A Stroke of Midnight Read online

  I stared at her now, but she wouldn’t mind. She wouldn’t mind anything ever again. Beatrice looked like a delicate human-size version of the tiny demi-fey that still clung to Rhys’s hair. Once Beatrice had been able to be that small, but something happened at the Seelie Court, something she would never talk about, and she lost the ability to change sizes. She’d been trapped at around four foot two, and the delicate dragonfly wings on her back had been useless. The demi-fey do not levitate, they fly, and in the larger size, their wings can’t lift them.

  Blood had formed a wide, dark pool around her body. Someone had come up behind her and slit her throat. To get that close to her, it had to have been someone she trusted, or someone with enough magic to sneak up on her. Of course, they had also needed enough magic to negate her immortality. There weren’t that many things in faerie that could do both.

  “What happened, Beatrice?” I said softly. “Who did this to you?”

  Galen came up beside me. “Merry.”

  I looked up at him.

  “Are you all right?”

  I shook my head, and looked down the hallway to our second body. Out loud I said, “I’ll be fine.”

  “Liar,” he said softly, and he tried to bend over me, tried to hold me. I didn’t push him away, but I moved back. Now wasn’t the time to cling to someone. According to our culture, I should have been touching someone. But the handful of guards that had come to L.A. with me had only worked at the Grey Detective Agency for a few months. I’d been there a few years. You didn’t huddle at crime scenes. You didn’t comfort yourself. You did your job.

  Galen’s face fell a little, as if I’d hurt his feelings. I didn’t want to hurt him, but we had a crisis here. Surely he could see that. So why, as so often happened, was I having to waste energy worrying about Galen’s feelings when I should have been doing nothing but concentrating on the job? There were moments, no matter how dear he was to me, that I understood all too well why my father had not chosen Galen for my fiancé.

  I walked toward the second body. The man lay just short of the hallway’s intersection with another, larger hallway. He was on his stomach, arms outspread. There was a large stain of blood on his back, and more of it curling down along the side of his body.

  Rhys was squatting by the corpse. He looked up as I approached. The demi-fey peeked out at me through Rhys’s thick white hair, then hid her tiny face, as if she were afraid. The demi-fey usually went around in large groups like flocks of birds or butterflies. Some of them were shy when on their own.

  “Do we know what killed him yet?” I asked.

  Rhys pointed to the narrow hole in the man’s back. “Knife, I think.”

  I nodded. “But they took the blade with them. Why?”

  “Because there was something special about the knife that might give them away.”

  “Or they simply did not want to lose a good blade,” Frost said. He took the two steps that moved him from the big corridor to the smaller one. He’d been coordinating the guards who were keeping everyone away from the crime scene. I had enough guards with me to close off both ends of the hallway, and I’d done it.

  When we’d arrived, the hallway had been protected by floating pots and pans, courtesy of Maggie May, the chief cook for the Unseelie Court. Brownies can levitate objects, but not themselves for some reason. She’d gone with Doyle to see if she could get any more sense out of the scullery maid who had found the bodies. The fey was having hysterics, and Maggie couldn’t decide whether the woman had seen something that frightened her, or was simply upset over the deaths. Doyle was going to try to find out. He was hoping the woman would react to him as if he were still the Queen’s Darkness, her assassin, and tell him the truth out of fear and habit. If she were just scared, he would probably frighten her into having a fit, but I let him try. I could play good cop after he’d played bad.

  I’d sent Barinthus to tell the queen what had happened, because of all of the men, he had the best chance of not being punished for being a bearer of such terrible news. The queen did have a tendency to blame the messenger.

  “Possibly,” Rhys said, “just habit. You use the blade, you retrieve, clean it, and put it back in its sheath.” He pointed to a smear on the man’s jacket.

  “He wiped the blade off,” I said.

  Rhys looked at me. “Why ‘he’?”

  I shrugged. “You’re right, it could be a she.”

  I didn’t hear Doyle come down the hallway, but I knew he was there a second before he spoke. “He was running when they threw the blade.”

  I actually agreed, but I wanted his reasoning. Truthfully, I wanted not to be in charge of this mess, but I had the most experience. That made it my baby. “What makes you say he was running?”

  He started to touch the man’s coat, and I said, “Don’t touch him.”

  He gave me a look, but said, “You can see where his coat is raised on this side, that the wound in his shirt does not line up with the coat as it lies. I believe he was running, then, when they retrieved the knife, they went through his pockets, moved his coat around.”

  “I’ll bet they didn’t wear gloves.”

  “Most would not think about fingerprints and DNA. Most here will be more worried that magic will find them than science.”

  I nodded. “Exactly.”

  “He saw something that scared him,” Rhys said, standing up. “He took off down this way to try and outrun it. But what did he see? What made him run?”

  “There are many frightening things loose in the corridors of our sithen,” Frost said.

  “Yes,” I said, “but he was a reporter. He came looking for something odd or frightening.”

  “Perhaps he saw the lesser fey’s death,” Frost said.

  “You mean he witnessed Beatrice’s murder,” I said.

