Divine Misdemeanors_A Novel Page 8

  A throat-clearing sound made me turn to see the woman with her human-looking child. The woman dropped a bobbing curtsey, blinking her hawk eyes at me. The boy with her started to try to do the same, but she caught him by the arm.

  “No, no, Felix, she’s a fey princess, not a human one. You don’t bow to her.”

  The boy frowned, trying to understand.

  “I’m his nanny,” she said, as if she needed to explain. “Fey nannies have become quite popular here.”

  “I didn’t know,” I said.

  She smiled brightly. “I would never leave Felix here. I’ve been with him since he was three months old, but I can recommend a few others if they’re between charges, or are willing to leave their charges.”

  I hadn’t thought that far ahead, but… “Do you have a business card?” I asked.

  She smiled and got one out of her purse. She put it on the table and wrote on the back of it. “This is my home phone so you don’t have to go through the agency. They won’t understand that you need different things than most clients.”

  I took the card and put it in the small wristlet wallet that was all I’d brought with me. We’d been headed to the beach; I’d wanted my ID and not much more.

  Matilda brought me a small plate with roast beef folded artfully on it. “I’d put something else with it but when a lady’s expecting you never know what to add.”

  I smiled at her. “It’s perfect. Tha—sorry. I know better.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about it. I’ve been out among the humans for centuries. It takes more than a thank-you to lay this brownie, eh, Harvey?” She laughed at her own joke. Harvey behind the counter looked both embarrassed and pleased.

  The roast beef was tender, just the right side of rare, and exactly what I wanted. Even the little hint of salt was perfect. I’d noticed that about the cravings, that if I gave in to them the food tasted amazing. I wondered if that was typical.

  Matilda pulled up a chair, and the nanny, whose name was Agnes, did the same. It wasn’t like any of us could leave. We were walled in with the press. In fact, the reporters and paparazzi in the front were being squashed against the windows and door. They were beginning to try to push back, but there was too much weight behind them.

  Doyle and Frost stayed standing, keeping an eye on the people outside. The young-looking man stood with them. He was obviously enjoying being one of the guys, and was showing his shoulder tattoo to Doyle and Frost.

  Matilda had told Harvey to put coffee on. I realized with a start that this was the first time in weeks that I’d sat down with other women and not felt either like a princess, a detective, or someone else in charge of everyone I was dealing with. We’d brought sidhe women with us out of faerie, but they’d all been part of the prince’s guard. They’d spent centuries serving my father, Prince Essus, and he’d been friendly, but not overly so; he’d been as careful of the boundaries as the queen, his sister, had been careless. Where she’d treated her guard as her harem and her toys to torment, he’d treated his guard with respect. He’d had lovers among them, but sex wasn’t looked down on among the fey. It was just normal.

  The female guards would give their lives to keep me safe, but they were meant to guard a prince, and there were no more princes in the Unseelie Court in or out of faerie. I’d killed the last one before he could kill me. The guards didn’t mourn their lost prince. He’d been a sexual sadist like his mother. One thing we’d managed to hide from the media so far was how many of the guard, both male and female, were traumatized from the tortures they’d endured.

  Some of them wanted Doyle, or Frost, or one of the other fathers to be named prince so they could be their guard. Traditionally, making me pregnant would have made the father a prince and future king, or at least royal consort. But with so many fathers, there was no precedent for making them all princes.

  I sat with the women and just listened to them talk about normal things, and realized that sitting in the kitchen at my Gran’s or in the kitchen with Maggie Mae had been the closest to normal I’d ever known.

  For the third time that day I felt tears at the back of my eyes, in my throat. It was that way every time I thought about Gran. It had only been a month since her death. I guess I was entitled.

  Matilda said, “Are you well, Princess?”

  “Merry,” I said. “Call me Merry.”

  That earned me another bright smile. Then there was a sound behind us.

  We all turned to see the glass begin to crack under the weight of the reporters crushing one another against it.

