Divine Misdemeanors (33 page)

I turned back to the seven-foot-tall man. “Enough,” I said, and I poked a finger into his chest, hard enough to move him a little. “Jeremy is my boss. He pays us most of the money that clothes and feeds all of us, including you, Barinthus.”

He looked down at me, and two feet is enough distance to make haughty work really well, but I’d had all I was taking from this ex-sea god.

“You aren’t bringing in any money. You don’t contribute a damned thing to the upkeep of the fey here in L.A., so before you go all high and mighty on us, I’d think about this. Jeremy is more valuable to me and to the rest of us than you are.”

That got through the haughtiness, and I saw uncertainty on his face. He hid it, but it was in there. “You didn’t say that you needed me to contribute in that way.”

“We may be getting Maeve Reed’s houses for free, but we can’t keep letting her feed the army of us. When she comes back from Europe she may want her house back, all her houses back. What then?”

He frowned.

“Yeah, that’s right. We are more than a hundred people, counting the Red Caps, and they’re camping out on her estate because the houses already won’t hold everyone. You don’t get it. We have what amounts to a faerie court, but we don’t have a royal treasury, or magic to clothe and feed us. We don’t have a faerie mound to house us all that will just grow bigger as we need it.”

“Your wild magic created a new piece of faerie inside the gates of Maeve’s land,” he said.

“Yes, and Taranis used that piece of faerie to kidnap me, so we can’t use it to house anyone until we can guarantee that our enemies can’t use it to attack us.”

“Rhys has a sithen now. More will come.”

“And until we know that our enemies can’t use that new piece of faerie to attack us, too, we can’t move many people in there.”

“It’s an apartment building, Barinthus, not a traditional sithen,” Rhys said.

“An apartment building?”

Rhys nodded. “It magically appeared on a street and moved two buildings so that it could appear in the middle of them, but it looks like a rundown apartment building. It’s definitely a sithen, but it’s like the old ones. I open a door one time and the next time there’s a different room behind the door. It’s wild magic, Barinthus. We can’t move people in there until I know what it does, and what plans it has.”

“It is that powerful?” he said.

Rhys nodded. “It feels it, yes.”

“More sithens will come,” Barinthus said.

“Maybe, but until they do, we need money. We need as many people as possible bringing in money. That includes you.”

“You didn’t tell me that you wanted me to take the bodyguarding jobs he offered.”

“Don’t call him ‘he’; his name is Jeremy. Jeremy Grey, and he’s been making a living out here among the humans for decades, and those skills are a hell of a lot more useful to me now than your ability to make the ocean come up and smash into a house. Which was childish, by the way.”

“The people in question don’t need bodyguards. They simply want me to stand around and be stared at.”

“No, they want you to stand around and be handsome and attract attention to them and their lives.”

“I am not a freak to be paraded for cameras.”

“No one remembers that story from the fifties, Barinthus,” Rhys said.

One reporter had called Barinthus the Fish Man because of the collapsible webbing between his fingers. That reporter had died in a boating accident. Eyewitnesses said that the water just came up and slapped the boat.

Barinthus turned away from us, his hands going into his coat pockets.
Doyle said, “Frost and I have both guarded humans who didn’t need guarding. We have stood and let them admire us and pay money for it.”

“You did one job and then you refused after that,” Frost said to Barinthus. “What happened to make you say no after that?”

“I told Merry it was beneath me to pretend to guard someone when I should be guarding her.”

“Did the client try to seduce you?” Frost asked.

Barinthus shook his head; his hair moved more than it should have, like the ocean on a windy day. “Seduction is not crude enough for what the woman did.”

“She touched you,” Frost said, and just the way he said it made me look at him.

“You say that like it’s happened to you, too.”

“They invite us to the parties to do more than guard them, Merry, you know that.”

“I know they want media attention but none of you told me that the clients had gotten that out of hand.”

“We’re supposed to be protecting you, Meredith,” Doyle said, “not the other way around.”

“Is that why you and Frost are back to guarding mostly just me?”

“See,” Barinthus said, “you’ve distanced yourself from it, too.”

