Lucy must have made some sign because uniformed officers moved in to stop her forward progress. They blocked her until all I could see were the sparkles of light and the trembling top of her crystal crown.
“Get out of my way!” she yelled. They were police; they didn’t get out of her way.
I heard someone shout, “Gilda, no!” then one of the uniforms fell straight down as if his knees had just buckled. He made no move to catch himself, and it was left to other officers to keep him from hitting the floor.
The cops began to shout, “Drop the wand! Drop it now!”
Doyle and Frost were suddenly in front of me and moving me farther away from the action. Doyle said, “Door.”
I didn’t understand at first, and then Frost was leading me toward a second smaller door leading outside. I glanced back to see Doyle close behind us, but facing the police and Gilda. I protested, “The door is alarmed. The noise could make it all worse.”
Frost’s hand was on the handle as he said, “It says for emergencies. This is an emergency.” Then he was pulling me by one arm through the door with the alarm screeching and Doyle spilling out behind us. We were on the sidewalk in the bright sunshine and warm, but not too warm, Southern California air.
Doyle took my other arm and kept us moving. “Bullets travel. I don’t want you close to them.”
I tried to pull free of their hands, but I might as well have been trying to pry metal away from my skin.
“I am a detective. You can’t just pull me out of a case when it gets dangerous.”
“We are your bodyguards first and foremost,” Doyle said.
I let my legs collapse under me so that they had to either stop or drag my bare legs and feet on the concrete. They stopped, but only long enough for Doyle to say, “Pick her up.”
Frost picked me up and kept walking away from the police and the potential fey riot. Gilda’s retinue would not take kindly to their queen being arrested, but what else could they do?
“Fine,” I said, “you’ve made your point.”
“Have we?” Doyle asked, and then he was suddenly in front of Frost and me. He glared down at me, and I could feel the weight of his anger behind the dark glasses. “I don’t think we have made our point at all, or you would have been the first one out that door.”“Doyle,” Frost began.
“No,” he said, and pointed his finger at both of us. With Lucy it had reminded me of a child being scolded, but there was something ominous about Doyle reaching out with the anger riding his body. “What if you had caught a stray bullet? What if you had caught a stray bullet in the stomach? What if you had killed our children because you simply won’t run away?”
I didn’t know what to say to that. I just stared at him. He was right, of course he was right, but … “I can’t do my job like this.”
“No,” he said, “you can’t.”
Then suddenly I felt the first tear slide down my face.
“No crying,” he said.
Another tear joined the first. I fought not to wipe at them.
His hand dropped to his side and he took a deep breath. “That’s not fair. Don’t cry.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to, but you’re right, I think. I’m pregnant, damn it, not crippled.”
“But you carry the future of the Unseelie Court in your body.” He leaned in so that his arms went around Frost’s until their faces touched and both of them were looking down at me. “You and the babies are too important to risk like this, Meredith.”
I wiped at the tears, angry now that I had cried at all. I’d been doing that more lately. The doctor said it was hormones. More emotions I did not need right now.
“You are right, but I didn’t know we’d end up with police all around us and guns.”
“If you simply avoid cases with the police involved, it will guarantee that you do not end up surrounded by police with guns,” he said.
Again I couldn’t argue with his logic, but I wanted to. “First, put me down; we’re attracting attention.”
They glanced out from the circle of their arms over me, and there were people staring, whispering among themselves. I didn’t have to hear them to know what they were saying. “Is that her?” “Is that Princess Meredith?” “Is that them?” “Is that the Darkness?” “Is that the Killing Frost?” If we weren’t careful, someone would call the press and we’d be besieged.
Frost put me down, and we started to walk. A moving target was always harder to photograph. I tried to keep my voice low as I said, “I can’t avoid this case, Doyle. They’re killing fey here in the only home we have left. We’re nobles of the court; the lesser fey are watching us, waiting to see what we’ll do.”