  Doyle and Frost were at my side. They got me to my feet, and we were running for the counter and the back area. Agnes picked up the little boy and we ran for cover. We heard screams, and the glass gave with a high, thin cracking.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THERE WERE AMBULANCES, POLICE, AND GLASS EVERYWHERE. NONE of us in the shop were hurt, but some of the paparazzi were taken to the hospital. Most of the people plastered against the glass had been photographers trying to get that one special picture that would make them rich. Certain shots were rumored to go for hundreds of thousands of dollars. After today, I believed the rumors.

  Lucy was standing over me as the ambulance medic checked me out. My protests of, “I’m fine. I wasn’t hurt,” fell on deaf ears. When Lucy had found me inside the glass-covered deli she’d been pale. I looked up at the tall brunette and realized that though we might never go shopping together, she was my friend.

  The emergency medical technician pulled the blood pressure cuff off my arm and pronounced, “Everything seems fine. Blood pressure, all of it. But I’m not a doctor, and I’m sure as heck not a baby doc.”

  “So you think she should go to the hospital?” Lucy asked.

  The EMT frowned and I felt his dilemma. If he said no and he was wrong, he was fucked. But there were other people who were actually injured, and if he left one behind to take me, just in case, and the one left behind died, he was also screwed.

  She turned to Doyle and Frost for backup. “Tell her she needs to go to the hospital.”

  They exchanged a look, then Doyle gave a small nod as if to say “Go ahead,” and Frost answered, “We don’t ‘tell’ Merry what to do, Detective. She is our princess.”

  “But she’s also carrying your babies,” Lucy said.

  “That doesn’t give us the right to order her around,” he said.

  Doyle added, “I expected you to understand that better than most, Detective Tate.”

  She frowned at both of them, then turned back to me. “You promise me you never fell or had something fall on you?”

  “I promise,” I said.

  She took in a lot of air, let it out slowly, then nodded. “Fine. Okay. I’ll let it go. If none of you are worried, I don’t know why I bother.”

  I smiled up at her. “Because you are my friend, and friends worry about each other.”

  She looked almost embarrassed, then grinned at me. “Fine. Go enjoy what’s left of your Saturday.”

  Doyle reached out a hand and I let him help me stand though I really didn’t need it. They’d both been calmer than Lucy, but then they’d been with me the entire time. They knew nothing had happened to me physically, but they were still more careful of me than they had been before. It was both touching and a little irritating. I was worried that as the pregnancy progressed it might become a lot less touching and a lot more irritating, but that was a worry for another day. We were free to head for the beach, and there was still daylight to enjoy it. It was all good.

  The EMT asked, “So I’m done here with the princess?”

  “Yeah,” Lucy said, “go find someone who’s bleeding to take for a ride.”

  He smiled, obviously relieved, and hurried off to find someone who really did need a ride to the hospital.

  “I’ll give you uniforms to escort you back to your car.” She sort of nodded toward the press that was being held back by tape and barriers. Oddly, the paparazzi who had gotten injured were
now news themselves. I wondered if they were enjoying being on the other side of the camera.

  “Some of them will follow us to the beach,” Frost said.

  “I can try to lose them.”

  “No, I do not want to see what that would mean on the roads to the beach.” Doyle said it very quickly and even Lucy picked up his unease.

  “So tall, dark, and deadly is still not comfy riding in regular cars.” She addressed the comment to me.

  I smiled and shook my head.

  “I prefer the limo; at least then I can’t see the road so clearly.”

  Lucy smiled and shook her head. “You know, it makes me like you better that you’re afraid of something, Doyle.”

  He frowned at her, and probably would have commented, but her phone rang. She checked, and saw that she needed to answer it. She held up a finger for us to wait.

  “Tell me this is a joke,” she said. Her tone was anything but amused.

  “How,” she asked, then listened and said, “Sorry doesn’t fix this.” She got off the phone and cursed softly but completely under her breath.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “While we were down here cleaning up this mess our witness fled the scene. We can’t find her.”

  “When did she get… ?”

