Divine Misdemeanors (Merry Gentry #8)(54)

I lay there covered in silver hair cradled between the warmth of Frost and Royal and watched over by my Darkness. It was a good way to wake up, and I was glad I hadn’t vision-traveled to the desert again. The news was already traveling about a mysterious black Humvee that was showing up and helping our troops. The media were speculating that it was a new special forces Hummer that was impervious to bullets and bigger things. The black coach was doing what I’d asked it to do. Maybe that’s why I didn’t have to rescue anyone else personally.
I wrapped the happy waking around me like a comforting blanket on a cold night even though the early California morning wasn’t actually cold, but rather chilly at best. But what Lucy wanted me to come see so bright and early made me feel cold down to my bones.
It was a small rose garden in the back of an older home. The rose bushes were all hybrid teas and were planted in a perfect circle, with only one small archway leading into it, a bench to one side for sitting and admiring, and a small musical fountain in the very center of it. I would have been happy to sit on the bench and listen to the water’s song, letting the scent of roses wash over me, except that under the perfume of roses were other smells, ones that I hadn’t wanted to smell again. The smell of roses would still remind me of the blessings of the Goddess, but this memory would pair it with blood and the smell of fear as the dead had given up their last moments of life, so that there was about the rose-scented morning a hint of charnel and outhouse.Lucy said, “If they were human sized it would be a massacre, but they’re so tiny that even twenty of them doesn’t seem as real.”
I wasn’t sure I agreed, but I let her statement stand. But if the bodies had been bigger the killers wouldn’t have been able to hang them between the roses like some macabre clothesline. The dead demi-fey hadn’t even begun to change color yet. They were all pale and perfect like little dolls, except that what child would tie their dolls up by their wrists and string them up between rosebushes so that the bound bodies formed a circle with the roses? But the killers had left the archway open so that people could walk back and forth without stooping. There was a demi-fey male hanging from the archway’s top like some gruesome ornament. Their throats were pale and whole, untouched.
“There’s not as much blood. How did they die?” I asked.
“Look at their chests,” she said.
I started to say that I didn’t want to, but I squared my shoulders and bent closer to one of the female victims. She had a cloud of pale blond hair like spun sunshine. Her tiny eyes were a blue as bright as the sky above us, but beginning to cloud a little. I forced myself to look at the gauzy purple dress she was wearing and there was a pin through her chest. It was one of those long slender pins like you’d use for pinning a butterfly to a mount as you waited for it to die and for rigor mortis to give you the fanned wings and perfect display you wanted.
I stepped back from the body and looked at the double row of hanging victims. They were dressed like the first demi-fey victims in the gauzy dresses or kilts, depending on the sex of the fey in question, but they were the children’s book versions of the gauzy clothes covering everything. I knew, from very recent experience, that the demi-fey were very grown-up, and most of them liked to show more skin. Standing here in the cool morning air seeing the lifeless bodies with their wings flared out behind their bodies it was hard not think about Royal and how he’d risen above me with his wings framing him. I wondered if any of these demi-fey had been able to grow bigger?
“We have some hints that one of the killers is a demi-fey, but how could another demi-fey do this to their own kind?” Lucy asked.
“Whoever it is hates being a demi-fey. The pin through the heart like they were really the butterflies they resemble and not people shows a real hatred, or disdain,” I said.
She nodded and handed me the plastic-wrapped illustration. It was a scene from Peter Pan where his shadow is hanging up. It was not exact, not even close. “This one’s different,” I said.
“It’s not a close copy,” Lucy said.
“It’s almost as if the killers wanted to do this murder, this way, and searched for an image that would justify it, but the murders came first in the plan, not the picture.” 
“Maybe,” she said.
I nodded. She was right; I was guessing. “If you don’t want my guesses then why am I here, Lucy?”
“You have somewhere better to be?” she asked, and there was an edge of hostility to it.
