Iron Kissed (Mercy Thompson #3)(8)
Author: Patricia Briggs

"She is not fae," said the fae.

"Neither is she human." There was something in Zee’s voice that was awfully close to deference, and I knew I’d been right to be afraid.

The stranger abruptly strode forward and dropped to one knee in front of me. He grabbed my muzzle without so much as a by-your-leave and ran his free hand over my eyes and ears. His icy hands weren’t ungentle, but even so, without Zee’s nudge I might have objected. He dropped my head abruptly and stood again.

"She wears no elf-salve, nor does she stink of the drugs that occasionally drop a lost one here to wander and die. Last I knew, rare though it is, your magic was not such as could do this. So how did she get here?"

As he spoke, I realized that it wasn’t Harvard I heard in his voice, but Merrie Old England.

"I don’t know, mein Herr. I suspect that she doesn’t know either. You of all people know that the Underhill is fickle and lonely. If my friend broke the glamour that hides the entrances, it would never keep her out."

The sea creature grew very still – and the waves of the ocean subsided like a cat gathering itself to pounce. The wisps of clouds in the sky darkened.

"And how," he said very quietly, "would she break our glamour?"

"I brought her to help us discover a murderer because she has a very good nose," Zee said. "If glamour has a weakness, it is scent. Once she broke that part of the illusion, the rest followed. She is not powerful or a threat."

The ocean struck without warning. A giant wave slapped me, robbing me of my footing and my sight. In one bare instant it stole the heat of my body so I don’t think I could have breathed even if my nose wasn’t buried in water.

A strong hand grabbed my tail and yanked hard. It hurt, but I didn’t protest because the water was retreating, and without that grip, it would have carried me out with it. As soon as the water had subsided to my knees, Zee released his hold.

Like me, he was drenched, though he wasn’t shivering. I coughed to get out the saltwater I’d swallowed, shook my fur off, then looked around, but the sea fae was gone.

Zee touched my back. "I’ll have to carry you to take you back." He didn’t wait for a response, just picked me up. There was a nauseating moment when all my senses swam around me, and then he set me down on the tile of the bathroom floor. The room was dark as pitch.

Zee turned on the light, which looked yellow and artificial after the colors of the sunset.

"Can you continue?" he asked me.

I looked at him, but he gave his head a sharp shake. He didn’t want to talk about what happened. It irked me, but I’d read enough fairy tales to know that sometimes talking about the fae too directly lets them listen in. When I got him out of the reservation, I would get answers if I had to sit on him.

Until then, I put my curiosity aside to consider his question. I sneezed twice to clear my nose and then put it down on the floor to collect more people from this house.

This time Zee came with me, staying back so as not to interfere, but close on my heels. He didn’t say anything more and I ignored him as I struggled for an explanation of what had just happened to me. Was this house real? Zee told the other fae that I had broken the glamour – wouldn’t that mean that it was the other landscape that was real? But that would mean that there was an entire ocean here, which seemed really unlikely – though I could still smell it if I tried. I knew that Underhill was the fairy realm, but the stories about it were pretty vague where they weren’t outright contradictory.

The sun had truly set and Zee turned on lights as we went. Though I could see fine in the dark, I was grateful for the light. My heart was still certain that we were going to be eaten, and it pounded away at twice its usual speed.

Death’s unlovely perfume drew my attention to a closed door. If I’d been on my own, I could have opened the door easily enough, but I believe in making use of others. I whined (coyotes can’t bark, not like a dog) and Zee obediently opened the door and revealed the stairs going down into a basement. It was the first of the houses that had had a basement – unless they’d been hidden somehow.

I bounded down the stairs. Zee turned on the lights and followed me down. Most of the basement looked like basements look: junk stored without rhyme or reason, unfinished walls and cement floor. I padded across the floor, following death to a door, shut tight. Zee opened that one without me asking and I found, at last, the place where the fae who had lived here was murdered.

Unlike the rest of the house, this room had been immaculate before the resident had been murdered. Underneath the rust-colored stains of the fae’s blood, the tile floor gleamed. Cracked leather-bound tomes with the authentic lumpiness of pre – printing press books sat intermingled with battered paperbacks and college math and biology texts in bookcases that lined the walls.

This room was the bloodiest I’d seen so far – and given the first murder, that was saying something. Even dried and old, the blood was overwhelming. It had pooled, stained, and sprayed as the fae had fought with his attacker. The lower shelves of three bookcases were dotted with it. Tables had been knocked over and a lamp was broken on the floor.

Maybe I wouldn’t have realized it if I hadn’t just been thinking about them, but the fae here had been a selkie. I had never met one before that I knew, but I’d been to zoos and I knew what seals smelled like.

I didn’t want to walk into the room. I wasn’t usually squeamish, but lately I’d been walking in enough blood. Where the blood had pooled – in the grout between tiles, on a book lying open, and against the base of one of the bookcases where the floor wasn’t quite level – it had rotted instead of dried. The room smelled of blood, seal, and decaying fish.

I avoided the worst of the mess where I could and tried not to think too much about what I couldn’t avoid. Gradually what my nose told me distracted me from the unpleasantness of my task. I quartered the room, while Zee waited just outside it.

As I started for the door, I caught something. Most of the blood here belonged to the fae, but on the floor, just in front of the door, were a few drops of blood that did not.

If Zee had been a police officer, I’d have shifted then and there to tell him what I’d found. But if I pointed my finger toward a suspect, I was pretty sure I knew what would happen to the person I pointed it at.

Werewolves dealt with their criminals the same way. I don’t have any quarrel with killing murderers, but if I’m the one doing the accusing, I’d like to be absolutely certain, given the consequences. And the person I’d be accusing was an unlikely choice for killing this many fae.

Zee followed me up the stairs, turning off lights and closing doors as we went. I didn’t bother looking further. There had only been two scents in the basement room besides Uncle Mike’s. Either the selkie didn’t bring guests into his library, or he had cleaned since the last time. Most damning of all was the blood.