Another sidhe had tried to change my shape during a duel. Many of the fey can shape-shift, but only the sidhe can change the form of others against their will. I can't change my shape or anyone else's, another mark against me in the courts.
"How do you do that?" Detective Tate asked.
The question startled me, made me turn to her. "Do what?" I asked.
Chris was glancing up as he repacked equipment. Maury was already fiddling with a medium-sized transmitter, working at it with a tiny screwdriver. The rest of us might as well not have been in the room.
"You stand there for nearly an hour in nothing but your underwear with a man fondling your breasts, but it's not sexual. It's like an R-rated comedy routine. Then Roane helps you on with your dress, never touches your bare skin, just zips you up, and suddenly the sexual tension in the room is thick enough to walk on. How the hell do you do that?"
"Us, as in Roane and me, or us, as in… " I let the thought trail off.
"Us as in the fey," she said. "I've seen Jeremy do it with a human woman. You guys can walk around buck naked and make me comfortable being in the same room with you, then fully clothed you do something small and suddenly I feel like I should leave the room." She shook her head. "How do you do that?"
Roane and I looked at each other, and I saw the same question in his eyes that I knew was in mine. How do you explain what it is to be fey to someone who is not? The answer, of course, is you don't. You can try, but you rarely succeed.
Jeremy tried. He was, after all, the boss. "It is part of what it means to be fey, to be a creature of the senses." He rose from his chair and walked to her, face, body neutral. He took her hand and raised it to his lips, laying a chaste touch of lips to her knuckles. "Being fey is the difference between that and this." He took the same hand again and raised it much slower, eyes on her face filled with that polite heat that any fey male might have given to the tall, attractive woman. The look alone made her shiver. He kissed her hand this time, a slow caress of lips, the upper lip catching just a little on her skin, as he drew back from her. It had been polite, no open mouth, no tongue, nothing rude, but color had spread up her cheeks, and from across the room I could tell her breathing had deepened, pulse quickening.
"Does that answer your question, Detective?" he asked.
She gave a shaky laugh, holding her hand with the other hand, cradling it against her body. "No, but I'm afraid to ask again. I don't think I could handle the answer and still work tonight."
Jeremy gave a little bow. Whether Tate knew it or not, she'd just given a very fey compliment. Everyone likes to be appreciated. "You warm the cockles of this old man's heart."
She laughed then, high and delighted. "You may be a lot of things, Jeremy, but you'll never be old."
He gave another bow, and I realized something I hadn't before. Jeremy liked Detective Tate, liked her the way a man likes a woman. We all touch humans more than they touch each other, or at least more than most American humans touch each other. But he could have chosen other ways to "explain" to Tate. He'd chosen to touch her in a way he'd never touched her before, taken a liberty with her, because she'd given him the excuse to do it without seeming forward. That was how the fey flirted when invited. Sometimes it was just a glance, but the fey do not go where they are not asked. Though our men will make the same mistake that human males make sometimes, mistaking a little flirting for sexual advance, outright rape is almost unknown among us. Our version of date rape on the other hand has been popular for centuries.
Funny how the thought of date rape brought me back to the job at hand. I went to the desk where I'd left my shoes and slipped into them, gaining three inches of height. "You can tell your new partner that he can come back in now," I told Lucy.
It was an insult to insist on modesty in a nonsexual situation among most of the fey, certainly among the sidhe. That's why the audience. To send them away would imply lack of trust, or outward dislike. There were only two exceptions. The first was if the person couldn't behave in a civilized manner. Detective John Wilkes had never worked with non-humans before. He didn't blink when Maury asked me to disrobe, but when I took the dress off without warning or clearing the room, the detective had spilled hot coffee down his shirt. When Maury plunged his hand down my bra, Wilkes had said, "What the hell is he doing?" I asked him to wait outside.
Lucy gave a low laugh. "Poor boy, I think he got second-degree coffee burns when you took off your dress."
I shrugged. "He must not see a lot of naked women."
She smiled, shaking her head. "I've dealt with fey, even a few visiting sidhe, and you're the only one I've met that was humble."
I frowned at her. "I'm not humble. I just think that if seeing me strip to my underwear is enough to make your partner nearly swallow his tongue, he must not be very experienced."
Lucy looked at Roane and Jeremy. "Does she not know what she looks like?"
"No," Roane said.
"I think, though I don't know, that our Merry was raised somewhere where she was considered the ugly duckling," Jeremy said.
I met his eyes, my pulse thudding in my neck. That one comment was a little too close for comfort. "I don't know what you guys are talking about."
"I know you don't," Jeremy said. There was a knowledge in his dark grey eyes, a guess that was close to a certainty. In that moment, I knew he suspected who I was, what I was. But he would never ask. He would wait until I was ready to talk, or the question would remain forever silent between us.
I looked at Roane. He was the only fey lover I'd known who had not come to my bed to further his political ambitions. To him I was just Merry Gentry, a human with fey ancestry, not Princess Meredith NicEssus. Now I stared into that familiar face and tried to read his expression. He was smilingly blank. Either it had never occurred to him that I might be the missing sidhe princess, or he'd guessed long ago, but would never be rude enough to bring it up. Or had Roane known from the first? Had that been why he'd come to me? Suddenly, all the security that I'd built up with these people, my friends, began to crumble around me.
Some of it must have shown on my face because Roane touched me. I drew back from him. His face showed the hurt, confusion. He didn't know. I hugged him suddenly, hiding my face from him, but I could still see Jeremy.
As the look on Roane's face had reassured me, so the look on Jeremy's frightened me.
