A Kiss of Shadows (5 page)

Roane raised the dress until I could slip my arms through the sleeves, then he raised it over my shoulders, moving around me until he was at my back and could pull the last of the silk into place. He began to zip the dress up in back. The dress tightened as it zipped, like it was slowly constricting across my waist, my ribs, over the breasts. The neckline was a very daring V, which was another reason for the uplift bra. It was the only one I'd found that you could wear under the dress and not flash the bra. The dress was sleeveless and fit like a shiny second skin, leaving my flesh very white against the dark fabric. I'd chosen the tightness very deliberately. The bodice looked like it was barely there and all it left was a view of my breasts, but if you tried to slide your hand into the top, you couldn't do it without risking ripping the dress. If Alistair Norton wanted to play with my breasts, he'd have to keep his play to the exposed tops, unless we were planning a rape scenario, and according to Naomi the rape fantasies had only come out at two months or more. The first month had been a perfect affair. Since this was the first date, Alistair would probably be on his best behavior. I'd have to take the dress off for him to have a chance at finding the mike, and I wasn't planning on taking the dress off.

Roane finished zipping me, fastening the small hook at the top. He traced his thumbs over the bare skin of my upper back, the barest of movements, then stepped away from me. He actually ran his thumbs over the scars on my back that he could neither see nor feel. I was confident enough in my abilities that the dress would have shown the scars, except for my glamour. They were like ripples in the skin, frozen forever. Another sidhe had tried to change my shape during a duel. Many of the fey can shape-shift, but only the sidhe can change the form of others against their will. I can't change my shape or anyone else's, another mark against me in the courts.

“How do you do that?” Detective Tate asked.

The question startled me, made me turn to her. “Do what?” I asked.

Chris was glancing up as he repacked equipment. Maury was already fiddling with a medium-sized transmitter, working at it with a tiny screwdriver. The rest of us might as well not have been in the room.

“You stand there for nearly an hour in nothing but your underwear with a man fondling your breasts, but it's not sexual. It's like an R-rated comedy routine. Then Roane helps you on with your dress, never touches your bare skin, just zips you up, and suddenly the sexual tension in the room is thick enough to walk on. How the hell do you do that?”

“Us, as in Roane and me, or us, as in . . .” I let the thought trail off.

“Us as in the fey,” she said. “I've seen Jeremy do it with a human woman. You guys can walk around buck naked and make me comfortable being in the same room with you, then fully clothed you do something small and suddenly I feel like I should leave the room.” She shook her head. “How do you do that?”

Roane and I looked at each other, and I saw the same question in his eyes that I knew was in mine. How do you explain what it is to be fey to someone who is not? The answer, of course, is you don't. You can try, but you rarely succeed.

Jeremy tried. He was, after all, the boss. “It is part of what it means to be fey, to be a creature of the senses.” He rose from his chair and walked to her, face, body neutral. He took her hand and raised it to his lips, laying a chaste touch of lips to her knuckles. “Being fey is the difference between that and this.” He took the same hand again and raised it much slower, eyes on her face filled with that polite heat that any fey male might have given to the tall, attractive woman. The look alone made her shiver. He kissed her hand this time, a slow caress of lips, the upper lip catching just a little on her skin, as he drew back from her. It had been polite, no open mouth, no tongue, nothing rude, but color had spread up her cheeks, and from across the room I could tell her breathing had deepened, pulse quickening.

“Does that answer your question, Detective?” he asked.

She gave a shaky laugh, holding her hand with the other hand, cradling it against her body. “No, but I'm afraid to ask again. I don't think I could handle the answer and still work tonight.”

Jeremy gave a little bow. Whether Tate knew it or not, she'd just given a very fey compliment. Everyone likes to be appreciated. “You warm the cockles of this old man's heart.”

She laughed then, high and delighted. “You may be a lot of things, Jeremy, but you'll never be old.”

He gave another bow, and I realized something I hadn't before. Jeremy liked Detective Tate, liked her the way a man likes a woman. We all touch humans more than they touch each other, or at least more than most American humans touch each other. But he could have chosen other ways to “explain” to Tate. He'd chosen to touch her in a way he'd never touched her before, taken a liberty with her, because she'd given him the excuse to do it without seeming forward. That was how the fey flirted when invited. Sometimes it was just a glance, but the fey do not go where they are not asked. Though our men will make the same mistake that human males make sometimes, mistaking a little flirting for sexual advance, outright rape is almost unknown among us. Our version of date rape on the other hand has been popular for centuries.

