The emergency medical technician pulled the blood pressure cuff off my arm and pronounced, “Everything seems fine. Blood pressure, all of it. But I’m not a doctor, and I’m sure as heck not a baby doc.”
“So you think she should go to the hospital?” Lucy asked.
The EMT frowned and I felt his dilemma. If he said no and he was wrong, he was fucked. But there were other people who were actually injured, and if he left one behind to take me, just in case, and the one left behind died, he was also screwed.
She turned to Doyle and Frost for backup. “Tell her she needs to go to the hospital.”
They exchanged a look, then Doyle gave a small nod as if to say “Go ahead,” and Frost answered, “We don’t ‘tell’ Merry what to do, Detective. She is our princess.”
“But she’s also carrying your babies,” Lucy said.
“That doesn’t give us the right to order her around,” he said.
Doyle added, “I expected you to understand that better than most, Detective Tate.”
She frowned at both of them, then turned back to me. “You promise me you never fell or had something fall on you?”
“I promise,” I said.
She took in a lot of air, let it out slowly, then nodded. “Fine. Okay. I’ll let it go. If none of you are worried, I don’t know why I bother.”
I smiled up at her. “Because you are my friend, and friends worry about each other.”
She looked almost embarrassed, then grinned at me. “Fine. Go enjoy what’s left of your Saturday.”
Doyle reached out a hand and I let him help me stand though I really didn’t need it. They’d both been calmer than Lucy, but then they’d been with me the entire time. They knew nothing had happened to me physically, but they were still more careful of me than they had been before. It was both touching and a little irritating. I was worried that as the pregnancy progressed it might become a lot less touching and a lot more irritating, but that was a worry for another day. We were free to head for the beach, and there was still daylight to enjoy it. It was all good.
The EMT asked, “So I’m done here with the princess?”
“Yeah,” Lucy said, “go find someone who’s bleeding to take for a ride.”
He smiled, obviously relieved, and hurried off to find someone who really did need a ride to the hospital.
“I’ll give you uniforms to escort you back to your car.” She sort of nodded toward the press that was being held back by tape and barriers. Oddly, the paparazzi who had gotten injured were now news themselves. I wondered if they were enjoying being on the other side of the camera.
“Some of them will follow us to the beach,” Frost said.
“I can try to lose them.”
“No, I do not want to see what that would mean on the roads to the beach.” Doyle said it very quickly and even Lucy picked up his unease.
“So tall, dark, and deadly is still not comfy riding in regular cars.” She addressed the comment to me.
I smiled and shook my head.
“I prefer the limo; at least then I can’t see the road so clearly.”Lucy smiled and shook her head. “You know, it makes me like you better that you’re afraid of something, Doyle.”
He frowned at her, and probably would have commented, but her phone rang. She checked, and saw that she needed to answer it. She held up a finger for us to wait.
“Tell me this is a joke,” she said. Her tone was anything but amused.
“How,” she asked, then listened and said, “Sorry doesn’t fix this.” She got off the phone and cursed softly but completely under her breath.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“While we were down here cleaning up this mess our witness fled the scene. We can’t find her.”
“When did she get… ?”
“He doesn’t know. Apparently when there were fewer of us, Gilda’s entourage got braver, and when they calmed it down the witness was gone.” I noticed that she was careful not to say Bittersweet’s name out in public. It was a good precaution when murders are magical; you never know who, or how, someone is listening.
“Lucy, I’m sorry. If you hadn’t come down here to help us this wouldn’t have happened.”
She gave a glare to the paparazzi who were not hurt but whom the police had forced to wait for questioning. “You wouldn’t have needed help if these bastards hadn’t mobbed you.”
“I’m not even sure you can charge them with anything,” I said.
“We’ll find something,” she said, her voice full of anger. The anger was probably more about Bittersweet fleeing the scene and having to tell her bosses that she’d been rescuing the faery princess from the big, bad reporters when it had happened, but the uninjured paparazzi would make a nice target for that anger.
“Go, enjoy your weekend. I’ll take care of this bunch and give you an escort to your car. I’ll have some cars make sure that no one follows you from the Fael, but if they’re waiting for you farther away”—she shrugged—“afraid there’s not much I can do.”
