At the same moment the nerdy human snapped, “Holster it, Dain.”
Lean, strong fingers came under her chin, and Duncan forcibly turned her face toward him. “Don’t look at him,” Duncan said to her in a quiet voice. “Look at me.”
She tried to focus on him. That was when she realized all her snakes were hissing at the Light Fae. Her panic had turned them deadly. She could feel them, roused and wanting to bite, and as she looked over Duncan’s shoulder, she could tell that the Light Fae male knew it.
“At me, Seremela,” Duncan whispered gently.
Her attention shifted back to him. He raised a hand and stroked it along a few of the snakes, and they quit hissing and wrapped around his forearm. Even though his back was turned to an unknown male with his gun drawn, Duncan looked calm, his dark gaze steady.
As soon as he knew he had gotten her attention, he smiled at her. “They’re not going to hang her,” he said telepathically. “We won’t let them.”
She calmed, marginally. They were only two people in an overcrowded, dangerous and unknown place. Maybe it was ridiculous to believe him. Certainly it was neither sensible nor logical, but she did.
Impulsively she reached up to touch his lean cheek, more of the snakes reaching for him, and his gaze warmed. “Duncan, I don’t know what he’s talking about,” she said. “Vetta isn’t a Tarot reader, and she might be a total contrary shit, but she’s not a murderer. That’s insane. If—if by any chance she did kill someone, she wouldn’t have had any other choice.”
He frowned. “We need to ask some questions now. Whatever he says, we’re going to make this right. Okay?”
She nodded jerkily. “Okay.”
He took her hand and kissed her fingertips, then carefully disengaged himself. Only then did he turn around to face the pharmacist and his Light Fae guard, who had holstered his gun.
All of her snakes had calmed as she had calmed. She gathered them to her and nudged them behind her shoulder as Duncan said, pleasantly, “Let’s start this conversation over, shall we?”
Wendell regarded them both with narrowed eyes. “Fine, but you’re scaring away my paying customers, so your free sample is over,” he said, chewing gum. “You want to know anything else, you gotta pay. Standard 411 rate is ten dollars a minute, not including additional rates for premium intel.”
Anger sparked in Seremela at the human’s callousness. She had never in her life wanted to hurt another creature, but she was pretty sure she could hurt this one. Just one bite, she thought as she fixed a cold, level gaze on him. All it would take is one, and your heart rate would slow, your skin would turn dry and flake off and you would be scared, nauseated and fucking miserable for a week. And I think I would like that very much.
Even as she thought it, a single snake slipped over her shoulder and rose to the level of her cheekbone. It too stared at Wendell unblinkingly, until the human shifted on his stool and looked away.
Aw, she’d made him squirm. Yee-fucking-haw.
Duncan slipped his hands in his jeans pockets, standing relaxed. “Your rate’s unimaginative but doable,” he said.
The human’s thin mouth tilted sourly, and he shifted again. “What the fuck do you mean by that?”
“There are much more valuable things than cash, Wendell,” Duncan said. “Like alliances, protection and immunity.”
Wendell’s eyebrows rose. “You think you could offer me protection or immunity? You’ve barely set foot in this place. You have no social equity here, Vampyre. You don’t know the Power brokers, and you have no alliances. You know nothing.”
“The world is a much wider place than this dusty little pile of tents,” Duncan said. He gave the human a cold smile, and a touch of a whip entered his voice, precisely balanced just so with a delicate lash of contempt. “But no worries, Wendell. If you want money, you’ll get money. Tell us what happened, with details, names and times.”
Wendell paused, regarding Duncan with equal parts greed and caution, and Seremela could tell he was rethinking the last few minutes. Then the pharmacist said, “There may not be any law here, but there is a balance of Power. Or there was, until one of the Power brokers was killed yesterday. Things are a bit destabilized at the moment.”
“Who were the Power brokers, and what did they control?” Duncan asked. “You’re not one of them.”