Funny how the thought of date rape brought me back to the job at hand. I went to the desk where I'd left my shoes and slipped into them, gaining three inches of height. “You can tell your new partner that he can come back in now,” I told Lucy.

It was an insult to insist on modesty in a nonsexual situation among most of the fey, certainly among the sidhe. That's why the audience. To send them away would imply lack of trust, or outward dislike. There were only two exceptions. The first was if the person couldn't behave in a civilized manner. Detective John Wilkes had never worked with nonhumans before. He didn't blink when Maury asked me to disrobe, but when I took the dress off without warning or clearing the room, the detective had spilled hot coffee down his shirt. When Maury plunged his hand down my bra, Wilkes had said, “What the hell is he doing?” I asked him to wait outside.

Lucy gave a low laugh. “Poor boy, I think he got second-degree coffee burns when you took off your dress.”

I shrugged. “He must not see a lot of naked women.”

She smiled, shaking her head. “I've dealt with fey, even a few visiting sidhe, and you're the only one I've met that was humble.”

I frowned at her. “I'm not humble. I just think that if seeing me strip to my underwear is enough to make your partner nearly swallow his tongue, he must not be very experienced.”

Lucy looked at Roane and Jeremy. “Does she not know what she looks like?”

“No,” Roane said.

“I think, though I don't know, that our Merry was raised somewhere where she was considered the ugly duckling,” Jeremy said.

I met his eyes, my pulse thudding in my neck. That one comment was a little too close for comfort. “I don't know what you guys are talking about.”

“I know you don't,” Jeremy said. There was a knowledge in his dark grey eyes, a guess that was close to a certainty. In that moment, I knew he suspected who I was, what I was. But he would never ask. He would wait until I was ready to talk, or the question would remain forever silent between us.

I looked at Roane. He was the only fey lover I'd
known
had not come to my bed to further his political ambitions. To him I was just Merry Gentry, a human with fey ancestry, not Princess Meredith NicEssus. Now I stared into that familiar face and tried to read his expression. He was smilingly blank. Either it had never occurred to him that I might be the missing sidhe princess, or he'd guessed long ago, but would never be rude enough to bring it up. Or had Roane known from the first? Had that been why he'd come to me? Suddenly, all the security that I'd built up with these people, my friends, began to crumble around me.

Some of it must have shown on my face because Roane touched me. I drew back from him. His face showed the hurt, confusion. He didn't know. I hugged him suddenly, hiding my face from him, but I could still see Jeremy.

As the look on Roane's face had reassured me, so the look on Jeremy's frightened me. All it would take was my true name being mentioned after dark, and it would float back to my aunt. She was the Queen of Air and Darkness, and that meant that anything said in the dark was hers to hear, eventually. The fact that spotting the missing Elven American Princess had become more popular than spotting Elvis helped. Her magic was always chasing blind leads. Princess Meredith skiing in Utah. Princess Meredith dancing in Paris. Princess Meredith gambling in Vegas. After three years I was still a front-page story for the tabloids, though the latest headlines had been speculating that I was as dead as the King of Rock and Roll.

If Jeremy spoke my name aloud to my face, the words would resonate, and when they finally floated back to her, she'd know I was alive, and she'd know that Jeremy had spoken my name. Even if I ran, she'd question him, and if polite methods didn't work, she'd use torture. I am told she is a creative lover. I know she is an inventive torturer.

I drew back from Roane and gave them part of the truth. “My mother was the beautiful one.”

“How do you know that?” Jeremy asked.

I looked at him. “She told me so.”

“You mean your mother told you you weren't beautiful?” Lucy asked. It took a human to be that direct.

I nodded.

“Don't take this wrong, but what a bitch.”

To that there was only one thing to say—“I agree, now let's get out of here.”

“We wouldn't want to keep Mr. Norton waiting,” Jeremy said.

“I still wish we were going after him for proof on the attempted murder,” Lucy said.

“We can't guarantee proof that will stand up in court about the death spell,” I said.

“But,” Jeremy said, “we might be able to prove tonight that he is using magic to seduce women. Magically aided seduction is rape under California law. We need him in jail away from his wife, and this is the surest way to do it. He won't get bail on a felony charge that includes magic.”

Lucy nodded. “I agree that the plan is great for Mrs. Norton, but what about Merry? What if this guy pulls out the magical aphrodisiac that he's used on the other mistresses, the ones who just couldn't get enough of him like Naomi Phelps?”

“We're counting on it,” I said.

She looked at me. “What if it works? What if you start panting over the microphone?”

“Then Roane breaks down the door playing the jealous lover and drags me out.”

