A Local Habitation

“No. His blood isn’t telling us anything.” I leaned down and closed Colin’s staring eyes, letting my fingers rest on the lids. “Nothing at all.”


“Nothing?” Peter whispered. The Daoine Sidhe don’t brag, because we don’t need to. My mother was so strong she could taste the death of plants. She could never stomach maple syrup; she said it tasted like trees screaming. The blood should have told me something, even if it wasn’t anything I could use. For it to tell me nothing at all was impossible.

“Nothing.” I stood, resisting the urge to wipe my hands on my jeans again. It wouldn’t get them clean, or take the taste of blood out of my mouth. “The blood’s empty.”

“But why didn’t the night-haunts come?”

“I don’t know.” The obvious next question was “so what good are you? ” and I didn’t know what my answer would be.

He didn’t get a chance to ask. Jan rushed into the room, clipboard clutched against her chest, with a tiny white-haired woman following a few steps behind.

“Elliot!” Jan cried, voice shrill and angry. “Elliot, what happened?”

He turned toward her, expression grim. “They got Colin, Jannie,” he said. “I’m so sorry. They got Colin.”

She stopped, raising a hand to her mouth. She was either one of the best actresses I’ve ever seen, or she hadn’t done it. “Colin?” she said, anger fading, replaced by sudden, bleak despair. “Oh, no. That can’t be right, Elliot, it can’t; I refuse. Look again. You have to be wrong.”

“I’m sorry, Jannie,” he said, and opened his arms. She threw herself into them, shuddering, and they clung to each other. My presence was forgotten; I had no place in the landscape of their grief. Even Alex and Peter looked away.

The white-haired woman stepped around them and stopped in front of the corpse, studying it for a long moment before she said, “He’s dead.”

“Yes,” I said flatly. Sylvester said he was worried about his niece not checking in. He never said anything about people getting killed.

“How?”

“I don’t know,” I said, studying her. Most people are upset when their friends die; this woman looked interested, and not all that surprised. That was unusual. She was roughly five feet tall, with a blaze of white hair cut in spikes that did nothing to hide the squared-off tips of her ears. Her figure matched her height—slight, lissome, and easily overlooked. Judging from her scowl, that happened pretty often; it wasn’t the sort of expression you master in an instant, even when your friends are dying. Lines cut through her face like scars through granite. They weren’t wrinkles; she wasn’t old enough for that. They were just lines, indelibly ground into the shape of her.

“Damn,” she said, raking her hands back through her hair. “I liked him.”

I glanced to Jan and Elliot, and frowned as I saw that she was sobbing on his shoulder. What a great thing to see in a leader: hysterics. I shook my head, looking back to the white-haired woman, and asked, “Who are you?”

“What?” She looked up at me, her scowl deepening until the lines on her face became caverns. “I’m Gordan. Who the hell are you?”

“October Daye.” I don’t normally flex my titles, but this time I added, “Knight of Shadowed Hills. I’m here by order of Sylvester Torquill, the Duke—”

“Duke of Shadowed Hills, yeah, we know the drill,” she said, interrupting. “We’re not totally uncivilized out here in the boonies, you know. Have you got any credentials on you?”

“What?”

“Can you prove it?”

“I’ve already shown my credentials to your Countess, but given that you’ve got a corpse here—an impossible corpse—do I really need to prove it? I’m Daoine Sidhe, I’m a licensed PI, and I don’t exactly see you getting any better offers.”

“So you’re here to fix all our problems? Well, that’s just peachy, princess. What the fuck took you so long?”

“What do you mean?”