“I know you’re tired,” I said, “but you called me, remember?”
“I’m sorry, Merry, but the press is crucifying us, saying we aren’t working hard enough because the victims aren’t human.”
“I know that’s not true,” I said.
“You know it, but the fey community is scared. They want someone to blame, and if we can’t give them a killer then they’ll blame us. It didn’t help that we had to arrest Gilda on charges of magical malfeasance.”
“Bad timing,” I said.
She nodded. “The worst.”
“Did she give up the name of the person who made her wand?”
Lucy shook her head. “We offered to drop the charges if she’d give up the name but she seems to think that if we can’t find the manufacturer, we won’t be able to prove what the wand did.”
“It is hard to prove magic in a court. Your wizards will only be able to explain the magic on this one. Magic is easier to prove when you can demonstrate it for the jury.”
“Yeah, but there’s nothing to see when someone sucks some of your magic, or at least that’s what the wizards tell me,” Lucy said.
Rhys joined us in the circle. “Not the way I wanted to start the day,” he said.
“None of us wanted this,” Lucy snapped at him.
He held up his hands as if to say “ease up.” “Sorry, Detective, just making conversation.”
“Don’t just make conversation, Rhys, tell me something that will help catch this bastard.”
“Well, from Jordan we know it’s bastards, plural,” he said.
“Tell me something we don’t know,” she said.
“The elderly lady who lives here lets the demi-fey come and dance in her rose circle at least once a month. She sits in the garden and watches them.”
“I thought it was against the rules for them to let humans watch,” Lucy said.
“Apparently her husband was part fey so technically they counted as fey.”
“What kind of fey was he?” I asked.
“I’m not sure he was, but the woman believes it, and who am I to tell her that there’s a difference between being a little bit fey as in artistic or crazy and being descended from the fey?”
“Is she senile?” I asked.
“A touch, but not badly. She believes what her beloved husband told her, that he was the product of a fey lover whom his mother had for a brief time.”
“Why can’t it be true?” Lucy asked.
Rhys gave her a look. “I’ve just spent the last hour looking at pictures of him. If he was part fey it was way back in the family tree, nothing recent.”
“You can tell just by looking?” she asked.
He nodded.
“It leaves a mark,” I said.
“So it’s another circle where people would know the demi-fey came regularly.”
“Jordan said that there was something with wings at the murder scene, and the brownie who died had thought whatever was flying was beautiful.”
“A lot of pretty things fly,” Lucy said.
“Yes, but look at them. When they were alive they were beautiful.”
“You keep saying that maybe a demi-fey did this, but even if one of these guys hated themselves enough to do this, they couldn’t get twenty of them to hold still while they did all this.” She didn’t try to keep the disbelief out of her voice.“Don’t underestimate the demi-fey, Lucy. They have some of the most powerful glamour left to us, and they’re insanely strong for their size, more so than any other type of fey.”
“How strong?” she asked.
Rhys answered, “They could toss you around.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“It’s true,” he said.
“One of them could knock you on your ass,” I said.
“But could a pair of them do this?”
“I think they’d need at least one half of the pair to be regular size,” I said.
“And they could control this many demi-fey, control them enough to do this to them?” she asked.
I sighed, and then tried to breathe less deeply. “I don’t know. Honestly, Lucy, I don’t know anyone powerful enough to make this many fey of any kind allow themselves to be tied up and murdered like this, but if they were dead before the pins went in, dead by magic somehow, I know some fey powerful enough to kill this many at once.”
I leaned in and spoke quietly to Rhys. “Could a Fear Dearg do this?”
He shook his head. “They never had enough glamour to work the demi-fey like this. It’s one of the reasons they liked humans so much. It made them feel powerful.”
“Don’t whisper. Share with the class,” Lucy said.
I moved closer to her, just in case one of the many police in the garden overheard and made problems with her for failing to do another part of her job. “Have you found Bittersweet yet?”