“If I have trouble getting her to leave, then Uther will come in as my friend and help me take my woman back home.”

Lucy rolled her eyes. “Well, what Uther wants, Uther gets.” Uther was thirteen feet tall, with a head that was more pig than human, and two curling tusks on either side of his snout. He was a jack-in-irons, but he was named Uther Squarefoot. He wasn't much good for undercover work, but he was hell on wheels when we needed muscle.

Uther had excused himself from the room when he realized the dress was coming off. He'd said only, “It's nothing personal, Merry, don't make more of it than there is, but seeing any attractive female nearly naked is not good for a man when there's no hope of relieving the thoughts that spring unbidden.” It wasn't until he made for the door, stooping his great shoulders low enough to squeeze out the doorway, that I realized something I should have known before. Uther is thirteen feet tall, the size of a large ogre or a very small giant, and there aren't many females his size in the Los Angeles area. He'd been here nearly ten years. That was a long time to be without the touch of another naked body. How terribly lonely.

If no one guessed who I really was, and if I didn't get bespelled out of my mind by Alistair Norton, I'd see about fixing Uther up with someone. Uther wasn't the only giant-sized fey wandering outside the courts, just the only one in the immediate area. If we couldn't find someone his size, we might be able to come up with other solutions. Sex doesn't have to mean intercourse. There are women on the streets that will do just about anything for a couple of hundred dollars, especially if twenty is their going rate. If I were truly fey down to my toes, I'd do Uther myself. That's what a real friend would do. But I was raised outside the court, out among the humans, from age six to sixteen. It meant that no matter how fey I was, some of my attitudes were human.

I can't be human because I'm not. But I can't be completely fey because I'm not that either. I am half Unseelie Court, but I am not one of them. I am part Seelie Court, but I do not belong among the shining throng. I am part dark sidhe, part light sidhe, and yet neither side wishes to claim me. I have always been on the outside looking in, my nose pressed to the window, but never welcomed inside. I understood isolation and loneliness. It made me hurt for Uther. Made me regret that I wasn't comfortable helping him with a little friendly, casual sex. But I wasn't, and I wouldn't. As usual, I was fey enough to see the problem, but too human to fix it. Of course, if I'd been pure Seelie sidhe, I wouldn't have touched Uther at any price. He would have been beneath my notice. The Seelie do not fuck monsters. Unseelie sidhe . . . well, define monster.

Uther wasn't a monster by Unseelie standards, but Alistair Norton might be. Either a monster, or a kindred spirit of the dark.

Chapter 5

 

ALISTAIR NORTON DIDN'T LOOK LIKE A MONSTER. I'D EXPECTED HIM TO
be handsome, but it was still disappointing. There is something in all of us that believes deep down that evil shows on the outside, that we should be able to pick out the bad people just by looking at them, but it just doesn't work that way. I'd spent enough time at both courts to know that beautiful and good were not the same. I, if anyone, knew that beauty was perfect camouflage for the darkest of hearts, and still I wanted Alistair Norton's face to show what he was inside. I wanted some visible mark of Cain on him. But he came smiling into the restaurant, tall, broad-shouldered, face full of clean angles, so masculine it was almost painful. His lips were a little thin for my taste, face a little too masculine, eyes a very ordinary brown. The hair that was tied back in a neat ponytail was an odd shade of brown, neither light nor dark. But I had to look for imperfections because there just weren't any.

His smile was quick and softened his face to something more approachable, less model-perfect. The laugh was deep and charming. His large hands wore a silver ring with a diamond as big as my thumb, but no wedding ring. There wasn't even a telltale pale line where the ring had been removed. His skin was dark enough that there should have been a tan line. He'd never worn a ring. I always felt that any man who didn't want to wear a wedding band was probably planning to cheat. There are always exceptions, but not many.

For his part, he seemed pleased. “Your eyes glow like green jewels.”

I'd left the brown contact lenses at the office. My natural eye color really did glow. I thanked him for the compliment, playing shy, looking into my drink. It wasn't shyness. I was trying to keep him from seeing the contempt in my eyes. Both human and sidhe culture abhor an adulterer. The sidhe don't worry about fornication, but once you get married, give your word that you will be faithful, then you must be faithful. No fey will tolerate an oath breaker. If your word is worthless, then so are you.

He touched my shoulder. “Such perfect white skin.” When I didn't chase him away, he leaned in and placed a soft kiss on my shoulder. I stroked his face as he drew back, and that seemed to be a signal of some kind. He kissed the side of my neck, hand touching my hair. “Your hair's like red silk,” he breathed against my skin. “Is it your natural color?”

