A Stroke of Midnight Read online

  The trouble was that Sage wasn’t on the stage. He wasn’t sidhe, and his own queen had demanded him at her side. Besides, our queen didn’t want him onstage with me. In Andais’s own words, “Oral sex, fine, but he doesn’t get to fuck you. No demi-fey, no matter how tall, is sitting on my throne as anyone’s king.” So Sage got to stay out of sight. Which made this moment even more interesting.

  “The other third, or would that be fourth,” I said with a smile, “isn’t onstage today. He’s not certain he wants the media attention.”

  “Is he going to be one of your lovers, and potential kings?”

  “No.” Which was the truth.

  “Why not?” someone else shouted out. I wouldn’t have answered it, but Nicca did. “He’s not sidhe.”

  Oh, hell. That started another frenzy of shouted questions. I leaned into Nicca and asked him to go back to his piece of wall on the dais. Rhys went back to his section on the edge where he could watch the crowd. He was trying not to laugh. I guess it might as well be funny. But Nicca had to stay away from the mike from now on. I wasn’t ashamed of what I’d done with Sage, but I wasn’t sure how much of it my aunt wanted me to explain to the media. She did seem embarrassed about it.

  Madeline finally found a question that she thought I would be able and willing to answer. She was wrong. “Which of them is the best in bed, Meredith?”

  I fought not to glance at Madeline. What was she doing taking that question? She knew better. “Look at them all. How could anyone choose just one?”

  Laughter, but they didn’t let it go. “You seemed to have a preference for Frost earlier, Princess.”

  It wasn’t a question so I didn’t answer it. Another reporter asked, “Fair enough, Princess, but if not just one, who are your multiple favorites?”

  That was trickier. “Everyone that I’ve had sex with is special to me in their own way.” Truth.

  “How many have you had sex with?”

  I leaned into the mike. “Gentlemen, if you would just take a step or two forward.”

  Rhys, Nicca, Doyle, and Frost moved forward. Only three extra men stepped away from the wall. Galen’s skin was almost as white as my own, but in the right light there was an undercast of green to that paleness. His curls were green in any light, except in the dark, where they looked blond. He had cut his own hair just above his shoulders, leaving only one thin braid to remind me that once it fell to his ankles. Of the men of faerie, only the sidhe were allowed to grow their hair long. Galen had cut his hair voluntarily, unlike Adair. Or Amatheon, who stood next to him. Amatheon’s rich red hair had been French-braided so that the reporters would have a harder time realizing that his hair only touched his shoulders now. He’d given in to the queen’s order sooner than Adair had. The fact that cutting the men’s hair had been a punishment, a humiliation that persuaded them to do as the queen bid, said how very odd it was that Galen had done it on his own. He was the youngest of the Queen’s Ravens, only seventy-five years older than me. Among the sidhe it was almost like being raised together. I’d thought that open, handsome face was the perfect face since I was fourteen, or maybe younger. It was Galen that I wanted my father to let me be engaged to, but he had chosen another. That engagement had lasted seven years, but there had been no children, and in the end, he had told me I was too human for him. Not sidhe enough. It had made me wonder even more why my father wouldn’t let me have Galen in the first place.

  He turned lovely green eyes to me and smiled, and I smiled back. He was as armed as any of them with blade and guns, but there was a softness to him that most of the others had lost centuries before either he or I had been born. He’d give his life for me, and would have when I was a child, unlike the rest of them. But as a politician he was something of a disaster, and that could be fatal in the high courts of faerie.

  Someone touched my shoulder. I jumped, and found Madeline with her hand over my mike. She leaned in and whispered, “You’re staring at him. Let’s not repeat the Frost incident, shall we?” She stepped back with a smile already for the press, hitting the switch at her waist.

  I had to keep my face turned away from the crowd because I was blushing. I didn’t blush much, and by human standards it wasn’t too dark. Sidhe skin just doesn’t flush the way human skin tones do. Of course, keeping my face away from the cameras meant that Galen could see me. Some days it’s only a choice of embarrassments, not an escape from them.

  Madeline was saying, “Princess Meredith is getting a little tired. We may have to cut this short, guys, sorry.”