  “He doesn’t know. Apparently when there were fewer of us, Gilda’s entourage got braver, and when they calmed it down the witness was gone.” I noticed that she was careful not to say Bittersweet’s name out in public. It was a good precaution when murders are magical; you never know who, or how, someone is listening.

  “Lucy, I’m sorry. If you hadn’t come down here to help us this wouldn’t have happened.”

  She gave a glare to the paparazzi who were not hurt but whom the police had forced to wait for questioning. “You wouldn’t have needed help if these bastards hadn’t mobbed you.”

  “I’m not even sure you can charge them with anything,” I said.

  “We’ll find something,” she said, her voice full of anger. The anger was probably more about Bittersweet fleeing the scene and having to tell her bosses that she’d been rescuing the faery princess from the big, bad reporters when it had happened, but the uninjured paparazzi would make a nice target for that anger.

  “Go, enjoy your weekend. I’ll take care of this bunch and give you an escort to your car. I’ll have some cars make sure that no one follows you from the Fael, but if they’re waiting for you farther away”—she shrugged—“afraid there’s not much I can do.”

  I took her hand and squeezed it. “Thank you for everything, and I’m sorry that you’re going to take grief about the witness.”

  She smiled, but her eyes weren’t happy enough for it. “I’ll deal with it. Go, have your picnic or whatever.” She turned away, then back to frowning. She moved closer to us and whispered, “How do we find someone who is only four inches high in a city the size of Los Angeles?”

  It was a good question, but I had a helpful answer. “She’s one of the smallest of us, so she’s very sensitive to metal and technology. So look for her at parks, vacant lots, street sides with trees like today’s scene. She needs nature to survive here.”

  “What kind of flower faery is she?” Frost asked.

  “I don’t know,” Lucy said.

  “Good idea, Frost,” I said. “Find out, Lucy, because she’ll be attracted to her plant. Some of them are so tied to a bit of land that if their plant goes extinct they die with it.”

  “Wow, that’d make you environmentally active,” Lucy said.

  I nodded.

  “Who would know what flower she likes?”

  “Robert might know,” I said.

  “Gilda would know,” Doyle said.

  Lucy frowned at him. “She’s already called for her lawyer. She’s not going to talk to us.”

  “She might if you tell her that not cooperating endangers her people,” Doyle said.

  “I don’t think she cares that much,” Lucy said.

  He gave that small smile. “Tell her that Meredith cares more than she does, obviously. Imply that Meredith is a better, kinder ruler and I think Gilda will at least tell you the plant.”

  She looked up at him with a nod of approval. “They’re both handsome and smart. It’s so not fair. Why can’t I find a Prince Charming like these guys?”

  I wasn’t sure what to say to that, but Doyle was. “We are not the Prince Charming of our story, Detective Tate. Meredith rode to our rescue and saved us from our sad fates.”

  “So she’s what, Princess Charming?”

  He smiled and this time it was that bright flash that he didn’t give often. It made Lucy blush just a little, and I realized that she liked Doyle. I couldn’t blame her. “Yes, Detective, she’s our Princess Charming.”

  Frost took one of my hands in his, and looked down at me with everything in his eyes. “She is.”

  “So instead of waiting for the prince to find me, I need to find one to save and bring him home?”

  “It worked for me,” I said.

  She shook her head. “I save people all day, or try to, Merry. Just once I’d like to be the one being saved.”

  I shook my head. “I’ve been both, Lucy. Trust me, it’s better to do the saving.”

  “If you say so. I gotta go see if Robert knows where to find our little friend.” She waved at us as she made her way toward the crowd.

  Two uniformed officers appeared as if she’d told them to step up when she left us; she probably had. It was our old friends Wright and O’Brian. “We’re supposed to see you safely to your car,” Wright said.

  “Let’s do it,” I said.

