Iron Kissed (Mercy Thompson #3)(7)
Author: Patricia Briggs

If this house held secrets like the last one, I wasn’t able to trigger them.

When I came out of the front door, the last of the daylight was nearly gone. Zee waited on the porch with his eyes closed, his face turned slightly to the last, fading light. I had to yip to get his attention.

"Finished?" he asked in a voice that was a little darker, a little more other than usual. "Since Connora’s was the first murder, why don’t we hit the murder scenes in order from here on out?" he suggested.

The scene of the second murder didn’t smell of death at all. If someone had died here, it had been so well cleaned that I couldn’t smell it – or the fae who had lived here was so far from humanity that his death didn’t leave any of the familiar scent markers.

There were, however, a number of visitors shared between this house and the first two and a few I’d found only in the first and third house. I kept them on the suspect list because I hadn’t been able to get a good scent in Connora the librarian’s kitchen. Also, since this house was so clean, I couldn’t entirely eliminate anyone who had been only in the first house. It would be handy to be able to keep track of where I’d scented whom, but I’d never figured out any way to record a scent with pen and paper. I’d just have to do the best I could.

The fourth house Zee took me to looked no more remarkable than any of the others had appeared. A beige house trimmed unimaginatively in white with nothing but dead and dying grass in the yard.

"This one hasn’t been cleaned," he said sourly as he opened the door. "Once we had a third victim, the focus of effort changed from concealing the crime from the humans to figuring out who the murderer is."

He wasn’t kidding when he said it hadn’t been cleaned. I hopped over old newspapers and scattered clothing that had been left lying in the entryway.

This fae had not been killed in the living room or kitchen. Or in the master bedroom where a family of mice had taken up residence. They scurried away as I stepped inside.

The master bathroom, for no reason I could see, smelled like the ocean rather than mouse like the rest of this corner of the house. Impulsively, I closed my eyes, as I had in the first house, and concentrated on what my other senses had to tell me.

I heard it first, the sound of surf and wind. Then a chill breeze stirred my fur. I took two steps forward and the cool tile softened into sand. When I opened my eyes, I stood at the top of a sandy dune at the edge of a sea.

Sand blew in the wind, stinging my nose and eyes and catching in my fur as I stared dumbfounded at the water while my skin hummed with the magic of the place. It was sunset here, too, and the light turned the sea a thousand shades of orange, red, and pink.

I slipped down through the sharp-edged salt grass until I stood on the hard-packed beach. Still I could see no end of the water whose waves swelled and gentled to wash up on shore. I watched the waves for long enough to allow the tide to come in and touch my toes.

The icy water reminded me that I was here to work, and as beautiful and impossible as this was, I was unlikely to find the murderer here. I could smell nothing but sea and sand. I turned to leave the way I’d come before true night fell, but behind me all I could see were endless sand dunes with gentle hills rising behind them.

Either the wind in the sand had erased my paw prints while I’d been watching – or else they had never been there at all. I couldn’t even be sure which hill I’d come down.

I froze where I stood, somehow convinced that if I moved so much as a step from where I was, I’d never find my way back. The peaceful spell of the ocean was entirely dispelled, and the landscape, still beautiful, held shadows and menace.

Slowly I sat down, shivering in the breeze. All I could do was hope that Zee found me, or that this landscape would fade away as quickly as it had come. To that end I lowered myself until my belly was on the sand with the ocean to my back.

I put my chin on my paws, closed my eyes, and thought bathroom and how it ought to smell of mouse, trying to ignore the salt-sea and the wind that ruffled my fur. But it didn’t go away.

"Well, now," said a male voice, "what have we here? I’ve never heard of a coyote blundering Underhill."

I opened my eyes and spun around, crouching in preparation to run or attack as seemed appropriate. About ten feet away, between me and the ocean, a man watched me. At least he looked mostly like a man. His voice had sounded so normal, sort of Harvard professorial, that it took me a moment to realize just how far from normal this man was.

His eyes were greener than the Lincoln green that Uncle Mike had his waitstaff wear, so green that not even the growing gloom of night dimmed their color. Long pale hair, damp with saltwater and tangled with bits of sea plants, reached the back of his knees. He was stark naked, and comfortable with it.

I could see no weapons. There was no aggression in his posture or voice, but my instincts were screaming. I lowered my head, keeping eye contact, and managed not to growl.

Staying in coyote form seemed the safest thing. He might think me simply a coyote…who had wandered into the bathroom of a dead fae and from there to wherever here was. Not likely, I had to admit. Maybe there were other paths to get here. I’d seen no hint of another living thing, but maybe he’d believe I was exactly what I looked like.

We stared at each other for a long time, neither of us moving. His skin was several shades paler than his hair. I could see the bluish cast of veins just below his skin.

His nostrils fluttered as he drew in my scent, but I knew I smelled like a coyote.

Why hadn’t Zee used him? Obviously this fae used his nose, and he didn’t seem powerless to me.

Maybe it was because they thought he might be the murderer.

I shuffled through folklore as he watched me, trying to think of all the human-seeming fae who dwelt in or about the sea. There were a lot of them, but only a few I knew much about.

Selkies were the only ones I could remember that were even neutral. I didn’t think he was a selkie – mostly because I couldn’t be that lucky – and he didn’t smell like something that would turn into a mammal. He smelled cold and fishlike. There were kinder things in lakes and lochs, but the sea spawns mostly horror stories, not gentle brownies who keep houses clean.

"You smell like a coyote," he said finally. "You look like a coyote. But no coyote ever wandered Underhill to the Sea King’s Realm. What are you?"

"Gnadiger Herr," said Zee cautiously from somewhere just behind me. "This one is working for us and got lost."

Sometimes I loved that old man as much as I loved anyone, but I’d never been so happy to hear his voice.

The sea fae didn’t move except to raise his eyes until I was pretty sure he was looking Zee in the face. I didn’t want to look away, but I took a step back until my hip hit Zee’s leg to reassure myself that he wasn’t just a figment of my imagination.