“Four and five.”
I waited some more. “What?”
“Six and seven.”
Okay.
Confused now.
But then the giant head bent down, and the tiny eyes were serious. And angry, but not at me. I stared into their depths, and saw a banked fury, a quiet outrage that was somehow more compelling than any physical thing I’d seen him do.
“They destroy. They dishonor. They pay.”
“The slavers?”
A nod.
“So, one, two, and three . . . are dead?”
It seemed a fair guess.
Another nod.
“So that leaves four . . .” But he hadn’t spoken of them that way, had he? “Two groups of two?”
Another nod.
Okay, getting the hang of this now.
“So you’re after two more groups of slavers. You know where they are?”
“Not know. Not yet.”
“It’s just . . . there’s a lot of slavers in New York. We’re trying to shut them down, but they’re good at hiding—”
“They blaspheme. They disgrace!”
“Yeah. They, uh, they’re bad people.”
“They destroy. They kill and kill again!”
“Okay. Okay.” I held out my hands, in the universal “see, I have no weapons, please don’t kill me” gesture, because he was suddenly furious.
And bending over me in a way that would have been intimidating, even if my weapons hadn’t still been in the car, except for the pain in his eyes. “They take fey, make fight, make die. And after die, they dishonor. They steal—”
He broke off with what I could only assume was a fey curse.
“They steal . . . what?”
But I didn’t get an answer this time. “So many lost. So many forgotten. Cannot go back. Cannot go home.”
“We’ll help them get home. We’ll help you.”
He’d turned his head to look out over the water, but now he turned it back. His eyes were suddenly tired and sad, which was somehow worse than the anger. “No. They never go back. Bones lost now.”
And I suddenly remembered something Caedmon had said. Something about the bones of a dead fey needing to be sent back to Faerie. But that wasn’t anything a slaver would care about, was it? If someone died in the fights, or any other way, what would they do?
Probably just bury them, and leave them to rot. Why risk opening a portal when, every time you did, it had a chance of being detected? Why bring the Circle down on your head just to honor an old tradition?
An old tradition that was sacred to a certain portion of Faerie, who believed that if the bones weren’t returned a fey soul was lost forever.
They kill and kill again.
No wonder he wanted them dead.
I suddenly noticed that my eyes were wet. I wasn’t the weeping type, but the depth of his pain was palpable. And not just the emotional kind, I realized, catching sight of the blood leaking out from under the pad the woman had put on his chest. She might have done her best, but it wasn’t good enough. He needed stitches, or whatever the troll equivalent was.
Because, no matter how strong you are, you can still bleed out.
Screw it.
I took out my phone and called Claire.
She showed up faster than I’d expected, an old trench coat over her nightgown and her hair in the kind of big foam curlers that make for nice, loose curls the next day. She’d brought her kit, but been smart enough to leave the Light Fey at home.
“Thanks,” I told her, as she paid the cabbie, because I’d managed to drown the lambo. “By the way, did I ever say sorry about your car?”
“Fuck the car.” She pushed a strand of red hair out of her eyes. “Where are they?”
I led her down to the water’s edge, not knowing what kind of reception we were going to get. But to my surprise, the selkies took one look at her and crowded up on land, as much as they could with the rocks in the way. Blue didn’t react, except to watch her as she examined his fellow fey and dispensed one of her patented horrible-smelling concoctions.
“They’re so thin,” she murmured.
“Yeah, I don’t think they’ve eaten much lately. And they didn’t like jerky and Cheetos.”
Her lip curled. “Who does?”
I bit back a reply about Claire’s ten thousand recipes for chickpeas, because this wasn’t the time.
“We need to get them home,” I said instead.
“And put them where?”
“They could stay . . . in the dining room?”
“I thought the vampires were in the dining room. Or did you move them upstairs?”
Shit.
“You, uh, you know about that?”
She shot me a look. “Dory. I have a houseful of fey guards. They don’t miss much.”
Yeah.
Probably should have thought of that.
“And you’re not upset?”
She sat back on her heels, and looked sort of sad. “I’m upset that you feel like you have to sneak people around. It’s your house, too.”
I sat there blinking, but she was already moving on to Blue. I tensed a little; I don’t know why. I knew what she was, what she could do. But she looked so tiny next to his massive bulk that I worried anyway.
Until I saw the most amazing thing I’d seen all night. The huge, battle-scarred, fearsome troll; the guy who had dangerous slavers quaking in their boots; the guy who had torn apart a warehouse full of who knew what kind of traps, snares, and hexes, not one, not two, but three nights in a row, and that after kicking ass at a no-holds-barred epic fight—that guy—relaxed back against the tree and closed his eyes.
And fell asleep.
Chapter Thirty-nine
Half an hour later, I was pouring a two-liter of water over Claire’s green-to-the-elbow arms, and Big Blue had a bunch of concrete in his chest. At least, that’s what it looked like. I assumed it was something more medicinal, since Claire had troweled it straight into the big wounds, where it finally stopped the seepage.
It had also left Blue looking like an about-to-be-vacated apartment, with spackle everywhere, but apparently it would be absorbed by the body as it healed and wouldn’t do any harm. And it didn’t look like it had hurt him, since he’d snored through most of it. In other news, my car was back without noticeable damage, and so was a truck, which Fin had had a couple of his boys bring over, since he hadn’t been able to find anyone to install a hitch in the middle of the night.
They were big, strapping guys that he used for security and other things, like loading up a bunch of selkies.
They’d also brought Fin a charm, which had transformed him into a short guy with a wild shock of brown hair and a big nose. It was weird; he still looked identifiably himself, with small eyes and roughly the same shaped face, just humanized. At least enough that we weren’t likely to scare anybody else.
So things were looking up.
“Things are looking up,” I told Claire.
She bit her lip.
“Aren’t they?”
She tilted the bottle’s mouth to stop the flow, and lathered up with some soap she’d brought with her. She made her own, when she had time, and this one smelled of lavender. It was nice.
Her expression wasn’t.
“I did something,” she told me abruptly. “I was waiting up to tell you about it, because I couldn’t get you on the phone, but then—” She glanced around at a burly guy walking past with a human-sized seal over his shoulder, and sighed.
“Then things got crazy.” I grinned at her.
She didn’t grin back.
“You’re going to be angry,” she told me.
“I doubt that.” Claire and I had our differences, from time to time, but we rarely fought.
“I don’t.”
She was rinsing off, and I could almost see her steeling herself. She finished, and the thin shoulders went back, the curler-bound head came up, and the green eyes met mine head-on. Because, whatever else Claire may be, she isn’t a coward.
“I called Louis-Cesare.”
For a moment, I just blinked at her. It was the last thing I’d expected—they didn’t even talk in person if they could avoid it, much less over the phone. I hadn’t even known she had his number.
“I didn’t even know you had his number,” I said, and it was her turn to blink.
“It . . . was in the house phone. He called once when you had your cell off.”
“Oh, yeah. Right.”