  There was a general outcry, and a renewed flash of cameras, which was bad, because Galen came to me. He knelt in front of me, beside my chair, and was tall enough that, from the shoulders up, he was still clearly visible to them. He touched my chin, so gently, with just the tips of his fingers. It made me look at him. It made me forget that we were both in profile to the cameras. He leaned his face closer to me, making me forget that we were onstage. I leaned in toward him, and his hand cupped the side of my face. That made me forget everything else. I have no explanation for it. We’d shared a bed for months. He was a disaster politically, and showing him this much favor in front of everyone could endanger him, but I wasn’t thinking that when we kissed. I wasn’t thinking anything, and all I could see was the pleased look on his face, the look in his eyes. He’d loved me since I was seventeen, and that was, in his eyes, as if nothing had changed and no time had passed.

  The queen had ordered me not to show favoritism. She was going to be angry with me, with him, with us, but after Frost’s little incident, as Madeline called it, what was one more? It was bad, and still I kissed him. Still I wanted to kiss him. Still, for just a moment, the world narrowed down to Galen’s face, his hand against my skin, and his mouth on mine.

  It was a soft, chaste kiss, I think because he knew if he kissed me too hard, I’d lose my hold on the glamour that kept Frost and me from looking like lipstick casualties. Galen drew back, and his eyes held that soft surprise that they did sometimes, as if he still couldn’t believe he was allowed to kiss me, allowed to touch me. I’d caught the same look on my face in the bedroom mirror a time or two.

  “Do we all get a kiss?” The voice was deep and held the rough sloughing of the sea. Barinthus moved toward us in a swirl of his hair, the color of oceans. The turquoise of the Mediterranean; the deeper medium blue of the Pacific; a grey-blue like the ocean before a storm, sliding into a blue that was nearly black, where the water runs deep and thick like the blood of sleeping giants. The colors moved and flowed into one another so that the actual where and what his hair looked like was ever-changing, like the ocean itself. He’d once been a god of the sea. I’d only recently discovered that he had been Manannan Mac Lir, but that was a secret. Now he was Barinthus, a fallen god of the sea. He moved gracefully across the stage, all near seven feet of him. His eyes were blue but with a slit pupil like a cat or a deep-sea animal. He had a second clear membrane that could close over his eye when he was underwater, and would often flicker when he was nervous. It flickered just a touch now.

  I wondered if anyone in the crowd of reporters knew how much it cost this very private man to have suggested a kiss, and make himself the target of all these cameras?

  Galen had realized he’d misbehaved because he showed me with his eyes that he was sorry. Unfortunately, his face wasn’t that hard for anyone to read, including the reporters. The queen had said no favorites. Our behavior was going to force me to try to prove I had none. After what Galen and I had just done, that was going to be difficult.

  A lot of the men standing with me would have played for the cameras, and it would have cost them, or me, nothing. Barinthus was not one of them. He’d been my father’s friend, and by American standards we hadn’t had sex. Not even by Bill Clinton’s standards. If I’d been him, I would have stayed against the wall, but he held to a higher standard of truth even than most of the sidhe.

  I looked up at Barinthus, and with me sitting and him standing, it took awhile to get all the way to his face. “If you like.” I kept my voice light and my face pleasant. Barinthus and I had never kissed, and the first kiss should not be on film.

  It was Rhys who saved the day. “If Barinthus gets a kiss, then so do I.”

  Doyle said, “To be fair, we all should.”

  Barinthus gave a slight smile. “I would bow to the larger need, and take my kiss in private.”

  “Galen and Frost have already had theirs,” Rhys said, and as Galen went back to his place in line, Rhys pretended to box his ears.

  Barinthus did a very graceful bow and tried to slink back to his place. But that wasn’t happening. A reporter asked, “Lord Barinthus, have you decided to go from being kingmaker to being king?” No sidhe would have called him kingmaker to his face, or queenmaker either. But the media, well, he couldn’t box their ears.

  He knelt beside me, rather than lean into the mike. Kneeling down, his head was about even with mine. “I doubt I will stay with the princess as a permanent member of her guard.”

  “Why not?”

  “I am needed elsewhere.”

