A Local Habitation

Finding the second generator from the door wasn’t hard: I inched along the wall until my thigh hit something sharp, stepped back, and then inched forward again until I hit something else. I wasn’t willing to move away from the wall; Peter was a dark blur at the center of the floor, and I didn’t want to step on him by mistake.

I was jumpier than I thought. I groped around until I found the panel with the switches; figuring out which one to flip was harder. The longer I stood there, the shakier I was getting, and Jan and Quentin were in the hall alone and unarmed. Time mattered. I settled for flipping the largest switch I could find, waiting thirty seconds and flipping it again. My heart thudded in my ears like a steel drum until the sound of the generator revving drowned it out. The engine coughed twice, turned over—and the lights came back on. I almost immediately wished that they hadn’t.

Peter was on his back, barely recognizable as the man we met when we arrived. Death had finally removed his human disguise. He was four feet tall, with delicate antennae and feathered gray hair, lying on a blanket made by his own gray-and-green wings. He’d been a Cornish Pixie, almost the only pixie breed large enough to interact with the bulk of Faerie as an equal.

Well, he wasn’t going to be doing anything as an equal anymore: he wasn’t going to be arguing about whether Klingon was a language, or confusing visiting changelings by wearing a human disguise when everyone else had shed theirs. It was starting to look like the ALH retirement plan was “get found dead in the back room.” Punctures broke his skin at the wrists and throat, dispelling the illusion that he was only sleeping. He was never going to wake up.

I knelt, touching his throat, and winced as I felt the lingering warmth of his skin. Blood and a thin film of dust covered my fingers: pixie-sweat. That gave me a time of death. Pixies stop “dusting” when they die, and the glittery traces they leave behind dissolve quickly. He couldn’t have been dead when the lights went out, or the pixie-sweat would have already faded.

The lights came back up too easily to have been sabotaged, but it made no sense for whoever had killed Peter to have also killed the power. The body would have gone undiscovered for hours, maybe even days, if we hadn’t needed to restart the generator. The killer could have had time to make a clean run of it . . . unless they knew that turning off the generators would lead us to the body, and were hoping to lead me—or maybe Jan—straight to Peter. This could have been a trap or a sick display. And, either way, someone wanted us to find the body.

Things were not looking up.

I pressed my fingers to my lips, sampling the blood. Pixie-sweat masked the normal copper taste in a veil of ashes and burnt sugar, cloying, but no more unpleasant than usual. I wasn’t hoping for much, and I wasn’t disappointed. There was nothing in the blood—no life, no memory, nothing. It was empty.

The room only had the one door, plus the small, heavy-glassed window: logically, no one could have left once I was inside. Unfortunately, we were in a faerie knowe, where logic didn’t always apply. I stood, backing out of the room and closing the door behind me. Peter could wait a while—the dead are patient. “Quentin?”

“Here,” he said.

Good. I hadn’t left them to be slaughtered. Pulling the door shut, I turned. “He’s dead.”

Quentin nodded. “Now what?”

“Now we start to work.” I turned toward Jan. “Is there any other way into this room?”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “Just the one door.”

“Could April have gone inside without using it?”

“Not while the power was out,” said Jan firmly.