A black, ankle-length skirt hugged my hips and flared out as it flowed down my legs, in a material not found in nature so it wouldn’t wrinkle on the plane. A black leather belt with a matching buckle was cinched tight at my waist. A green silk-and-spandex T-shirt was topped with a black bolero-cut jacket. Antique gold-and-emerald earrings picked up the green. Calf-high black boots showed under my skirt. They had three-inch heels, and the leather was shiny, and gleamed when the light caught it. I’d thought the emerald-green shirt brought out the green of my eyes, and the fit, along with the scoop neck, showed off my breasts. I’d normally have worn a shorter skirt, but it was January in St. Louis, and showing off my legs wasn’t worth risking frostbite. But the skirt flowed as I moved, and the black overskirt gave an impression of floating, catching in the slightest wind, whether of my movement or air.
I’d thought I looked good, until Maeve had worded her sentence oh, so carefully.
“I take it you don’t approve of the outfit,” I said, and went for the teapot under its cozy. Galen had had to search Los Angeles over to find an honest-to-goddess tea cozy to keep our tea warm. Most of the men preferred a strong black tea for breakfast instead of coffee—Rhys being the exception. He just didn’t think that hard-boiled detectives should drink tea, so he drank coffee. His loss. More tea for me.
She looked at me, almost startled. “I forget sometimes that you were raised out among the humans in your formative years. Though, frankly, you can be blunt even by human standards.” She dabbed at her eyes again, but there were no more fresh tears, just the tracks drying on her face. “You don’t play the game.”
I added cream to the sugar I’d put in my tea and stirred as I looked at her. “What game would that be?”
“I’m angry with you, so I imply that you don’t look good. You’re not supposed to ask me outright what I think of your outfit. You’re supposed to simply worry that I think you look bad. It’s supposed to eat at you, undermine your confidence.”
I sipped my tea. “Why would you want to do that?”
“Because it’s your fault what happened last night.”
“What’s my fault?”
A sound very close to a sob broke from her lips. “I had sex with that . . . that false sidhe.”
I frowned, then finally realized what she meant. “You mean Sage?”
She nodded, and there were fresh tears. In fact she laid her head back on the pale pine of the table and sobbed. Sobbed as if her heart would break.
I set my tea down and went to her. I couldn’t stand to hear that broken sound. I’d heard it often enough over the last few weeks since her husband had died, but lately, less. I was glad it was less. Most of the stories talk about what happens to the poor mortals who fall in love with the immortal, and how badly it goes for them, but Maeve was showing the other side. When the immortal truly fell in love with a mortal, eventually it ended badly for the immortal. We died, and they didn’t. Simple, horrible, true. Watching Maeve mourn Gordon had made me worry about what I was getting myself into with a sidhe spouse. Eventually, whomever I married would be a widower. No way around it. Not a pretty thought.
I touched her shoulder, and she cried harder. “Did Sage hurt you?” I asked, and thought it was stupid even as I said it.
She raised her head enough to give me a tearful version of her how-dare-you face. She said in a snuffly voice, “He could not hurt a princess of the Seelie Court.”
I patted her shoulder. “Of course not, I apologize for saying it. But if he didn’t hurt you, then why are you crying about it? The sex couldn’t have been that bad.”
She sobbed harder, covering her face with her hands. I think she said, “It was wonderful,” but it was too muffled for me to be certain.
I still didn’t understand why she was so upset, but the pain was real. I hugged her shoulders, laid my cheek against her hair. “If it was wonderful, then why are you crying?”
She said something, but it was lost in all the crying. “I’m sorry, Maeve, I couldn’t understand you.”
“It shouldn’t have been wonderful.”
I was glad she couldn’t see my face because I probably looked as puzzled as I felt. “It was your first taste of sidhe flesh in a century. Of course it was wonderful.”
She lowered her hands and turned to look at me, so that I had to stand back to give her room. “You don’t understand,” she said. “He isn’t sidhe. It’s a lie, an illusion, like the apple tree in my house. It was gone this morning.”
“The tree?”
