Those Who Fight Monsters: Tales of Occult Detectives

His throat worked. Pete saw a scar there, under his jaw. His clothes were fine as the rest of the group, but his hands were roughed at the knuckles, bent and square from bare-fisted fighting. Tolliver was a man who believed in blunt force. Pete hoped that also meant he believed in honesty.

“I found him,” he said, and his voice went rough. “I came to get him for our daily fencing lesson and he was on the floor, like a doll with all of the stuffing gone out…” Tolliver’s jaw worked and he looked away from her, out at the boiling thunderheads illuminated by a sickly green light in the eastern sky. “Unseelie land,” he murmured. “They’ll be putting up a ruddy festival. This is their dream come true.”

“Could an Unseelie have done this?” Pete asked. Her hands felt restless and she wished for her leather-bound reporter’s notebook. Ollie, her old partner in the met, had used his PDA to take notes, but Pete preferred the feel of paper and ink.

“No.” Tolliver was back in control. “Our borders prevent it. The Courts are neutral ground. So it’s been since the accords long past, when we made the Seelie and Unseelie lands half each of Faerie.”

“So who’s your money on?” Pete asked. Tolliver’s eyes expanded, then contracted. Wrinkles sprouted like weeds at his cheekbones. After a moment he said, “That’s your job, isn’t it?”

Pete allowed herself a flicker of a smile. “You thought of someone,” she said. “When I asked. You have an answer back there behind that big, ugly scar.”

“I protect the Queen,” Tolliver said brusquely. “I protect the family. And I’ve told you all I’m fit to tell.” He turned his back, and stared out the window.

Pete sighed, and returned to the icy stare of the Queen. She was beautiful, of course. It was hardly remarkable in Faerie. Her beauty was that of statues, and ice — remote, chill and unearthly. Hair of the whitest white, like Rowan’s, skin to match, traced only by blue veins. A young face with eyes ancient as the stones under Pete’s feet. There was a little pink around them from crying, and they made Pete think of animal eyes. Hungry eyes.

“Tolliver’s given me leave to ask you a few questions,” Pete said.

The magic in the room, slithering and sliver, came to a boil when the Queen spoke. “I am in mourning. I have nothing to say.”

Pete normally didn’t open herself to the Black. Being a Weir meant she was a repository rather than a conductor, and too much magic could turn her to cinder, surely as fire. She felt it, though. Every flux and flow. Every push and pull. And the Queen was at the center of something that was alien and frozen as the surface of another planet. Pete bit her lip, and let the magic lap at the back of her mind.

“You know who we look at in my world, when someone dies?” she asked quietly. “Family. Parents. Wives. Brothers. Family knows you best. Family can hate you more than anyone else in the world.”

The Queen shot a glance at the other man, who was slender as Tolliver was enormous. He cleared his throat. “Perhaps Miss Caldecott would care to examine the body and the scene of the deed?”

Pete knew when she was being brushed off, but she didn’t expect the young woman next to the Queen to pipe up. “I’ll come.”

“Snowblood, no,” the man insisted. “You’ll only upset yourself.”

“Shut up, Crowfoot,” she hissed. “You may have my aunt fooled but you don’t fool me!”

“Snowblood!” The Queen’s voice snapped like the lightning outside. “That’s enough.”

“All right,” Pete spread her hands. “You, young miss — you’re with me. The rest of you, stay put. I’ll have more questions once I’ve seen the body.”

The prince was kept in a chamber below the Court, older than the building above, cool arches dripping water into drains that lead to places only rats would know. Pete scented the familiar rotten-orchid scent of decay, along with something foreign, a bit like char. Blood, she guessed. Fae blood.

“Snowblood’s quite a name,” she said to the girl. “You the queen’s niece?”

“Yes,” Snowblood said tightly. “And the prince’s intended.”

The body was covered with a sheet, whiter than white — like any white in Faerie — but dotted all over with blossoms of red, like a first bloom after a snowfall. Pete stopped her hand before she moved it back.

“The prince … he’s your cousin.”

Snowblood lifted one boneless shoulder. “That’s the way it works, isn’t it?”

Pete let that one go. It wasn’t like royals and inbreeding were strangers. “And Crowfoot?”

“He’s the leader of the majority. The Seelie Council.” Snowblood paused. “He’s perfectly hideous.”

“Politicians usually are,” Pete said, and twitched the sheet back. She wasn’t looking at the prince, but at Snowblood’s face. The girl betrayed absolutely no reaction. Her eyes were dull and glassy as a stagnant pond.

“Crowfoot wanted to marry me. Before my cousin,” Snowblood said. Pete looked at the body. It was a clean job, exit wounds in the chest ragged and black and, when she rolled the body, two stab wounds in the back, angled upward into the heart and lungs.