  Frost nodded.

  “Okay, say he witnessed it. He ran, they threw a blade, killed him.” I shook my head. “Almost everyone carries a knife. Most of them can pin a fly to the wall with one. It doesn’t limit our suspect pool much.”

  “But Beatrice’s death limits it.” Rhys gave me a look that was eloquent. Should this be discussed where the new guards, whom we didn’t entirely trust, could hear us?

  “There’s no reason to hide it, Rhys. You can’t kill the immortal with a knife, but she’s dead. It needed a spell, a powerful spell, and only a sidhe, or some few members of the sluagh could have done it.”

  “The queen forbid the sluagh to be out this night. Simply to be seen while the reporters are in our sithen would raise suspicion.”

  The sluagh were the least human of faerie. The nightmares that even the Unseelie fear. They are the only wild hunt that is left to us. The only frightening group that can hunt the fey, even the sidhe, until they are caught. Sometimes they kill, sometimes they only fetch you back for the queen. The sidhe fear the sluagh, and its threat was one of the reasons to fear the queen. I’d agreed to bed the King of the Sluagh to cement an alliance with them against my enemies. It was not widely known in the court that I had made the bargain. There were sidhe, even lesser fey, who would think it a perversion. I thought of it as a political necessity. Beyond that, I tried not to dwell too much on the mechanics. Sholto, their king, the Lord of That Which Passes Between, was half-sidhe, but the other half hadn’t been even close to humanoid.

  I shook my head. “I don’t think a member of the sluagh could have hidden themselves enough to wander about the sithen tonight. Not with all the spells we had on the corridors to keep everyone boxed into that one tiny section.”

  “Just as the reporter should not have been able to leave the area,” Frost said. He had a point.

  “Let me say what we’re all thinking, even the guards who don’t want to think it. A sidhe killed Beatrice and the reporter.”

  “That still leaves us with several hundred suspects,” Rhys said.

  “The scullery maid is very frightened,” Doyle said. “I cannot tell if she is afraid in general or about some
thing specific.”

  “So you scared her,” I said.

  He gave a small shrug. “I did not do it on purpose.”

  I looked at him.

  “I did not, Meredith, but Peasblossom took it ill that the Queen’s Darkness had come. She seemed to think I’d come to kill her.”

  “Why would she think the queen wanted her dead?” Rhys asked.

  I had an idea, an awful idea, because Queen Andais would hate it. I didn’t say it out loud, because though the new guards knew as well as we did that a sidhe had done this, they probably wouldn’t be thinking what I was thinking in that moment. Andais had saddled me with several men I did not know and a couple who I outright didn’t trust. The awful thought was, What if it had been Prince Cel’s people? What if the maid, Peasblossom, had seen one of Cel’s people leaving the scene of a double homicide? She’d never believe that the queen would want her to tell anyone.

  The trouble was that I couldn’t see what Cel, or anyone serving his interests, would gain from killing Beatrice. The reporter seemed accidental, just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  “You’ve thought of something,” Rhys said.

  “Later,” I said, and let my eyes flick to the backs of the men just a foot away from us.

  “Yes,” Doyle said, “yes, we do need some privacy.”

  “We should hide the body,” said one of the men at our backs. Amatheon’s hair, in its tight coppery red French braids, left his face bare, but nothing could leave it unadorned, for his eyes were layered petals of red, blue, yellow, and green, like some multicolored flower. It often made me a little dizzy to meet his gaze, as if my own eyes rebelled at the sight of him gazing out at the world with flower-petal eyes. His face was square-jawed but slender, so that he managed to be both strongly masculine and vaguely delicate at the same time. Almost as if his face, like his eyes, couldn’t quite decide what it wanted to be.

  “The reporter will be missed, Amatheon,” I said. “We can’t just hide his body and hope this will all go away.”

  “Why can we not? Why can we not simply say we don’t know where he has gone? Or that one of the lesser fey saw him leave the sithen.”

  “Those are all lies,” Rhys said. “The sidhe don’t lie, or did you forget that in all those years you hung around with Cel?”

  Amatheon’s face clouded with the beginnings of anger, but he fought it off. “What I did, or did not do, with Prince Cel is not your business. But I know that the queen would want to hide this from the press. To have a human reporter killed in our court will ruin all the good publicity she has managed to acquire for us in the last few decades.”

  He was probably right on that last part. The queen would not want to admit what had happened. If she even suspected that I suspected that one of Cel’s people was responsible, she’d want to hide it even deeper. She loved Cel too much, and always had.

  The fact that Amatheon had suggested disposing of the body made me wonder even more if Cel’s interests were somehow behind this. Amatheon had always been one of Cel’s supporters. Cel was the last pure-blood sidhe of a house that had ruled this court for three thousand years. Amatheon was one of the sidhe who thought me a mongrel and a disgrace to the throne. So why was he here to compete to bed me and make me queen? Because Queen Andais had ordered it. When he refused the honor, she made certain that he got her point, her painful point, that she was ruler here, not Cel, and Amatheon would do as he was told or else. Part of the “or else” had been to cut his knee-length hair to his shoulders, still long by human standards, but a mark of great shame for him. She’d done other things to him, things more painful to his body than to his pride, but he hadn’t shared details and I didn’t really want to know.

