A Caress of Twilight (Merry Gentry #2)(31)

He turned toward us and waved, smiling. His white trench coat billowed out around him like wings as he began to trudge his way back up the beach. He had had to take off his tan fedora to keep it from blowing into the sea.
"Rhys is creepy around murder scenes," Detective Lucy said. "He always has such a good time, like he's happy someone's dead."
I didn't know how to explain that Rhys had once been worshipped as a god of death, so death didn't bother him all that much. But that part was best not shared with the police. I said, "You know how much he loves film noir."
"This isn't a movie," she said.
"What's got you all upset, Lucy? I've seen you at worse murder scenes than this. Why are you so ... bothered?"
"You just wait. You won't need to ask once you've seen it."
"Can you just tell me, Lucy, please?"
Rhys came up to us, face all shiny like a kid on Yule morning. "Hi, Detective Tate. There's no burst blood vessels in the girl's eyes, no bruising anywhere that I could find. Does anyone know how she suffocated?"
"You looked at the body?" Her voice was cold.
He nodded, still smiling. "I thought that's what we were here to do."
She pointed a finger at his chest. "You weren't invited to this show. Merry was, and Jeremy was, and Teresa was, but you -- " She poked the finger into his chest, " -- were not."
The smile faded and left his tricolored blue eye cold. "Merry has to have two bodyguards with her at all times. You know that."
"Yeah, I know that." She poked again, hard enough that he was shoved backwards just a little. "But I don't like you around my murder scenes."
"I know the rules, Detective. I haven't messed with your evidence. I've stayed out of the way of everyone from the EMTs to the video photographer."
The wind gusted, blowing her dark hair across her face, so she was forced to take a hand out of her pocket to smooth it back. "Then stay out of my way, too, Rhys."
"Why, what did I do wrong?"
"You enjoy this." The last was almost spit in his face. "You're not supposed to enjoy it." She stalked back up the beach toward the stairs that led up to the road, the parking lot, and the club on its little promontory.
"Who licked her fur the wrong way?" he asked.
"She's creeped out by whatever's up the stairs, and she needs someone to take it out on. You're it."
"Why me?"
Frost had joined us. "Because she is human and humans mourn death. They don't enjoy poking at it like you do."
"That's a lie," Rhys said. "A lot of the detectives enjoy their work, and I know the medical examiner does."
"But they don't go around humming at the crime scene," I said.
"Sometimes they do," Rhys said.
I frowned at him, trying to figure out how to make it more clear. "Humans hum, or sing, or tell bad jokes over the bodies so they won't be scared. You hum because you're happy. This doesn't bother you."He glanced down at the dead woman. "She doesn't care anymore. She's dead. We could stage a Wagnerian opera on top of her and she wouldn't care."
I touched his arm. "Rhys, it's not the dead you should try to placate; it's the living."
He frowned at me.
"Be less happy in front of the humans when you are looking at their dead," Frost said.
"Very well, but I don't understand why I should pretend."
"Pretend that Detective Tate is Queen Andais," I said, "and it bothers her that you go around chortling over the dead."
I watched some thought slip over his face, then he shrugged. "I can seem less happy around the detective, but I still don't understand why."
I sighed, and looked at Frost. "Do you understand why?"
"If it were my kinswoman on the gurney, I would feel something for her death."
I turned back to Rhys. "See."
He shrugged. "I'll be sad around Detective Tate."
"Just somber will do, Rhys." I'd had this sudden image of him falling on the next corpse with weeping and wailing. "Don't overdo it."
He grinned at me, and I knew that he'd been thinking of exactly what I'd feared. "I mean it, Rhys. If you don't behave yourself, Tate could get you barred from crime scenes."
He suddenly looked somber; that mattered to him. "Okay, okay, I'll be good. Sheesh."
Detective Tate yelled back at us, her voice riding the wind like seagulls overhead. She was halfway up the stairs, and it was impressive that her voice carried back to us so clearly. "Hurry it up. We don't have all day here."
"Actually, we do," Rhys said.
I was already walking through the soft sand toward the stairs. I was very sorry that I'd worn high heels today, and I didn't protest when Frost offered me his arm. "Actually we do what?" I asked.
"We have all day. We have all eternity. The dead aren't going anywhere."