She nodded.
I frowned; I couldn’t help it. “But I touched it, the leaves, the bark, the blossoms. I smelled the scent. It was real. Illusions can hide things, or make one thing look like another, but illusion can’t bring something out of nothing. There has to be something real for the illusion to attach to.”
“Normally, yes, but the sidhe once could build an illusion so solid that you could walk across it. Do you think that stories of castles in the air are fairy tales, Merry? Once the sidhe could do that. We could create something out of nothing. Things made of pure magic that were as real as anything in existence.”
“So it was a real tree,” I said, slowly.
“Real while the magic lasted, yes. If there had been apples on the tree, you could have eaten them and they would have filled your belly. It was the way we had of making our few fey animals feed us again and again. They were magic, and that could be renewed.”
“I know there is such a thing as illusion that is real, but my father said that such talents were lost long ago.”
She nodded. “They were.”
“So that is beginning to return to us, along with other magicks?”
“Yes.” She smiled then, a watery version of the smile that had launched a thousand blockbuster movies, years before the term blockbuster meant anything. She took my hand in hers. “And you have brought that back to us, Merry, you and your magic.”I shook my head. “No, not me, the Goddess. I couldn’t do any of this without divine help.”
“You are too modest,” she said.
“Maybe,” I said, and I couldn’t help myself, “though of course when you have such bad taste in clothes, it’s hard not to be humble.”
She wouldn’t meet my eyes for a moment. “I am sorry, but I wanted to hurt you.”
I squeezed her hand then took my hand out of hers. “Why?”
“Because I blamed you for Sage seducing me last night.”
“Rhys made it sound like you were doing more of the seducing,” I said.
She actually blushed. “Truth. Hard, but the truth. I saw him shining in the dark. He glowed like a golden moon. I . . .” She turned so I couldn’t see her face, put her back to me. “I knew that he was not one of your men. I thought he would not refuse me, and he didn’t.”
“You seduced him. It was wonderful. And now you’re having morning-after regrets?” I said.
“Silly, isn’t it.”
“The fey don’t regret sex, Maeve.”
“You’ve never truly been Seelie Court, Merry. You don’t know what the rules are there.”
“I know that anyone who isn’t pure-blooded is less, no matter her talents or magicks.”
She turned in the chair enough to look at me again. “Yes, yes.”
“I didn’t think you held with that anymore.”
“Neither did I.”
I tried to reason it out. “You’re upset because you enjoyed being with someone who wasn’t pure sidhe?”
“I’m upset because Sage is not a prince of either court. He’s a demi-feywhom your magic has brought into something more, but he is not sidhe, Merry. He will never be truly sidhe. A hundred years from now, even with his tricolored eyes, he will not be sidhe.”
“You see how they are.” It was Frost from the doorway. Neither of us had heard him come up, and we both jumped.
He wore a standard white dress shirt, tie, and dress slacks, but the tie was silver and only a shade less bright than the hair that shimmered around his shoulders. His slacks were dark grey, thick material, cut well so the pants managed to be roomy in the front and over the thighs but formfitting from behind. I’d admired the view earlier. A silver-and-diamond tie bar and matching cuff links glittered as he moved into the room. His usual loafers had given way to dark grey boots, mostly hidden by the generous cut of pant cuffs.
“How who are?” I asked.
“The Seelie.” He said Seelie as if it was a dirty word. The way most Seelie said Unseelie.
Maeve stood up from the table. “How dare you.”
“How dare I what?” he asked as he moved toward us.
“How dare you insult the Seelie.”
“They would say the same of us,” Frost said, and there was a level of anger in him that I wasn’t sure of. I hoped this new anger wasn’t his answer to the pouting. Trading one problem for another was not what I’d had in mind.
Maeve opened her shapely mouth, then closed it. She couldn’t call him a liar, because it was true. She finally settled for, “I don’t know what to say,” in a much more subdued voice.
Frost turned to me. “She’d never have touched Sage if she was still part of the golden court.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “I’m proof that more than one Seelie will sully her body with those not of her court.”