  We started the trip back the way we’d come, through a barrage of new camera flashes from yet more and different paparazzi and reporters.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  WE ENDED UP WITH AN IMPROMPTU ENTOURAGE OF REPORTERS AND uniformed police. At one point the reporters were such a solid mass that Wright and O’Brian couldn’t move us forward without laying hands on them, and apparently they’d been ordered not to manhandle the press. They were experiencing the problem that my bodyguards had been having for weeks. How do you stay politically correct with strangers shouting in your face, flashes going off like blinding bombs, and the crowd turning into a mass of bodies that you were not allowed to touch?

  The reporters yelled questions. “Are you helping the police with a case, Princess?” “What investigation are you helping the police with?” “Why were you crying?” “Is the shop owner really a relative of yours?”

  Wright and O’Brian tried to push a way through without actually pushing, which is a lot harder than it sounds. Doyle and Frost stayed on either side of me, because the crowd had grown beyond the reporters. Human and fey had come out of the shops and restaurants to see what the commotion was about. It was “human” nature to be curious but they began to add to the press around us so that forward movement stopped.

  Then suddenly the reporters fell silent, not all at once, but gradually. First one went quiet, then another, and they began to look around, as if they’d heard a noise, a disturbing noise. Then I felt it, too: fear. Fear like a cold, clammy wind across your skin. I had a moment to stand there in the bright California sunshine and feel a shiver creep down my spine.

  Doyle squeezed my arm and that helped me think. It helped me tighten my magical shields, and the moment I did, the fear washed away from me, but I could still see it on the reporters’ faces.

  Wright and O’Brian had their hands on their guns, looking around apprehensively. I spilled my shields outward to them, the way I’d done the glamour over Doyle and Frost earlier. Wright’s shoulders dropped as if a weight had gone from him. O’Brian said, “What was that?”

  “Is that,” Doyle said.

  “What?” she asked.

  The reporters parted like a curtain. They simply didn’t want to be near whatever was walking between them. The Fear Dearg walked toward us grinning his snaggletoothed grin. I’d been right;
it was an evil grin. His enjoyment of the reporters’ fear showed in his face and the jaunty roll of his walk.

  He came to stand in front of us, and then went down on one knee before us. “My queen,” he said.

  A camera flashed, freezing the image for tomorrow’s news, or tonight’s. The Fear Dearg looked in the direction of the flash and there was a yell, then a man went running down the sidewalk. His many cameras jangled as he raced away screaming, as if all the devil’s Dandy Dogs were chasing him.

  The other reporters took a collective step back. The Fear Dearg gave an evil chuckle, and just the sound of it was enough to make me break out in goose bumps. If I’d been alone on some dark road it would have been terrifying.

  “You must practice that laugh,” I said. “It’s positively evil.”

  He grinned up at me. “A fey likes to know his work is appreciated, my queen.”

  A reporter called out in a shaking voice, “He called you his queen. Does that mean you did keep the throne?”

  The Fear Dearg got to his feet and bounced at them, hands up, and said, “Boo!” The reporters fled on that side. He made a move toward the other group, but most of them backed away, hands held out, as if to show that they meant no harm.

  One woman asked in a breathless voice, “Meredith, are you queen of the Unseelie Court?”

  “No,” I answered.

  The Fear Dearg looked at me. “Shall I tell her the crown that sat upon your head first?”

  “Not here,” Doyle said.

  The Fear Dearg glared up at him. “I did not ask you, Darkness. If we were kin, then it would be different, but I owe you nothing, only her.”

  I realized that Doyle refusing to acknowledge that his ancestry was similar to the Fear Dearg’s had insulted the fey.

  Doyle seemed to figure it out then too, because he said, “I do not hide my mixed heritage, Fear Dearg. I only meant that I had none of your blood in my veins, which is only truth.”

  “Ay, but you’ve had our blood on your sword, haven’t you? Before you were the Queen’s Darkness, before you were Nudons and healed at your magic spring, you were other things, other names.” The Fear Dearg lowered his voice with each word, until the remaining reporters began to come closer trying to hear. I had known that Doyle had been something before he was worshipped as a god, and that he had not sprung full grown at the side of Queen Andais, but I had never asked. The older of the sidhe did not like to talk about the time before, when our people were greater.