I took her hand and squeezed it. “Thank you for everything, and I’m sorry that you’re going to take grief about the witness.”
She smiled, but her eyes weren’t happy enough for it. “I’ll deal with it. Go, have your picnic or whatever.” She turned away, then back to frowning. She moved closer to us and whispered, “How do we find someone who is only four inches high in a city the size of Los Angeles?”
It was a good question, but I had a helpful answer. “She’s one of the smallest of us, so she’s very sensitive to metal and technology. So look for her at parks, vacant lots, street sides with trees like today’s scene. She needs nature to survive here.”
“What kind of flower faery is she?” Frost asked.
“I don’t know,” Lucy said.
“Good idea, Frost,” I said. “Find out, Lucy, because she’ll be attracted to her plant. Some of them are so tied to a bit of land that if their plant goes extinct they die with it.”
“Wow, that’d make you environmentally active,” Lucy said.
I nodded.
“Who would know what flower she likes?”
“Robert might know,” I said.
“Gilda would know,” Doyle said.
Lucy frowned at him. “She’s already called for her lawyer. She’s not going to talk to us.”
“She might if you tell her that not cooperating endangers her people,” Doyle said.
“I don’t think she cares that much,” Lucy said.
He gave that small smile. “Tell her that Meredith cares more than she does, obviously. Imply that Meredith is a better, kinder ruler and I think Gilda will at least tell you the plant.”
She looked up at him with a nod of approval. “They’re both handsome and smart. It’s so not fair. Why can’t I find a Prince Charming like these guys?”
I wasn’t sure what to say to that, but Doyle was. “We are not the Prince Charming of our story, Detective Tate. Meredith rode to our rescue and saved us from our sad fates.”
“So she’s what, Princess Charming?”
He smiled and this time it was that bright flash that he didn’t give often. It made Lucy blush just a little, and I realized that she liked Doyle. I couldn’t blame her. “Yes, Detective, she’s our Princess Charming.”
Frost took one of my hands in his, and looked down at me with everything in his eyes. “She is.”
“So instead of waiting for the prince to find me, I need to find one to save and bring him home?”
“It worked for me,” I said.
She shook her head. “I save people all day, or try to, Merry. Just once I’d like to be the one being saved.”
I shook my head. “I’ve been both, Lucy. Trust me, it’s better to do the saving.”
“If you say so. I gotta go see if Robert knows where to find our little friend.” She waved at us as she made her way toward the crowd.
Two uniformed officers appeared as if she’d told them to step up when she left us; she probably had. It was our old friends Wright and O’Brian. “We’re supposed to see you safely to your car,” Wright said.
“Let’s do it,” I said.
We started the trip back the way we’d come, through a barrage of new camera flashes from yet more and different paparazzi and reporters.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
WE ENDED UP WITH AN IMPROMPTU ENTOURAGE OF REPORTERS AND uniformed police. At one point the reporters were such a solid mass that Wright and O’Brian couldn’t move us forward without laying hands on them, and apparently they’d been ordered not to manhandle the press. They were experiencing the problem that my bodyguards had been having for weeks. How do you stay politically correct with strangers shouting in your face, flashes going off like blinding bombs, and the crowd turning into a mass of bodies that you were not allowed to touch?
The reporters yelled questions. “Are you helping the police with a case, Princess?” “What investigation are you helping the police with?” “Why were you crying?” “Is the shop owner really a relative of yours?”
Wright and O’Brian tried to push a way through without actually pushing, which is a lot harder than it sounds. Doyle and Frost stayed on either side of me, because the crowd had grown beyond the reporters. Human and fey had come out of the shops and restaurants to see what the commotion was about. It was “human” nature to be curious but they began to add to the press around us so that forward movement stopped.Then suddenly the reporters fell silent, not all at once, but gradually. First one went quiet, then another, and they began to look around, as if they’d heard a noise, a disturbing noise. Then I felt it, too: fear. Fear like a cold, clammy wind across your skin. I had a moment to stand there in the bright California sunshine and feel a shiver creep down my spine.