  “If Beatrice were the only one dead, then I might agree,” I said. “But a human is dead in our land. We can’t hide that.”

  “Yes,” he said, “we can.”

  “You haven’t dealt with the press as directly as I have, Amatheon. Was this reporter alone when he came here to the sithen? Or was he part of a group that will miss him right away? Even if he came alone, he will be known to other members of the press. If one of us had killed him out in the human world, we might be able to hide who did it, and let it be just another unsolved crime. But he was killed here on our land, and that we cannot hide.”

  “You sound as if you are going to tell the press of his death.”

  I looked away from his confusing eyes.

  He reached out to touch my arm, but Frost simply moved in the way, and he never completed the gesture. “You will announce it to the press?” He sounded astonished.

  “No, but we have to contact the police.”

  “Meredith,” Doyle started to say.

  I cut him off. “No, Doyle, he was stabbed with a knife. We’ll never figure out whose blade did it. But a good forensics team might.”

  “There are spells for tracing a wound to the weapon that made it,” Doyle said.

  “Yes, and you tried those spells when you found my father’s body in the meadow. You did your spells, yet you never found the weapons that killed him.” I did my best to make those words empty, to have nothing in my head with them. My father’s death, like the capital of Spain. Just a fact, nothing more.

  Doyle drew a deep breath. “I failed Prince Essus that day, Princess Meredith, and you.”

  “You failed because it was sidhe that killed him. It was someone who had enough magic to thwart your spells. Don’t you see, Doyle, whoever did this is as good at magic as we are. But they won’t know modern forensics. They won’t be able to protect themselves against science.”

  Onilwyn stepped away from the guards. He was blockier than any of the other sidhe, tall but stocky, and yet he always moved with grace, as if he’d borrowed his movements from someone more slender. His hair fell in a long wavy ponytail over the back of his black suit and white shirt. Black, the queen’s color, and Prince Cel’s color. A very popular color here at the Unseelie Court. His hair was a green so dark it had black highlights. His eyes were pale green with a starburst in the center around his pupil.

  “You cannot mean to bring human warriors into our land?”

  “If you mean human policeman, yes, that is exactly what I mean to do.”

  “You will open us up to that over the death of one human and the death of a cook?”

  “Do you think the death of a human is less important than the death of a sidhe?” I looked him straight in the face and was happy to see that he realized his faux pas. I watched him remember that I was part human.

  “What is one death, even two, over the damage it will do to our court in the eyes of the world?” He tried to recover, and it wasn’t a bad job of it.

  “Do you think the death of a cook is less important than the death of a nobleman?” I asked, ignoring his attempt to fix things.

  He smiled then, and it was arrogant, and so very Onilwyn. “Of course, I believe that the life of a noble-born sidhe is worth more than the life of a servant, or a human. So would you if you were pure sidhe.”

  “Then I’m glad that I’m not pure sidhe,” I said. I was angry now, and I fought not to have it translate to power, not to start to glow, and raise the stakes of this fight. “This servant, whose name happens to be Beatrice, showed me more kindness than most of the nobles of either faerie court. Beatrice was my friend, and if you have nothing more helpful to add than class prejudice, then I’m sure that Queen Andais can find a use for you back among her guards.”

  His skin went from pale whitish green to just white. I felt a swift burst of satisfaction at his fear. Andais had given him to me to bed, and if I didn’t bed him, he would suffer. So would I, but in that moment, I wasn’t sure I cared.

  “How was I to know she meant anything to you, Princess Meredith?”

  “Consider this my only warning to you, Onilwyn”—I raised my voice so that it carried down the hallway—“and for the rest of you who don’t know me. Onilwyn assumed that the death of a servant meant nothin
g to me.” Some of the men at the far end turned and looked at me. “I spent a great deal of time with the lesser fey while I was at court. Most of my friends here were not among the sidhe. You made it plain that I was not pure-blooded enough for most of you. You have only yourselves to blame, then, that my attitude is a little more democratic than usual for a noble. Think upon that before you say something as foolish to me as Onilwyn just did.” I turned back to the guard in question, and let my voice go lower. “Bear all that in mind, Onilwyn, before you open your mouth again, and say something else equally stupid.”

  He actually dropped to one knee and bowed his head, though I think that was to hide the anger on his face. “As my princess bids, so I do.”

  “Get up, and go stand somewhere farther away from me.”

  Doyle told him to go to the other end of the hallway, and he went, without another word, though the starbursts in his eyes were glittering with his rage.

  “I do not agree with Onilwyn,” Amatheon said, “not completely, but are you truly going to bring in the human police?”

  I nodded.

  “The queen will not like it.”

  “No, she won’t.”

  “Why would you risk her anger, Princess?” He seemed to be truly puzzled by that. “I would not risk her anger again for anything, or anyone. Not even my honor.”