Iron Kissed (Mercy Thompson #3)(57)
Author: Patricia Briggs

He was trying to keep Tad out of it, I thought.

Uncle Mike flopped on the couch, closing his eyes, giving in to the exhaustion that he was obviously feeling – and giving Samuel the upper hand without a fight.

"I don’t think he planned the thefts to start with. We’ve talked to her friends. Connora chose him. He thought he was doing her a favor – she thought he deserved what she planned to do with him." He looked at me. "Our Connora could be kind, but she despised humans, especially anyone connected to the BFA. She played with him awhile before tiring of her game. The day before she died, she told one of her friends she was dropping him."

"So why did you need Mercy?" Samuel asked. "He was the obvious suspect."

Uncle Mike sighed. "We had just set our sights on him when the second victim turned up dead. It took a while before anyone would talk to us about her affair. For a fae to take up with a human is encouraged. Half-breeds are better than no children at all. But O’Donnell – all the guards really are the enemy. And a fae doesn’t consort with the enemy…especially when they are someone like O’Donnell."

"She was slumming," I said.

He considered it. "If one of your friends was consorting with a dog, would it be considered slumming?"

"So he thinks he’s doing her a favor and she tells him what she really thinks of him – and he kills her."

"That’s what we think. When the second victim was found – we thought it was unlikely that a human could have killed her so we didn’t look at O’Donnell again. It wasn’t until the third murder that we realized that the motive was theft. Connora had a few items, but no one thought to check if any were missing. She also must have had something else, something that allowed him to hide from our magic. Something much more powerful than anything someone like her should have had."

He looked at me and gave me a tired smile. "We are a secretive people, and even the risk of disobeying the Gray Lords’ orders is not worth giving up all of our secrets. If something you possess is too powerful, They will confiscate it. If They had known that she had something of power, she’d have been forced to give it to someone who could take care of it."

"So O’Donnell gets it instead." I closed the book and set it beside me.

"And the list she had compiled for the Gray Lords, of the items they wanted recorded." He spread his hands. "We aren’t sure that she had a copy in her house. One of her friends saw it, but Connora might have turned it over to the Gray Lords without keeping a copy."

That didn’t sound like the woman whose house I’d searched. A woman like that would have kept a copy of everything. She loved the storage of knowledge.

"So O’Donnell takes that list," I said. "After playing with whatever toys he stole from Connora, he decided he wanted more. He looks at the list and goes after the things he wants." My sample size was limited, but – "It seemed to me that he was killing the least powerful, Connora, to the most, the forest fae who was last killed. Is that right?"

"Yes. She might have told him or maybe she had the list organized that way. He didn’t get it quite right, by the way, but close enough. I suppose whatever items he stole allowed him to kill people he would otherwise never have been able to touch."

"Do you have any idea at all what things O’Donnell’s killer might have?" Samuel growled.

Uncle Mike sighed. "No. But he doesn’t either. The list said things like ‘one walking stick’ or ‘a silver bracelet, but it didn’t explain what they were. Mercy, the walking stick wasn’t in your car. The Fideal says that he didn’t touch it. I suspect it will show up again – it has been persistent in following you."

"It is the walking stick that would make all my ewes have twins, isn’t it?" I asked, though I was almost certain. The stories about the others had worried me enough to be grateful the stick was useless to me.

He laughed. It started from his belly and worked its way to his eyes, until they twinkled merrily. "You have some ewes you plan on breeding?"

"No, but I’d like to be able to travel more than five miles from home without finding myself on my own doorstep – or worse, be able to see all the faults in the people around me without any of the goodness." Not that any of that had been happening, but for all I knew, the stick had to be activated somehow in order to work.

"Not to worry," he said, still grinning. "If you decide to be a sheep farmer, all of your sheep would have healthy twins until the stick decided to roam again."

I let out a sigh of relief and turned back to what I needed to know. "When O’Donnell was killed, were you and Zee the only ones who knew he was the killer?"

"We hadn’t told anyone else."

"Were you the only ones who knew the murderer was stealing artifacts?" I caught a whiff of something magical and tried to keep my face from showing my sudden alertness.

"No. It wasn’t talked about, but as soon as we discovered that Connora’s list had been taken, we started asking around. Anyone would have made the obvious connection."

Beside me, Samuel nodded in happy agreement. Not that he should have objected to anything Uncle Mike said but…

"Quit that," I told Uncle Mike. I noticed that the tiredness I’d seen in him when he came was gone and he once more appeared to be a kindly man who made his living making people happy.

"What?"

I narrowed my gaze at him. "I don’t like you right now, and no fae magic is going to change that." Samuel jerked his head toward me. Maybe he hadn’t caught that Uncle Mike was using some kind of charisma magic – or maybe he smelled that I was lying. I did like Uncle Mike, but Uncle Mike didn’t need to know that. He’d be easier to pry information out of as long as I could keep him feeling guilty.

"My apologies, lass," he said, sounding as appalled as he looked. "I’m tired and it’s a reflex thing."

That might be true, it might be reflex, but he didn’t say he wasn’t doing it deliberately either.

"I’m tired, too," I said.

"All right," he said. "Let me tell you what we are going to do right now. It is agreed among us that the Fideal offered first offense. It is agreed among us that your death would cost the fae more than it would gain us – you can thank Samuel and Nemane for that."

He leaned forward. "So here is what we can offer you. As it seems important to you that Zee be proven innocent, we can work on that – so you don’t cause even greater problems for us. We are allowed to aid the police – except that we cannot tell them about the stolen things. They are powerful, some of them, and it is better if the mortals don’t have any idea that they might exist."