“Nothing. I just thought I recognized someone.”
“The blond with the implants?” he asked.
“Hm-hm,” I said, not moving my lips, because I really didn’t like how he was staring at us.
“Good of you to join us this fine morning.” It was a hale and hearty voice, one to greet you and make you happy that you’d come. Robert Thrasher, as in thrashing wheat, stood behind the counter polishing the wood with a clean white cloth. He was smiling at us, his nut-brown face handsome. He’d let modern surgery give him a nose, and make the cheekbones and chin graceful, though tiny. He was tall for a brownie, my own height, but he was still small of bone, and the doctor who had done his face had kept that in mind so that if you hadn’t known that he’d begun life with only empty holes where the nose was, and a face closer to that of the Fear Dearg, you’d never have known that he hadn’t been this delicate, handsome man all his life.
If anyone ever asked for a plastic surgeon recommendation, I’d send them to Robert’s doctor.
He smiled, only his dark brown eyes showing the edge of his worry, but none of the customers would see it. “I’ve got your order in the back. Come back and have a cup before you approve it.”
“Sounds good,” I said, all happy to go with his tone. I’d lived in the Unseelie Court when the only magic I could do was glamour. I knew how to pretend to feel things that I wasn’t feeling at all. It had made me good at undercover work for the Grey Detective Agency.
Robert handed the cloth to a young woman who looked like a pinup girl for Goth Monthly, from her black hair to her black velvet minidress, striped hose, and clunky retroish shoes. She sported a neck tattoo and a piercing through her dark lipsticked mouth.
“Mind the front for me, Alice.”
“Will do,” she said and smiled brightly at him. Ah, a perky Goth, not a gloomy one. Positive attitude makes better counter help.
The Fear Dearg stayed behind, twisting his face into a smile for the tall human girl. She smiled down at him, and there wasn’t a shadow in her face that saw anything but attraction in the small fey.
Robert was moving and we were following, so I left off speculating on whether Alice and the Fear Dearg were a couple, or at least hooked up. He wouldn’t have been my cup of tea, but then I knew what he was capable of; did she?
I shook my head and pushed it all away. Their love life was not my business. The office space was neat and modern but all warm earth tones, and had a wall of photographs from home so that all the staff, even those without a desk, could bring family photos in and see them during the day. Robert and his partner were pictured in tropical shirts in front of a beautiful sunset. Goth Alice had several pictures, each with a different friend; maybe she was just friendly. There was a partition, still in that warm shade between tan and brown, that separated the break area from the office space. We heard the voices before we could see around the partition. One was low and masculine, the other high-pitched and feminine.
Robert called out in a cheerful voice, “We have visitors, Bittersweet.”
There was a little scream, and the sound of china breaking, and then we were around the corner of the partition. There was nice leather furniture with cushions, a large coffee table, some drink and snack machines almost hidden by an oriental screen, a man, and a small flying faery.
“You promised,” she shrieked, and her voice was thin with anger so that there was an edge of buzz to it, as if she were the insect she resembled. “You promised you wouldn’t tell!”
The man was standing, trying to comfort her as she hovered near the ceiling. Her wings were a blur, and I knew when she stopped moving that it wouldn’t be butterfly wings on her back, but rather something faster, slimmer. Her wings caught the artificial light with little winks of rainbow color. Her dress was purple, only a little darker than my own. Her hair fell around her shoulders in white-blond waves. She would barely fill my hand, tiny even by demi-fey standards.
The man trying to calm her was Robert’s partner, Eric, who was five foot eight, slender, neatly dressed, tanned, and handsome in a preppie sort of way. They’d been a couple for more than ten years. Before Eric, Robert’s last love of his life had been a woman who he’d been faithful to until she died at eighty-something. I thought it was brave of Robert to love another human so soon.
Robert spoke sharply. “Bittersweet, we promised not to tell everyone, but you were the one who flew in here babbling hysterically. Did you think no one would talk? You’re lucky that the princess and her men are here before the police.”
She flew at him, tiny hands balled into tiny fists, and her eyes blazed with rage. She hit him. You would think that something smaller than a Barbie doll wouldn’t pack much punch, but you’d be wrong.
She hit him, and I was behind him, so I felt the wave of energy that came before and around her fist like a small explosion. Robert was airborne, and pitched backward toward me. Only Doyle’s speed put him between me and the falling man. Frost yanked me out of the way of both as they hit the floor.
Bittersweet turned on us, and I watched the ripple of power around her like heat on a summer’s day. Her hair formed a pale halo around her face, raised by the wind of her own energy. It was the magic that kept a “human” that small alive without her having to eat multiple times her own body weight every day like a hummingbird or a shrew.
“Do not be rash,” Frost said. His skin ran cold against mine as his magic woke in a skin-tingling winter’s chill. The glamour that I’d used to hide us fell away, partly because to hold it with his magic coming was harder, and partly because I hoped it would help bring the small fey to her senses.
Her wings stopped, and I had a moment to see the crystal of dragonfly wings on her tiny body as she did the airborne equivalent of a human stumbling on uneven ground. It made her dip toward the ground before she caught herself and rose to eye level with both Frost and Doyle. She’d turned sideways so she could see both of them. Her energy quieted around her as she hovered.
She bobbed an awkward curtsey in the air. “If you hide yourself with glamour, Princess, then how’s a fey to know how to act?”
I started to come around Frost’s body, but he stopped me partway with his arm, so I had to speak from the shield of him. “Would you have harmed us if we had simply been humans who were part fey?”
“You looked like those pretend elves that the humans dress up as.”
“You mean the wannabes,” I said.
She nodded. Her blond curls had fallen around her tiny shoulders in beautiful ringlets, as if the power had curled her hair tighter.
“Why would human wannabes frighten you?” Doyle asked.
Her eyes flicked to him, and then back to me as if the very sight of him frightened her. Doyle had been the queen’s assassin for centuries; the fact that he was with me now didn’t take away his past.
She answered his question while looking at me. “I saw them coming down the hill from where my friends were …” Here she stopped, put her hands in front of her eyes, and began to weep.
“Bittersweet,” I said, “I’m sorry for your loss, but are you saying you saw the killers?”
She just nodded without moving her hands from her face, and began to weep louder, an amazing amount of noise from a being so small. The weeping had an edge of hysteria to it, but I guess I couldn’t blame her.
Robert moved around her to Eric, and they held hands as Eric asked Robert if he was hurt. Robert just shook his head.
“I have to make a call,” I said.
Robert nodded, and something in his eyes let me know that he understood both who I was going to call and why I wasn’t doing so in this room. The little fey didn’t seem to want anyone to know what she’d seen, and I was about to call the police.