The Fae reached for her, and Pete lost what little patience she had for the creatures. “You lay that pretty hand on me and you’re getting a pretty stump back,” she said, swatting. Contact with its skin sent a spiraling jolt of power up her arm and into her heart. Pete didn’t make it her practice to cause a scene in the middle of pubs — at least not when she was sober — and when the Lament’s few patrons looked over, she felt herself flush. “Look, I’m sorry,” she said. “But here, you don’t just swan in and grab people…” she waited for the Fae’s name.
“You can call me Rowan,” it said. Pete crinkled her nose.
“That’s a bit swishy for a strapping thing like yourself.” The expression on Rowan’s face showed he had no idea what she meant. Pete sighed. “Rowan, what do you want? You’re making me conspicuous.”
“You must come,” Rowan said. “If I don’t deliver you…” The magic about him changed subtly, a darkening, a chill across Pete’s bare skin. “If I don’t,” Rowan whispered, “they cut off my head.”
Pete blinked. “How medieval,” she said dryly. “You expect me to believe that?”
“Don’t you know?” he said. “Seelie Fae can’t lie. We are bound by blood. Our very nature forbids it.”
That caused Pete to consider. Jack, the one with actual experience of the pasty bastards, had only spoken of Fae in the most dismissive of terms. She had no idea whether to trust Rowan or laugh at the audacity of his put-on.
“They told me you were smart,” Rowan said. “That you were a detective.”
Pete took a sip of her dark beer. “Used to be. Not any more.” It was hard to reconcile murders and robberies and the orderly procession of the Metropolitan Police with magic and curses and a place like the Lament Pub. Too hard. Six months next week, she’d been off the job.
“That’s why they want you,” Rowan continued. “The puzzle. The bloody business. Human eyes are needed.”
Pete raised her eyebrow at that. Rowan was growing more fidgety by the second, like a first-former itching to tattle on a classmate. “Come out with it!” she said.
“A murder,” Rowan said. “It’s the first in … well, a very, very long time, even for us. Honor killings are one thing. Duels. Assassination. But this…” He scrubbed his hand against his forehead. “It has no sense behind it.”
Pete sighed. “You look for murder to make sense, you might as well be looking for meaning in ‘Whiter Shade of Pale’. Don’t Fae have … I dunno, investigative types?” The idea of Fae police, in everyday Met uniforms, made her smirk a bit. Most of the Black was lawless as the American West, and it was by pure meanness and cunning that you kept your blood and entrails inside your body. Jack had taught her that. Where the fuck was Jack?
“We used to have Inquisitors,” Rowan said. “But the Queen disbanded them, long ago. It’s said … they said Petunia Caldecott was the cleverest human in the Black. And this needs a human’s eyes.”
Pete looked at the door again, at Rowan’s haggard face, and finally back at her mostly-still-full pint glass. “Fine,” she sighed, tossing down a few pounds for it. “Let’s have a look at your corpse, then.”
They left the Lament, which opened onto an alley that was never in the same place twice. Rowan visibly relaxed once they were outside, and Pete felt him shift something, the enchantment that had allowed him inside in the first place, though his magic still prickled her. “Have you ever visited Faerie?” he asked Pete. His voice was stronger, with the clearbell-like quality she associated with Fae.
“Never have, never wanted to,” she said. Feeling in her pockets for her pack and a lighter, she lit up, inhaled, and added a small blue cloud to the low wet fog that fell around them like frayed lace.
“This way,” Rowan said, starting down the stairs of a long-abandoned tube station. In the light world, it would be full of people, buskers, newsagents. In the Black, it was boarded up and painted with graffiti in a dozen arcane languages, the steps slippery and the air dank. Pete hesitated on the top step.
“If this is a setup to get me eaten by something nasty, I’m going to be very bloody upset with you, Rowan.”
Rowan held out his long pale hand, the color of a drowned man’s. “I mean you no harm. I swear.”
Pete didn’t take his hand, but she did take the first step down to the tube platform. A shadow passed over the clouded moon, and for a moment there was perfect blackness. Something whistling and unearthly breathed in her face.
Pete’s cigarette went out.
When she could see again, she was in Faerie.
Pete didn’t know what she’d expected, exactly — perhaps some Froud-esque fantasy of pixies at play under giant, Alice in Wonderland mushrooms. Or perhaps a palace of tall, pale, ridiculously good-looking Fae straight out of Hellboy. She’d expected soft things, silver eyes, the scent of elderflower.
Faerie was hard, instead. It was brick and iron, blackened to the same color by soot and grit. A sign was worked into the tiles of the tube station, in a language that looked like twisting vines to Pete’s eye.
Rowan slowed when she did. “Is something the matter, Lady?”
“It’s, um…” Pete gestured at the wood track, broken and empty. “You have the tube here?”
“Used to,” Rowan said. “When people and the Fae were much closer. We shared a great deal.”
He hopped from the platform and started to walk. “The court is this way.”
Pete shivered. Things lived in the dark, of the Black and of the light world. That she knew. Demons, murderers, angry ghosts. If it was a toss-up between the Fae and the dark, Pete knew which she’d choose. She hopped the platform, her feet crunching into shifting gravel between the ties, and followed Rowan into the tunnel.
The Seelie Court loomed from nowhere, when Rowan and Pete emerged onto a rail trestle. Below her, in the dark, Pete heard the rush and burble of a creek, and laughter that sounded like water on rock. Selkies, or naiads. Maybe a kelpie.
“I thought it was always summer here,” she said to Rowan. Another tidbit from Jack.
“It is,” he said. “The Prince’s death has changed that.”
Prince. “Bloody fucking hell,” Pete muttered to herself. Not only was she supposed to Sherlock Holmes a culprit out of the thin Fae air, the victim was royalty. Pete had worked an overdose case once, an MP’s son, and the MP himself, his supercilious face and veiled threats, still haunted her. He’d wanted it swept neatly under the rug, had actually sent a bloke in a dark suit to Pete’s flat to offer her fifteen thousand pounds to say his son’d had a heart attack and blot out all mention of the pharmacy floating in his bloodstream.
Pete had told him to fuck off, in exactly those words. But she had a notion that her usual routine wouldn’t play well with the ruling members of the Seelie.
She wasn’t even a DI any longer. Why the fuck had she agreed to come?
Before she could find a decent answer, they had been swept through a private entrance, past a coterie of guards armed with billy clubs and short, brutal swords that Pete had no doubt would do the job they were intended for, and into chambers guarded with a twined seal of two oak leaves. “Bow your head,” Rowan muttered. “You’re about to receive an honor few humans ever dream of.”
“Aren’t I a fucking prizewinner,” Pete said under her breath. Then she remembered those blades, and thought better of finishing the thought.
The Queen of the Seelie wasn’t a person Pete had ever fancied meeting, and she could tell the reverse was also true. The Queen drew herself up and in when Pete and Rowan came in, patting at her cheeks with a handkerchief spun from something white and translucent. She wore a simple black gown, the kind of thing you saw in old photos of Victorian mourning. Flanking her were three more Fae, two men and a girl.
Pete took their measure even as she smiled and inclined her head. She’d treat this like any other homicide. “You’re the mother?”