“But we help Meredith with her investigations. We didn’t just stop doing the parties and then hide away by the sea,” Doyle said.

“Part of the problem is that you haven’t picked a partner,” Rhys said.

“I don’t know what you mean by that.”

“I work with Galen, and we watch each other’s backs, and make sure that the only hands that touch us are the ones we want touching each other. A partner isn’t just to watch your back in a battle, Barinthus.”

That arrogance that Frost hid behind was back on Barinthus’s face, but I realized that for him it wasn’t just a version of a blank face.

“Do you honestly believe that no one among the men is worthy to partner with you?” I asked.

He just looked at me, which was answer enough, I supposed. He looked at Doyle. “Once I would have been happy to work with Darkness.”

“But not now that I’ve partnered with Frost,” he said.

“You have chosen your friends.”

I wondered for a moment if Barinthus had a crush on Doyle, or did his words mean only what he said. The fact that I’d never realized he was more than my father’s friend had made me question a lot of things.

“It’s okay,” Rhys said. “You and I have never gotten along.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Old news. If you want to stay here, then you need to contribute in a real way, Barinthus. You’re going to start by explaining to Jeremy and the nice police wizards why that isn’t sidhe magic.” I gave as good eye contact as I could with a two-foot height difference. I guess with the three-inch heels it was a little less, but it was still a neck-craning moment. It’s always hard to look tough when you’re looking that far up at someone.

His hair flared out around him for all the world as if it were underwater, though I knew it would be dry to the touch. It was a new show of growing power, but I’d already noticed that it seemed to be an emotional reaction for him.

“Is that a no, or a yes?” I asked.

“I will try to explain,” he said at last.

“Fine, good, let’s get this done so we can go home.”

“Are you tired?” Frost asked.

“Yes.”

Barinthus said, “I am a fool. You may not look it yet, but you are with child. I should be taking care of you. Instead I am making things harder for you.”

I nodded. “That’s about what I was thinking.” I led the way back to the police and Jeremy. We all gathered around the wand again. Barinthus didn’t apologize, but he did explain.

“If it was truly sidhe workmanship it would not have the power flares. If I understand what electrical shorts are, then that’s accurate.
The flaring points mark weak spots in the magic, as if the person who enchanted it didn’t have enough power to make the magic smoothly. The flaring points are also as Wizard Wilson says, moments when the power grows stronger. I believe one of those power flares is what harmed the policeman who was originally hurt.”

“So if you had made it, or another sidhe, then the magical marks would be smooth and the power would be even,” Wilson said.

Barinthus nodded.

“Not to be rude,” Carmichael said, “but aren’t the sidhe less powerful than they once were magically?”

There was that uncomfortable moment when someone says something that everyone knows, but no one is supposed to talk about. It was Rhys who said, “That would be true.”

“Sorry, but if that’s true, then why couldn’t this be a sidhe with less control of his, or her, magic? Maybe it’s the best the wizard could do?”

Barinthus shook his head. “No.”

“Her logic is sound,” Doyle said.

“You see the symbols; you know what they are for, Darkness. We are forbidden such magic, and have been for centuries.”

“These symbols are old enough that I’m not familiar with all of them,” I said.

“The wand is designed to harvest magic,” Rhys said.

I frowned at him. “You mean to make your own magic grow more powerful?”

“Nope.”

I frowned harder.

“It’s designed to steal other people’s power,” Doyle said.

“But you can’t do that,” I said. “Not that we’re not allowed to do it, but it’s not possible to steal someone’s personal magic. It’s intrinsic to them, like their intelligence, or their personality.”

“Yes and no,” he said.

I was beginning to be tired, really tired. I hadn’t had any real pregnancy
symptoms, but suddenly I was tired, achingly so. “Can I have a chair?” I asked.

Wilson said, “I’m sorry, Merry, I mean, of course.” He went and got a chair.

“You look pale,” Carmichael said. She started to touch my face like you’d check a child for fever, then stopped herself in mid-motion.

Rhys did it for her. “You feel cool and clammy. That can’t be good.”