I turned into him, answering him with my mouth just above his, “Yes.”

He kissed, and it was gentle, a good first kiss. I hated the fact that he seemed so sincere. What was truly horrible was that he might be sincere, that at the beginning of the seduction he might mean every word. I'd met men like that before. It's as if they believe their own lies, that this time it will be true love. But it never lasts because no woman is perfect enough for them. Of course, it isn't the women who aren't perfect enough. It's the man. He tries to fill some void in himself with women or sex. If the love is true enough, the sex good enough, then this time he'll feel complete. This time he'll finally be whole. Serial womanizers are like serial killers in one respect. They both believe that next time will be perfect, that the next experience will complete them and stop this unending need. But it never does.

He whispered, “Let's get out of here.”

I nodded, not trusting my voice. I'd be doing a lot of eyes-closed kissing because sometimes I could lie with my eyes, and sometimes I couldn't. It was going to be hard enough to keep the reluctance out of my body as he touched me. Expecting my eyes to show lust and love was asking too much.

His car matched the rest of him: expensive, sleek, fast. A black Jaguar with black leather seats so that it was like sliding into a pool of darkness. I put my seat belt on. He didn't. He drove fast, weaving in and out of traffic. It would have been more impressive if I hadn't been driving in L.A. for three years. Everyone drove like this out of sheer self-defense.

The house was neat and small, the smallest in the neighborhood, but it had the largest yard. There was actually enough land on either side that even a Midwesterner would say it had a good-sized yard. The house looked like a place for kids to wait for daddy to come home, while mom rushed around in her power suit trying to fix dinner after a hard day's work.

For a moment I wondered if he'd actually taken me to his home, the one he shared with Frances. If so, it was a break in his pattern, and I didn't like that. Why would he break his pattern? I knew he hadn't found the bug, and he hadn't touched my purse, which meant he didn't know about the hidden camera in it. I was saving turning it on until we got to his love nest. He couldn't know.

Ringo was posted outside the Norton house watching over Mrs. Norton. If Alistair got too violent before we could get him in jail, Ringo was on his own best judgment over whether to intercede. I didn't look around for Ringo. If he was here, I didn't want to draw attention to him.

Alistair opened the door for me, helping me out of the car. I let him because I was trying to think. I finally tried for honesty, sort of. “You sure you're not married?”

“Why do you ask?”

“This looks like a house for a family.”

He laughed and drew me into the circle of his arm. “No family, just me. I just moved in.”

I looked up at him. “Are you buying with an eye for the future? Munchkins and the family thing?”

He raised my hand to his lips. “With the right woman anything's possible.”

Lord and Lady, but he knew just how much carrot to dangle in front of most women. Imply that you could be the woman to tame him, make him settle down. Most women love that. I knew better. Men don't settle down because of the right woman. They settle down because they are finally ready for it. Whatever woman they're dating when they get ready is the one they settle down with, not necessarily the best one or the prettiest, just the one who happened to be on hand when the time got to be right. Unromantic, but still true.

He'd moved out of his apartment. Why? Did it have something to do with Naomi Phelps leaving him abruptly? Did it make him nervous enough to move? Or had he been planning the move all along? No way to know without asking, and I couldn't ask. As Alistair Norton ushered me through the door, I fought an urge to look back, to search for Jeremy and the rest. I knew my backup was out there. I knew because I trusted them. Alistair hadn't driven fast enough to lose both vehicles. The van for the sound system and to hide Uther, and the car with Jeremy at the wheel in case they needed more maneuverability to follow Norton, or just to switch off so that he wouldn't notice the same car behind him for too long. They were out there, listening to us. I knew that, but still I would have liked to have glanced back and seen them. Just sheer insecurity on my part.

I felt the warding before the door opened. When I stepped over the threshold, power shivered over my skin. He noticed. “Do you know what you're feeling?”

I could have lied, but I didn't. I'd like to say it was a hunch that Alistair would be pleased that I was a trained mystic, but that wasn't it. I wanted him to know that I wasn't helpless. “You've got the door warded,” I said. The air in the room pressed against my skin, and it was as if I couldn't breathe deep enough, like there wasn't enough air. I stepped off the tiled entryway, hoping the atmosphere would get better. It didn't. If anything the atmosphere grew heavier, like wading into deeper water. Hot, close, skin-crawling water.

I'd known he was powerful by the spells he'd laid on his wife and his mistress. But the amount of power that filled that empty living room was more than human. The only way for a human witch to get that much power was to bargain with things not human. I hadn't counted on that. None of us had.