A couple came up to us, the woman saying, “Are you Princess Meredith? You are, aren’t you?”
I nodded.
“Can we take your picture?”
There was a sound to the side as someone else used their phone to take a picture without asking. If they had the right phone, the photo could be on the Internet almost instantly. We had to get to the car and get out of here before the press descended.
“The princess is feeling unwell,” Doyle said. “We need to get her to the car.”
The woman touched my arm and said, “Oh, I know how hard the baby thing can be. I had terrible pregnancies every time. Didn’t I, dear?”
Her husband nodded, and said, “Just a quick picture?”
We let them take their “quick” picture, which is rarely quick, then moved away. We’d have to double back for the car. But the voluntary picture had been a mistake, because other tourists wanted a picture and Doyle said, no, which upset them. “They got a picture,” they said.
We kept moving, but a car stopped in the middle of the street, a window glided down and a camera lens came out. The paparazzi had arrived. But it was like the first hit in a shark attack. They came in to hit you to see what you’d do and whether you were edible. If you were, the next hit used teeth. We had to get out of sight and onto private property before more of them arrived.
A man was yelling from the car, “Princess Meredith, look this way! Why are you crying?”
That was all we needed, not only pictures of us but some caption about how I was crying. They’d feel free to speculate on why, but I’d learned that trying to explain was worse. We made ourselves a moving target. It was the best we could do as the first photographer ran up the sidewalk toward us, from the direction we’d been heading. We were trapped.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
DOYLE USED HIS MORE-THAN-HUMAN SPEED TO PICK ME UP AND take us inside the nearest shop. Frost locked the door behind us. A man protested, “Hey, this is my business.”
Doyle set my feet on the floor of the small family-run deli. The man behind the counter was balding, and round under his white apron. The entire store matched him, old-fashioned, with cut meats, cheeses and unhealthy sides in little containers. I didn’t think anything like this could have survived in L.A., land of the health obsessed.
Then I saw that the short line of customers was made up almost entirely of fey. There was one elderly man who looked full human, but the short woman behind him was small and plump with red curly hair and eyes like a hawk’s, and I mean that literally. They were yellow, and her pupils spiraled up and down as she tried to get the best look at me. A little boy of about four clung to her skirts, staring at me with blue eyes and white-blond hair, cut modern; short and neat. The last person in line had a multicolored Mohawk with a long tail of hair trailing down his back. He wore a white T-shirt with a band logo on it, but his pants and vest were black leather. He was pierced, and looked out of place in the line, but then so did we.
They stared at us, and I stared back. Staring wasn’t considered rude among us. Most fey didn’t sweat high cholesterol or high blood sugar or any of a myriad of illnesses that might kill a human being eating foods with salt and preservatives. Immortals don’t really sweat heart disease. I had a sudden craving for roast beef.
The door rattled behind us. One of the reporters was banging on the door angrily, shouting at us to open up, saying that this was a public area. We had no right to do this.
Cameras were shoved in front of the glass so that the daylight was gone in a brilliance of flashes. I turned, shielding my eyes. Apparently, I’d left my sunglasses in the break area of the Fael.
The slender fey male with his Mohawk, who most would have thought in his teens, came forward. He made a rough bow. “Princess Meredith, may I get you a seat?” I looked into his slender face with its pale greenish skin. There was something about his face that simply wasn’t human. I couldn’t have put my finger on it, but the bone structure was simply a little off for a human. He looked like a pixie drawn to short human size by some mix of genetics. His pointed ears had almost as many earrings as Doyle’s did. But the earrings in his lobes were dangling and had multicolored feathers brushing the shoulders of his leather vest.“That would be lovely,” I said.
He drew up one of the few small chairs and held it for me. I sank into it gratefully. I was suddenly very tired. Was it being pregnant, or was it the day?
Doyle went to the shopkeeper. “Where does the back way empty out to?” Not was there a back way, but where did it go.