“Call the captain out for this?” asked the taller garda as his companion took out his scryer. “On his day off? More’n my life’s worth.”
“Well, then who’s the duty sergeant?” she asked, hoping and praying he wasn’t going to say Lya.
“DS Lya,” he said, and Kett figured she might as well hold her wrists out to be cuffed straight away. Lya was a great garda and her father’s best friend, but as soon as Bael saw her, she knew he’d give up being reasonable.
Lya was a kelf.
Bael wasn’t sure who this Lya person was to make Kett suddenly look so dejected. He was enjoying himself immensely, and he hadn’t even had to hit anyone yet. The four traders had taken their seats again and were refusing to look at either him or Kett or the gardaí or the waitress. This meant they could only look at each other, which Bael figured was punishment enough.
One of the gardaí took out a scryer, like the little rock device Jarven had used, to call his superior and complain about “that bloody Almet girl again”.
Bael laughed so hard he had to sit down.
But when the superior turned up, he stopped laughing. Var, who’d been sitting quietly while Bael fed him sausages, suddenly started growling.
It was a kelf.
Bael stared, but there was no mistaking it. Four feet tall, with bright blue skin and green hair, it wore human clothes but that was its only nod to fitting in. The creature had bare feet-because who would make shoes to fit feet with three long frog toes? Its huge eyes were all iris with no whites, like those of a cat.
It carried a short sword in one three-fingered hand and a garda badge in the other.
How did something that tiny kill my mother?
“Uh, Kett,” Bael said, nudging her, and she turned from arguing quietly with the café’s owner. She saw the kelf and groaned.
“Look, I’m not actually going to shoot anybody,” she said.
“Aye, but the threat’s enough,” the kelf replied. It had an accent like a Zemlyan kelf, but that was impossible. Kelfs couldn’t cross the Wall. They just couldn’t. It was why there were no kelfs in Peneggan. Why he liked Peneggan. No kelfs lived here indigenously and they couldn’t migrate.
It was impossible.
“Kett,” he said, trying to keep his voice steady. “Did I eat something funky, or is that a kelf?”
“She’s a kelf,” she said, as if he’d asked her what a particular kind of sausage was called.
“And…we’re still in Elvyrn?”
She sighed, her patience clearly short. “It’s a long story,” she said, and flicked her eyes irritably at Var, who continued to emit a low, rolling growl. “Can you shut him up?”
“It’s a kelf.”
“Yes, well done.” She turned back to the owner. “Look, you got big guys like that coming in here, straight off the river, ain’t seen a woman for weeks, of course they’re gonna cause trouble. You need to start standing up for your staff.”
The kelf watched her with a smile. “Giving legal advice, Kett?”
“Hardly. I’ve just had it with stupid men attacking stupid women. Do you need to be here?”
“You’re causing a breach of the peace.”
“Kett is a breach of the peace,” Bael muttered, and the kelf gave him a sharp look. He’d forgotten how acute their hearing was.
“And you are?”
“I am,” he replied.
“Bael, stop pissing around,” Kett snapped.
“It’s a kelf,” Bael said. “What the hell is it doing dressed as a garda?”
For the second time that day, the café went totally silent.
“She is a garda,” Kett said. “Moreover, she’s a sergeant.”
“And I could put you in the cells for that,” said the kelf.
“Just you fucking try,” Bael snarled, and Kett threw out her arm to hold him back.
The kelf continued to regard him calmly, its huge eyes unblinking. Bael swore at it and Kett’s expression grew stonier.
They avoided being arrested, mostly because the kelf seemed to be a friend of hers. Bael vaguely remembered Kett saying her father was a great friend of the kelfs, so maybe that was why.
But even after the traders had been sent on their way, the gardaí had dispersed and he and Kett released, he still couldn’t get an answer out of her about the kelf. Halfway up the hill toward Nuala’s, she snapped, “Look, you’ll have to ask Lya, all right?”
“Lya?”
“Detective Sergeant Lya. The kelf.”
“But how is it-”
“She.”
“All right, she. How is she here?”
“Ask her.”
“You know I hate kelfs.”
“Yeah, but why? And don’t give me that crap about them not liking Nasc. That’s no excuse to not like them back.”
“Bloody is.”
“Bloody isn’t, Bael.” She stopped to glare at him in the middle of the street. “Look, I’ve had enough of this. I knew you were going to react like this when she turned up. This morning you told me you’re a Nasc Mage. Well, you don’t fucking act like a Mage, you act like a child. And you wonder why I don’t want to be your mate. I don’t do children.”
With that, she spun on her heel and stalked off, leaving Bael slightly bewildered, not to mention a little turned on, because Kett stalking was a damn sexy sight.
But self-preservation kicked in and he realized that saying so would probably earn him a kick somewhere sensitive, so he walked after her at a slower pace, thinking.
He found her in her room, packing a kitbag with a few clothes and a lot of weapons. “Going somewhere?”
“Home.”
Okay. He sat down on the bed and watched. “Kett,” he said after a while. “Listen. I know you like kelfs, and your father is this great friend of theirs, but they just don’t like Nasc. Ask your cousin. They hate us.”
“What, every kelf hates every Nasc?”
“As far as I can tell, yes. They think we’re unnatural, that we mess with the natural order of things.”
“You mess with any kind of order,” Kett grumbled.
“You know what I mean. They serve humans, but they consider themselves better than animals. And we’re halfway between the two.”
“Shouldn’t that make you their equals?”
“You wanna sit down with a kelf and debate this? They cross the street to avoid us. They deliberately ignore our requests. And you saw that kelf in Nihon, it shot me-”
“You tried to pounce on it!”
“Yeah, but tell me this, if you or your friend Miho had pounced on it, would it have shot you?”
Kett just glared at him.
“They might not be violent toward humans-”
“A kelf would never hurt a human,” Kett said, as simply as if she was stating that grass was green.
“But they’d hurt a Nasc.”
“Only if provoked. Severely provoked.”
“One of them killed my mother,” Bael said-and Kett went very still for a moment.
“Impossible,” she said. “They don’t hurt-”
“Humans, yes, I know. But my mother wasn’t human, was she? She was Nasc.”
Kett folded a shirt, unfolded and refolded it, and then threw it down on the bed and stared at him.
Of course, Albhar had come up with a new theory, but Bael was having trouble believing him. Albhar wanted the shapeshifter for his own ends; if it really had killed Bael’s mother, he’d have said so years ago.
No, it had been the kelf. Bael was sure of it.
“It was serving my parents,” he said. “I never met it. I rarely spent much time with them when they were away-and they spent a lot of time away. All I knew was that my father sent word my mother had been killed in an accident. When he came home, he told me it had been their serving kelf. I believed him-hell, I’m a Nasc, kelfs have never been exactly kind to me-but no one else did.”