

“More than us,” Doyle said.

I took in a lot of air, let it out slowly, and moved forward past the police. My men moved with me, and I felt that Gilda genuinely thought her spell was working. Now that we’d seen what she did to Bittersweet, and what she had tried to do to my men, we were going to have to take a harder look at how she got the other lesser fey to obey her. If it was all magic and compulsion and no free will, then that was bad.

“Both of you coming to me, how marvelous,” she said.

“Am I missing something?” Lucy asked as I passed her.

I whispered, “A pissing contest of sorts.”

Gilda couldn’t keep acting as if she didn’t see me. She kept smiling past me at Doyle and Frost, as if pretending still that they were coming closer for her. She actually held out her hand at a higher angle than I would need, as if she’d just bypass me.

“Gilda, Godmother of Los Angeles, greetings,” I said, voice low but clear.

She made a little
humph
sound, then looked at me, lowering her hand as she did so. “Merry Gentry. Back in town, I see.”

“All the royal of faerie know that if another royal gives you your title, you must give them back their own, or it’s an insult that can only be settled by a duel.” That was half true—there were other options—but a duel was at the end of all the other options. But Gilda wouldn’t know that.

“Duels are illegal,” she said primly.

“As are compulsion spells that steal the free will of any legal citizen of these United States.”

She blinked at me, frowning. Bittersweet cuddled against Gilda’s curls with a face gone half sleepy, as if touching Gilda made the godmother’s spell even stronger. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes, you do,” I said, and I leaned closer, so that the light around her dress reflected in my tricolor eyes and moonlight skin. “I don’t remember you being this powerful last time we met, Gilda. What have you been doing to gain such power?”

I was close enough to see the flash of fear in her perfect blue eyes. She masked it, but it had been there. What had she been doing that she didn’t want anyone to know about? I had the thought that maybe she really didn’t want Bittersweet to talk to the police. Maybe Gilda knew more about the murders than she wanted to let on. There were spells—evil spells, forbidden spells—that allowed a fey to steal power from those less powerful. I’d even seen a human wizard who had perfected it so that he could steal power from other humans who had only the faintest trace of faerie blood. He’d died trying to rape me. No, I didn’t kill him. The sidhe traitor who had given the human the power killed him before we could use him to trace the power back to its master. The traitor was dead now, too, so it had all evened out.

Then I realized why I’d noticed the blond wannabe in the café. We’d killed the main wizard of that ring of magic thiefs and rapists, but we hadn’t caught all of them. One of them had been described to me as an uncircumcised wannabe with long blond hair named Donald.
It would be a huge coincidence, but I’d seen bigger coincidences in real life. Was stealing magic slowly over months that much of a step up to stealing the demi-fey’s magic all at once? It was only magic that kept the smallest of us alive outside of faerie.

Something must have shown on my face, because Gilda asked, “What’s wrong with you? Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Do you know an elf wannabe named Donald?”

“I would never consort with the false elves. They are an abomination.”

I thought her choice of words was interesting. “Do you have a sidhe lover?”

“That is none of your business.”

I studied her offended face. Would she not know the difference between a really well-done wannabe and the real thing? I doubted that she’d ever been with a true sidhe of the courts, and if you’ve never had the real thing you might have trouble spotting a fake.

I smiled, and said, “Hold that thought.” I started for the door behind her. Doyle and Frost followed like shadows. Lucy called after me, “Merry, where are you going?”

“Need to check something in the café,” I called back but kept moving. The room was thick with people, police of different flavors, and the court retinue that followed Gilda everywhere, but that the police hadn’t allowed into the back room. They were a pretty lot, almost as shiny and spectacular as their mistress. There were still customers at the tables, a mix of human and fey. Some had stayed to have tea and cakes, but others were just there to gawk.

I pushed my way through the crowd, until Doyle moved a little forward of me and people just seemed to move out of his way. When he wanted to he could be very intimidating. I’d seen men step out of his way without even knowing why they’d done so. But when Doyle got me through the crowd, the table that had held the blond wannabe was empty.

