Rosemary and Rue

Her arms were straight at her sides, but her legs and hips were twisted—she was kicking right up until the end. Someone pinned her down while her throat was cut, then held on until she stopped struggling. That meant there were at least two killers, maybe more. I had to give her one thing: she hadn’t been taken by surprise. The look on her face was pure anger, almost hiding the underlying foundation of fear. She died kicking, yes, but she also died pissed off.

The blood wasn’t the worst part. Neither was the second mouth beneath her chin. That title went to her round-eared, blunt-featured face, framed by black hair shot with veins of gray and matted down with blood. The Evening Winterrose I knew had features that looked like the last, perfect work of a dying sculptor, ears that tapered to sharp points and eyes the impossible dark blue of midnight; she had hair that wavered between black and purple, with highlights of pink, orange, and blue, like an aurora. She was wild and terrible and strange, one of the Daoine Sidhe, the fairest of the fae, and she was never, ever human. What the night-haunts left would never be anything else. Death wouldn’t even let her keep her true face.

Something wasn’t right about the body. I leaned in for a better look at her wounds, already knowing that they wouldn’t tell me anything. Maybe there are foren sics experts that can look at a knife slash and tell you everything there is to know about whoever made it, but I’m not one of them. All I know is what I’ve learned through experience, and my experience was telling me that something was wrong.

There are two kinds of problems in my world: human and fae. Back when I was doing private investigation on a professional basis, most human problems could be solved with a camera and a well-placed microphone, and when a human problem looked like it was getting deadly, I gave it back to the humans. They can handle their own trash.

Fae problems are another matter, because my loyalty is to Sylvester, even now, and my actions reflect on him. I’m his knight, and that means that no matter how bad the fae problems get, I have to see them through. This was a fae problem. Whether I liked it or not, it needed a fae solution.

Some of the blood in the carpet was still wet enough that it was soaking through the knees of my jeans. I ran a finger across one of the deeper stains, forcing fresh blood to well up through the fiber.

My mother is Daoine Sidhe. That means I am, too, debased as I may be. There are ways of talking to the dead that are almost exclusively ours—or, if not talking to them, at least coming to a better understanding. Evening’s blood could let me taste her death. The body was gone, but the blood would remember. Blood always remembers.

I raised my finger to my lips.

Blood magic is dangerous, because it skips the brain and goes straight for the gut. When you’re talking about someone as weak as I am, you’re lucky if nobody winds up trying to fly off the top of a ten-story building. Out of all Titania’s descendants, only the Daoine Sidhe can measure another’s death by the taste of their blood; everyone else with that capacity descends from Maeve and the darker paths of Faerie. Evening was my fifth time. It doesn’t get any better with practice.

The world twisted until I was looking at the apartment through a red-tinted fog. The police and the body were gone; this was what the world looked like through Evening’s eyes just before the end. It was disorienting but not painful, like trying to walk after three beers. The knowledge that coming down from this would be worse than a hangover hovered on the edge of my awareness, but I pushed it away, forcing myself deeper into the red.

The room snapped into focus, clean, perfect, and unmarred by any signs of a struggle. A warm wave of satisfaction flowed over me. Everything was where it belonged.

Especially the key.