“I’m just tired.”

“We need to get Merry home,” Rhys said.

Frost knelt by me, with me sitting he was about eye level with me. He put his hand against my face. “Explain to them, Doyle, and then we can get her home.”

“This wand is designed to take magic from others. Merry is right, the magic cannot be stolen permanently from someone, but the wand is like a battery. It absorbs magic from different people and gives the wand’s owner more power, but she would have to feed the wand new power almost constantly. The spell is clever, and harkens back to the older days of our own magic, but it has the marks of something other than sidhe. Our magic, but not.”

“I know what it reminds me of,” Rhys said. “Humans. Humans who were my followers, but who could do some of our magic. They were good, but it never translated exactly.”

“The marks aren’t carved on the wood, or painted,” Carmichael said.

“If it was sidhe magic, then we could trace the symbols on the wood with our finger and our will, but for most humans they needed something more real. Like the fact that our followers saw the marks of power on us and thought they were tattoos, so they painted themselves with woad for protection in battle.”

“But that didn’t work,” Carmichael said.

“It worked when we had power,” Rhys said, “and then when we lost enough power it was worse than useless to the people whom we were
supposed to protect.” Rhys looked so unhappy. I had heard both him and Doyle tell stories of what had happened to their followers when they had lost so much power they could no longer protect them with magic.

“Is there a human who could trace those symbols?” I asked. Sitting down had helped.

“With nothing but will and word, I doubt it.”

“What else could he or she have used?” Carmichael asked.

“Body fluid,” Jeremy said.

We all looked at him. “Remember, I learned wizardry back when the sidhe were still in power. When the rest of us could find a piece of your enchantments, we copied it using body fluid.”

“There’s nothing visible on the wood. Most body fluids would leave something visible behind,” Carmichael said.

“Saliva wouldn’t,” Wilson said.

“Spit works,” Jeremy said. “People always talk about blood or semen, but spit is good, and it’s just as much a part of a person.”

“We haven’t swabbed the wood directly because we weren’t sure how the spells would react to it,” Wilson said.

“Whoever made it has left you DNA,” I said. I was feeling much better. I stood up, and threw up all over the forensic lab floor.

ONCE I THREW UP I WAS FINE. I WAS APOLOGETIC ABOUT THROWING
up in the lab, but luckily the floor wasn’t actual evidence. Carmichael gave me a breath mint and we left. Rhys drove us home, and made arrangements to pick up the other car tomorrow. I was the only other person who could drive, and none of the men seemed to want me to do that. I guess I couldn’t blame them.

I leaned back in the passenger seat and said, “I thought I was supposed to get morning sickness, not evening sickness.”

“It differs from woman to woman,” Doyle said from the backseat.

“You knew someone who got evening sickness?” I asked.

“Yes” was all he said.

I turned in the seat and he was Darkness in the dark car, but the streetlights shone as Rhys drove. Frost was beside him, helping make the contrast even greater. Barinthus was on the far side and managed to make it clear that he didn’t want to be that near Frost.

“Who was she?” I asked.

“My wife,” he said, and looked out the window, not at me.

“You were married?”

“Yes.”

“And you had a child?”

“Yes.”

“What happened to them?”

“They died.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. I had learned that Doyle had been married, had had a child, and had lost them both, and I hadn’t known any of that minutes before. I turned around in the seat and let the silence fill the car.

“Does it bother you?” Doyle asked quietly.

“I think so, but … How many of you have had wives and children before this?”

“All of us except for Frost, I think,” Rhys said.

“I had both,” Frost said.

“Rose,” I said.

He nodded. “Yes.”

“I didn’t know you had a child with her, though. What happened?”

“She died.”

“They all died,” Doyle said.

Barinthus spoke from the dimness of the backseat. “There are moments, Meredith, when being immortal and ageless is not a blessing.”

I thought about that. “As far as we know, I’m aging just a little less than humanly normal. I’m not immortal or ageless.”

“You were not immortal as a child,” Barinthus said, “but then you didn’t have hands of power as a child.”