I WENT TO ALICE, WHO WAS BEHIND THE COUNTER, AND ASKED
, “The man with long blond hair, ear implants, and muscles at that table—when did he leave?”

“He left with most of the customers when the police came in,” she said, and her gaze was serious and intelligent.

“Do you know his name?”

“Donal,” she said.

“Donald?” I made it a question.

She shook her head. “No, he’s very insistent about it being Donal, not after that stupid duck. His quote, not mine. I love classic Disney.”

The comment made me smile, but I let it go, and asked the next question. “Is he a regular?”

She nodded, making her black pigtails bounce. “Yep, he comes in at least once a week, sometimes twice.”

“What’s he like?”

She narrowed her eyes and gave me a look. “Why do you want to know?”

“Humor me,” I said.

“Well, he’s one of those men who are rude until he wants to charm a woman; then he’s sweet.”

“Has he hit on you?”

“Nope, I’m too human. He only dates fey. He’s very insistent on that.”

“Is he fond of any particular kind of fey?”

Again, she gave me that look. “Just as full-blooded as he can get them. He’s dated a lot of different fey.”

“Can you give me some names?”

Lucy’s voice came from behind me, “And why do you want the names, Merry?”

Frost and Doyle parted so I could see the detective. She was giving me a look that made Alice’s suspicious look pale in comparison, but then Lucy was a cop. They give great suspicious looks.

She spoke more quietly. “What’s up, Merry? What do you think you’ve figured out?”

The attempted rape and the perpetrator’s death were public record, so I told her my suspicions.

“Do you really think this Donal is the Donald that the client told you about?” she asked.

“I’d love to get a picture of him and see if they could pick him out. It would be easy to hear Donal and just put the ‘d’ on the end to make it a more familiar name, especially if you were scared.”

Lucy nodded. “Fair enough. I’ll see about getting someone to snap a picture, discreetly.”

“Grey’s would be happy to help.”

She shook her finger at me. “No, you are not involved in this from now on. If these are the same people, you almost got killed the last time you came up against them.” She looked up at Frost and Doyle. “Come on, big guys, back me up on this.”

“I would love to tell her to stay away from such dangerous people,” Doyle said, “but she’s made it clear that her job as a detective requires risk. If we do not like that, then we can send other guards with her and we can stay home.”

Lucy raised her eyebrows at them. Frost nodded and said, “We had this talk again before we went to the murder scene this morning.”

“The only card, as you would say, that we have to play is potential
harm to the babes she carries, and even that must be a card carefully played,” Doyle said. His lips gave that bare movement of a smile, as if he were both amused and not amused by it all.

“Yeah, that’s what I’ve learned. She looks all soft and feminine, but push her and it’s like trying to shove through a brick wall. It doesn’t move, and neither does she,” Lucy said.

“You do know our princess,” Doyle said, and his words were so dry that it took me a moment to hear the humor in them.

Lucy nodded, then looked at me. “We’ll get names of who this guy dated. We’ll do some district checking. We’ll get the picture and hunt up your old client. And by ‘we’ I mean the police, not you or anyone else from your agency or your entourage.” She pointed her finger at me as if I were a stubborn child.

“You’ve used me on decoy assignments where the danger was a lot more real than checking a few facts,” I said.

“I didn’t know you were Princess Meredith back then, and you weren’t pregnant.” She held up a hand before I could do more than take a breath to protest. “First, before I could even bring you to see today’s crime scene, I got warnings from my upper brass that I was, under no circumstances, to endanger you. That if anything happened to you because of involvement in a case of mine, it was my ass on the chopping block.”

I sighed. “I’m sorry, Lucy.”

She waved it away. “But more important to me, I’ve known you for about four years, and this is the happiest I’ve ever seen you. I don’t want you to fuck that up because you’re helping me on a case. You’re not a cop. You don’t have to put everything on the line for a case. That’s my job.”

“But this person is killing my people …”