  Truth was that before Queen Andais had accepted him into the Unseelie Court after the Seelie Court kicked him out, Barinthus had to promise that he would never accept the throne here, not even if it was offered. He’d been Manannan Mac Lir, and the queen and her nobles all feared his power. So he’d given his most solemn oath that he would never, personally, sit on our throne.

  He bowed to the room in general and simply went back against the wall. He made it clear that he was done with questions for the day. Kitto, the half-goblin sidhe, had already moved back to his place. He was only four feet tall, and that made a lot of the media try to portray him as child-like. He was old enough to remember wha
t the world was like before Christianity was a religion. But his appearance made the media uncomfortable. His short black curls, pale skin, and sunglasses made him look ordinary in his jeans and T-shirt. The queen didn’t have a designer suit to fit someone so short. There hadn’t been time even for the queen’s seamstress to make those kind of alterations. He got away with hugging his section of the wall.

  “Princess Meredith, how will you choose your husband from among all these gorgeous men?” a reporter was asking.

  “The one who gets me pregnant wins the prize,” I said, smiling.

  “What if you are in love with someone else? What if you don’t love the one who gets you pregnant?”

  I sighed, and didn’t fight the smile slipping away. “I am a princess, and heir to a throne. Love has never been a prerequisite for royal marriages.”

  “Isn’t it traditional to sleep with one fiancé at a time, until you either get pregnant or don’t get pregnant?”

  “Yes,” I said, and cursed that anyone knew our customs that well.

  “Then why the marathon of men?”

  “If you had the chance, wouldn’t you?” I asked, and that got them laughing. But it didn’t distract them.

  “Would you marry a man you didn’t like just because he was the father of your child?”

  “Our laws are clear,” I said. “I will marry the father of my child.”

  “No matter who it is?” another reporter asked.

  “That is our law.”

  “What if your cousin Prince Cel gets one of his female guards pregnant first?”

  “Then, according to Queen Andais, he will be king.”

  “So it’s a race to get pregnant?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where is Prince Cel? No one has seen him in nearly three months.”

  “I’m not my cousin’s keeper.” In fact, he was in prison for trying to kill me one too many times, and for other crimes that the queen didn’t want even the court to know. He should have been executed for some of them, but she’d bargained for her only child’s life. He was to be locked away for six months, tortured with the very magic he had used against sidhe-ancestored humans. Branwyn’s Tears, one of our most guarded ointments. It was an aphrodisiac that worked even against someone’s will. But more than that, it made your body crave to be touched, to be brought. He was chained and covered in Branwyn’s Tears. There were bets around the court that what little sanity he’d been born with would not survive it. The queen had given in to one of his guards only yesterday, to let the woman slack Cel’s need, save his sanity. And suddenly I had not one, but two, no, three attempts on my life, and one on the queen’s. It was more than a coincidence, but the queen loved her son.

  Madeline was back in front of me, looking at me. “Are you all right, Princess?”

  “Sorry, I’m getting a little tired. Did I miss a question?”

  She smiled and nodded. “I’m afraid so.”

  They repeated it, and I wished I’d missed it again. “Do you know where your cousin the prince is?”

  “He’s here in the sithen, but I don’t know what he’s doing this exact moment. Sorry.”

  I needed off this subject, off this stage. I signaled to Madeline, and she closed it down with a promise of a photo op in a day or two, when the princess was fully healed.

  A tiny faerie with butterfly wings fluttered into camera range. This was a demi-fey. Sage, whom I’d “slept with,” could make himself human tall, but most of the demi-fey were permanently about the size of Barbie dolls, or smaller. The queen would not be happy about the little faerie fluttering in front of the cameras. When there was press in the sithen, the less-human-looking stayed away from them, and especially away from cameras, or faced the queen’s wrath.

  The figure was a pale blue-pink with iridescent blue wings. She fluttered through a barrage of flashbulbs, shielding her eyes with a tiny hand. I thought she’d land on me, or maybe Doyle, but she flew the length of the stage to land on Rhys’s shoulder.

  She hid herself in his long white curls. She whispered something in his ear, using his hair and hat as a shield. Rhys stood up and came to us smiling.