I glanced at him. He was watching the tall detective with a sort of faraway, almost dreamy look on his face. "You know what, Rhys?"
He looked at me, raising one eyebrow.
"Lucy's right. You're creepy at a murder scene."
He grinned again. "Not nearly as creepy as I could be."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
Rhys wouldn't answer. He just started walking ahead of us in his lower-heeled shoes. I looked up at Frost. "What did he mean by that?"
"Rhys was once called the Lord of Relics."
"And that means what?" I asked, nearly stumbling in the heels, holding tighter to his arm. 
"Relics is an old poetic word. It means corpse."
I stopped him with my hands on his arm and stared up at him. I tried to see his eyes through a tangle of his silver hair and my own red fluttering across my face. "When a sidhe is called a lord of anything, it means they have power over it. So you're saying what? That Rhys can cause death? I knew that."
"No, Meredith, I am saying that he could at one point raise the old dead, those that had grown stiff and cold, to rise and fight on our side in battle."
I just stared at him. "I didn't know Rhys had that kind of power."
"He no longer does. When the Nameless was created, Rhys lost the power to raise armies of the dead. We had no more use for armies among ourselves, and to fight the humans in such a way would have meant our expulsion from this country." Frost hesitated, then said, "Many of us lost our most otherworldly powers when the Nameless was cast. But I do not know of any who lost so much as Rhys."
I watched Rhys walking ahead of us, his white curls blowing in the wind to mingle with the white of his coat. He had gone from being a god who could raise armies at his will, to being... Rhys. "Is that why he won't tell me his real name, the name he was worshipped under?"
"When he lost his powers, he took the name Rhys and said that the other was dead along with his magic. Everyone, including the queen, has always respected that. It could so easily have been any one of us who gave the most of ourselves to the spell."
I balanced on one foot while I slipped off the heels. My stocking feet would do for the sand. "How did you get everyone to agree to the Nameless?"
"Those in power decreed death for any who opposed it."
I should have guessed. I transferred my shoes to one hand and slipped my other hand back on Frost's arm. "I mean, how did Andais get Taranis to agree?"
"That is a secret only the queen and Taranis know." He touched my hair, smoothing it back from my face. "Unlike Rhys, I do not like being around so much death and sadness. I look forward to tonight."
I turned my face and kissed his palm. "Me, too."
"Merry!" Lucy Tate screamed at me from the top of the steps. Rhys was almost even with her. Lucy walked out of sight, with Rhys almost but not quite chasing her. If you could call it chasing at a casual walk.
I tugged on Frost's arm. "We had better hurry."
"Yes," Frost said. "I do not trust Rhys's sense of humor alone with the detective."
We exchanged a glance on the windy beach, then we began to hurry toward the steps. I think we were both hoping to get there before Rhys did something cute and unfortunate. I, for one, didn't believe we'd make it in time.
Chapter 22
Some of the bodies were in body bags, plastic cocoons from which nothing would wake. But they'd run out of body bags and just started laying the uncovered bodies out. I could not count at a glance how many there were. More than fifty. Maybe a hundred, maybe more. I couldn't bring myself to start counting, to make them just things in a row, so I stopped trying to estimate. I tried to stop thinking at all.
I tried to pretend that I was back at court and this was one of the queen's "entertainments." You never dared show distaste, disgust, horror, or least of all fear at one of her little shows. If you did, she'd often make you join in on the fun. Her shows ran more to sex and torture than true death, and suffocation wasn't one of Andais's kinks, so this little disaster wouldn't have pleased her. She'd probably see it as a waste. So many people who could have admired her, so many people she could have terrorized.
I pretended that my life depended on keeping a blank face and feeling nothing. It was the only way I knew to walk among the bodies and not have hysterics. My life depended on not going into hysterics. I repeated it in my head like a mantra -- my life depends on not having hysterics; my life depends on not having hysterics -- and it kept me moving down the rows, kept me able to look down at all this horror and not scream.The bodies that weren't covered all had lips almost the same shade of blue as the girl on the beach, except this obviously wasn't lipstick. They'd all suffocated, but not instantly. They hadn't dropped magically and mercifully in their tracks. There were nail marks on some of the bodies where they'd clawed at their throats, their chests, as if trying to get air into lungs that no longer worked.