He was talking to me, but I hadn't heard. My mind was screaming, “Leave! Leave now!” But if I did that, Alistair was still free to kill his wife and torture other women. Me leaving would keep me safe, but it wouldn't help our clients. It was one of those moments when I had to decide, was I going to earn my paycheck or not.

One thing I did know. The guys in the van needed to know what I'd found out. “The ward isn't to keep things out, is it, Alistair? Though it will keep out other powers. The ward is to keep anyone else from sensing how much power you've got in here.” My voice sounded breathy as if I was having trouble breathing.

He looked at me then, and for the first time I saw something in his eyes that wasn't pleasant or smiling. For an instant the monster was there in those brown eyes. “I should have known you'd sense it,” he said. “My little Merry, with her sidhe eyes, hair, and skin. If you were tall and willowy, you'd pass for sidhe.”

“So I've been told,” I said.

He held his hand out to me. I reached for his hand, but I had to reach through the power in the room, like pushing my hand through an invisible, skin-tingling thickness. His fingers touched mine, and a jolt of energy like static jumped between us. He laughed and wrapped his hand around mine. I forced myself not to pull back, but I couldn't make myself smile. I was having too much trouble breathing through the power. I'd lived in places so full of power, the walls groaned with it, but this power had been allowed to fill the space available like water until there was no air space left. Alistair probably thought he was a big, powerful witch to be able to call this much power, but he was a baby witch if he couldn't control it better than this. A lot of people can call power. Calling is not the measure of your strength as a practitioner. It's what you can do with the power that counts. Though as he pulled me, gently, through the brush of the hovering energy, I did wonder what he was doing with all this magic. He might be wasting a lot of it just letting it swirl around, but you don't get this much energy without having some idea of what you're doing and some plan of what to do with it.

My voice sounded strange even to me, strained, and breathy. “The living room is full of magic, Alistair. What are you going to do with all of it?” I hoped everyone in the van was getting this.

“Let me show you,” he said. We were at the closed door in the left-hand wall.

“What's behind the door?” I asked. It was the only door visible from the entrance. There was an open hallway that led from the rear of the living room farther into the house, and an open entranceway into the kitchen. It was the only closed door, and if the guys had to come save me, I didn't want them wandering around. I wanted them to come straight in and get me out.

“Let's not pretend, Merry. We know why you're here, why we're both here. It's the bedroom.” He opened the door, and it was the bedroom. It was red from the four-poster bed to the drapery that covered every wall to the carpet. It was like standing inside a crimson velvet box. Mirrors were set between the heavy drapes like jewels set to charm the eye. There were no windows. It was a closed box and the center of the magic that had been called to this place.

The power rolled over me like suffocating fur, warm, close, choking. I couldn't breathe, couldn't speak. My feet stopped working, but Alistair didn't seem to notice. He kept leading me, pulling me into the room, so that I stumbled, and the only thing that kept me from falling to the polished wood of the floor was his arms. He tried to lift me in his arms, but I collapsed the rest of the way to the floor so that he couldn't lift me up. I wasn't fainting. I just didn't want to be picked up because I knew where he'd take me: to the bed. And if that was the center of all this power, I didn't want to go there, not yet.

“Wait,” I said, “wait. Give a girl a second to catch her breath.” There was a small chest of drawers about waist high just inside the door. I used the edge of the chest of drawers to get to my feet, though Alistair was there to help, very solicitous. I set my purse on the edge of the chest, squeezing the handle twice to turn on the hidden camera. If the camera was on, it had a near perfect view of the bed.

He came up behind me, arms wrapping around me from behind, managing to pin my arms to my sides, but not hard. He meant it to be a hug. The fact that it panicked me wasn't his fault, not really. I tried to relax against his body, in the circle of his arms, but couldn't. The power was too thick, and I couldn't relax. The best I could do was not to pull away.

He nuzzled the side of my face, lips moving down my skin. “You're not wearing any base.”

“I don't need any.” I turned my head just enough to encourage him to continue kissing down my face to my neck. It was all the invitation he needed to work his way lower. His lips stopped at my shoulder, but his hands slid from my arms to encircle my waist. “God, you're a tiny thing. I can reach around you with my hands.”

I moved gently away from him toward the bed. My senses were dulling to the magic. I'd had years of practice at ignoring amazing amounts of power. If you're sensitive to such things and you don't want to go mad, you adapt. Magic can become like white noise, like the sounds of the city itself, only coming to your attention when you concentrate.