All it would take was my true name being mentioned after dark, and it would float back to my aunt. She was the Queen of Air and Darkness, and that meant that anything said in the dark was hers to hear, eventually. The fact that spotting the missing Elven American Princess had become more popular than spotting Elvis helped. Her magic was always chasing blind leads. Princess Meredith skiing in Utah. Princess Meredith dancing in Paris. Princess Meredith gambling in Vegas. After three years I was still a front-page story for the tabloids, though the latest headlines had been speculating that I was as dead as the King of Rock and Roll.
If Jeremy spoke my name aloud to my face, the words would resonate, and when they finally floated back to her, she'd know I was alive, and she'd know that Jeremy had spoken my name. Even if I ran, she'd question him, and if polite methods didn't work, she'd use torture. I am told she is a creative lover. I know she is an inventive torturer.
I drew back from Roane and gave them part of the truth. "My mother was the beautiful one."
"How do you know that?" Jeremy asked.
I looked at him. "She told me so."
"You mean your mother told you you weren't beautiful?" Lucy asked. It took a human to be that direct.
I nodded.
"Don't take this wrong, but what a bitch."
To that there was only one thing to say—"I agree, now let's get out of here."
"We wouldn't want to keep Mr. Norton waiting," Jeremy said.
"I still wish we were going after him for proof on the attempted murder," Lucy said.
"We can't guarantee proof that will stand up in court about the death spell," I said.
"But," Jeremy said, "we might be able to prove tonight that he is using magic to seduce women. Magically aided seduction is rape under California law. We need him in jail away from his wife, and this is the surest way to do it. He won't get bail on a felony charge that includes magic."
Lucy nodded. "I agree that the plan is great for Mrs. Norton, but what about Merry? What if this guy pulls out the magical aphrodisiac that he's used on the other mistresses, the ones who just couldn't get enough of him like Naomi Phelps?"
"We're counting on it," I said.
She looked at me. "What if it works? What if you start panting over the microphone?"
"Then Roane breaks down the door playing the jealous lover and drags me out."
"If I have trouble getting her to leave, then Uther will come in as my friend and help me take my woman back home."
Lucy rolled her eyes. "Well, what Uther wants, Uther gets." Uther was thirteen feet tall, with a head that was more pig than human, and two curling tusks on either side of his snout. He was a jack-in-irons, but he was named Uther Squarefoot. He wasn't much good for undercover work, but he was hell on wheels when we needed muscle.
Uther had excused himself from the room when he realized the dress was coming off. He'd said only, "It's nothing personal, Merry, don't make more of it than there is, but seeing any attractive female nearly naked is not good for a man when there's no hope of relieving the thoughts that spring unbidden." It wasn't until he made for the door, stooping his great shoulders low enough to squeeze out the doorway, that I realized something I should have known before. Uther is thirteen feet tall, the size of a large ogre or a very small giant, and there aren't many females his size in the Los Angeles area. He'd been here nearly ten years. That was a long time to be without the touch of another naked body. How terribly lonely.
If no one guessed who I really was, and if I didn't get bespelled out of my mind by Alistair Norton, I'd see about fixing Uther up with someone. Uther wasn't the only giant-sized fey wandering outside the courts, just the only one in the immediate area. If we couldn't find someone his size, we might be able to come up with other solutions. Sex doesn't have to mean intercourse. There are women on the streets that will do just about anything for a couple of hundred dollars, especially if twenty is their going rate. If I were truly fey down to my toes, I'd do Uther myself. That's what a real friend would do. But I was raised outside the court, out among the humans, from age six to sixteen. It meant that no matter how fey I was, some of my attitudes were human.
I can't be human because I'm not. But I can't be completely fey because I'm not that either. I am half Unseelie Court, but I am not one of them. I am part Seelie Court, but I do not belong among the shining throng. I am part dark sidhe, part light sidhe, and yet neither side wishes to claim me. I have always been on the outside looking in, my nose pressed to the window, but never welcomed inside. I understood isolation and loneliness. It made me hurt for Uther. Made me regret that I wasn't comfortable helping him with a little friendly, casual sex. But I wasn't, and I wouldn't. As usual, I was fey enough to see the problem, but too human to fix it. Of course, if I'd been pure Seelie sidhe, I wouldn't have touched Uther at any price. He would have been beneath my notice. The Seelie do not fuck monsters. Unseelie sidhe… well, define monster.
Uther wasn't a monster by Unseelie standards, but Alistair Norton might be. Either a monster, or a kindred spirit of the dark.
Chapter 5
ALISTAIR NORTON DIDN'T LOOK LIKE A MONSTER. I'D EXPECTED HIM TO be handsome, but it was still disappointing. There is something in all of us that believes deep down that evil shows on the outside, that we should be able to pick out the bad people just by looking at them, but it just doesn't work that way. I'd spent enough time at both courts to know that beautiful and good were not the same. I, if anyone, knew that beauty was perfect camouflage for the darkest of hearts, and still I wanted Alistair Norton's face to show what he was inside. I wanted some visible mark of Cain on him. But he came smiling into the restaurant, tall, broad-shouldered, face full of clean angles, so masculine it was almost painful. His lips were a little thin for my taste, face a little too masculine, eyes a very ordinary brown. The hair that was tied back in a neat ponytail was an odd shade of brown, neither light nor dark. But I had to look for imperfections because there just weren't any.
His smile was quick and softened his face to something more approachable, less model-perfect. The laugh was deep and charming. His large hands wore a silver ring with a diamond as big as my thumb, but no wedding ring. There wasn't even a telltale pale line where the ring had been removed. His skin was dark enough that there should have been a tan line. He'd never worn a ring.