  Doyle was standing beside me, but even that close I couldn’t hear what Rhys whispered to him.

  Doyle gave a small nod, and Rhys left the room ahead of us with the tiny fey still tangled in his hair. I wanted to ask what could be important enough for Rhys to leave early in front of the press.

  Someone shouted, “Rhys, why are you leaving?”

  Rhys left the room with a wave and a smile.

  Doyle helped me stand, then the rest of the guards closed around me like a multicolored wall, but the reporters weren’t finished.

  “Doyle, Princess, what’s happened?”

  “What did the little one say?”

  The press conference was over; we got to ignore them. It might have been wise to give them an excuse, but Doyle either didn’t think we needed to bother or he didn’t know what to say. There was a tension in his arm where he touched me that indicated that whatever Rhys had said had shaken him. What does the Darkness fear?

  My wall of bright-colored muscle marched me down the steps and out. When we were in the hallway, clear of the media, I still whispered. Modern technology was a wonderful thing, and we didn’t need some sensitive microphone picking us up. “What’s happened?”

  “There are two dead bodies in one of the hallways near the kitchen.”

  “Fey?” I asked.

  “One, yes,” he said.

  I stumbled in my high heels because I tried to stop, but his arm on mine kept us all moving. “What about the other?”

  He nodded. “Yes, exactly.”

  “Is it one of the reporters? Did one of them go wandering?”

  Frost leaned in from the line of men. “It cannot be. We had spells that would make them unable to leave the safe path inside the sithen.”

  Doyle glanced at him. “Then explain a dead human in our sithen with a camera beside his hand.”

  Frost opened his mouth, then closed it. “I cannot.”

  Doyle shook his head. “Nor can I.”

  “Well, isn’t this going to be a disaster,” Galen said.

  We had a dead reporter in the Unseelie sithen, and a mass of live reporters still on the premises. Disaster didn’t even begin to cover it.

  CHAPTER 3

  I’D SEEN MORE VIOLENCE IN THE COURTS THAN IN ALL MY YEARS as a private detective in Los Angeles, but I’d seen more death in L.A. Not because I was included in murder cases—private dicks don’t do murder cases, at least not fresh ones—but because most of the things that live in faerie land are immortal. By definition, the immortal don’t die very often. I could count on one hand how many fresh crime scenes the police had called us in on and still have fingers left over. Even those cases were because the Grey Detective Agency could boast some of the best magic workers on the West Coast. Magic is like everything else; if you can do good with it, some people will find a way to do bad with it. Our agency specialized in Supernatural problems, Magical solutions. It was on the business cards and everything.

  I’d also learned that all bodies are an it, not he, not she—it. Because if you think of the dead body as a he or a she, they begin to be real for you. They begin to be people, and they aren’t people, not anymore. They’re dead, and outside of very special circumstances they are just inert matter. You can have sympathy for the victim later, but at the crime scene, especially in the first moments, you serve the victim better by not sympathizing. Sympathy steals your ability to think. Empathy will cripple you. Detachment and logic, those are your salvation at a fresh murder. Anything else leads to hysterics, and I was not only the most experienced detective in the hallway, I was also Princess Meredith NicEssus, wielder of the hands of flesh and blood, Besaba’s Bane. Besaba was my mother, and my conception had forced her to wed my father and live, for a time, at the Unseelie Court. I was a princess and I might one day be queen. Future queens do not have hysterics. Future queens who are also trained detectives aren’t allowed hysterics.

  The problem was that I knew one of these bodies. I’d known her alive and walking around. I knew that she liked classical literature. When she was cast out of the Seelie Court and had to come to the Unseelie Court, she’d changed her name, as many did, even among the Seelie. They changed their names so they wouldn’t be reminded daily of who and what they had once been, and how far they had fallen. She called herself Beatrice, after the love interest in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Dante’s Inferno. She said, “I’m in hell, I might as well have a name to match.” I’d taken world literature as one of my forced electives in college. When I finished the class, I gave most of my books to Beatrice, because she would read them and I wouldn’t. I could always buy extra copies of the handful of books that I actually enjoyed. Beatrice couldn’t. She couldn’t pass for human, and she didn’t like being stared at.