“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 something 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.