Divine Misdemeanors

I drew back enough to try to see his face, but he curled around me so I couldn’t. “Ethan didn’t believe that. Adam’s always liked men.”

“He had a few girlfriends here and there. He was engaged once before me.”

I touched his face and turned him to look at me. “Is he making noises about being into women again?”

He shook his head, and I realized there were tears glittering behind those tinted glasses. He wasn’t crying yet, but he was a blink away from it. “I don’t know. He doesn’t want me to touch him. He doesn’t want anyone to touch him. I don’t know what’s in his head anymore.”

The tears trembled on the thickness of his eyelashes. He kept his eyes wide so the tears wouldn’t fall.

“Come over for di

“We’re supposed to have di

I smiled up at him. “If you don’t show up, then we know you and your main squeeze are having fun, and that will be great.”

He smiled at me, and wiped hastily at the unshed tears. He was gay but he was still a man, and most of them hated to cry, especially in public. “Thank you, Merry. I’m sorry to bring this to you, but my other friends, they’re mostly gay men and …”

“They see it as a chance to poach you,” I said.

He made that waffling motion again. “Not poach, but I am learning how many of my friends would be happy to be in my bed again.”

“That’s the problem with staying friends with most of your ex-lovers,” I said.

He laughed and this time it sounded happy. “What can I say? I’m just a friendly guy.”

“So I’ve heard,” I said. I hugged him, and he hugged me back, more a friend hug this time. “Have you talked to Adam about couple’s therapy?” I asked.

“He says he doesn’t need therapy. He knows what’s wrong with him. He lost his damn brother and he’s allowed to mourn.”

Rhys made a throat-clearing sound and we turned to him. “We have to show ID and get through the line.” He was utterly neutral as he said it, but I knew that he’d caught some of what we’d been doing. One, all fey have better-than-human hearing, and two, after a thousand years you get to read people.

“I’m sorry,” Julian said. “I am being unprofessional and that’s not acceptable.” He stepped away from me, straightening his jacket, smoothing his lapels, and gathering himself at the same time.

Galen leaned in and said, “We’ll cuddle you without wrecking your marriage.”

“Oh, that is a blow to the ego,” Julian said with a smile. “That you’re not even tempted to seduce me.”

Galen gri

Julian gri

“How sad for you,” I said.

Cathbodua frowned harder. I shook my head, but said, “No one has to cuddle anyone they don’t want to cuddle. It’s all about touching because you want to, not because you’re forced to.”

She exchanged a look with Saraid. “That is very different from the prince.”

Saraid said, “Happily so.”

Julian glanced from one to the other of the women, and then said, “Were you honestly thinking that Merry would force you to touch me when you didn’t want to?”

The women just looked at him. Julian shivered. “I don’t know what your life was like before this, but I’m not into force. If my charming personality doesn’t make you want my company, then so be it.”

The women exchanged another look. Cathbodua said, “Give us a few more months of this new world and we may even believe that of both you and the princess.”

“Tell Jeremy to keep all the female guards off undercover duty for a while,” Julian said.

I thought about how either of the women might have taken the little walk with Julian. Would it have seemed like force, a kind of sexual abuse? So many walking wounded to take care of, and I’d just offered to help take care of Julian. But I didn’t mind that last, because I knew how weak you could grow from lack of attention, until you began to look at strangers while the person who was supposed to love you neglected you. Humans saw it as a weakness on the part of the cheater, but I knew through my first fiancé that a person can leave a relationship in more ways than just walking away. You can leave your partner so bereft of attention that it’s like not being in love at all.

If we could help Julian through this rough patch with Adam, then we would. I understood that you could die a little bit every day from lack of the right touch from the right person. I’d spent three years without the touch of another sidhe. I didn’t want to see anyone else go through that if I could help them. And Adam wouldn’t see me as a threat, because I was a woman.

We fished out our IDs and waited for someone in charge to give us permission to cross past the uniforms. We were private detectives, not police detectives, and that meant that no uniform was going to just say, “Come on down.”

We waited in the brilliant sunlight while Julian held my hand and I held his back. I’d have rather helped him with his need than seen more dead bodies, but I wasn’t getting paid to touch my friend, I was getting paid today to look at the dead. Maybe we’d have a nice divorce case next. That was sounding pretty good as we followed the nice police detective through the crowd of police and rescue workers. They were all avoiding each other’s eyes. I’d learned that that was a bad sign—a sign that whatever lay ahead was disturbing to the people who saw a hell of a lot of disturbing things. I kept walking, but now holding Julian’s hand wasn’t just so he could get some touch for the day; it was because touching made me feel just a bit braver.

Chapter Thirty

There was no hand-holding at the crime scene. We were all civilians being allowed into a police investigation. I was a woman and not all human, so I had to uphold the honor of both my sex and my ancestry.

The first victim was curled before the fireplace. It wasn’t a real fireplace, but one of those plug-in electric ones. The killer, or killers, had positioned the body in front of it to match the illustration that Lucy had shown us safe in its plastic evidence wrap, tagged and bagged. She, because it was a she, had been dressed in the same ragged sack clothing as the illustration. It was a story I remembered reading as a child. I’d liked stories about brownies because of Gran. The brownie fell asleep before the fire and was caught napping, literally, by the household children. Gran had said, “Na brownie worth ’er salt would fall asleep on th’ job.” The rest of the story was about the children going with the brownie to fairyland and I knew that was made up, because I’d been there as a child and it was nothing like the book.

“Well, another childhood memory ruined,” I said softly.

“What did you say?” Lucy asked.

I shook my head. “Sorry, but my grandmother read me this book as a child. I was thinking about reading it to my own kids, but maybe not now.” I stared down at the dead woman and forced myself to look at what they’d done to her face. There was a brownie in the story, so they’d made her into a brownie by taking her nose and her lips, and paring her down to what they needed to make the picture.

Rhys came up beside me and said, “Don’t look at her face.”

“I can do my job,” I said, and I didn’t mean to sound defensive.

“I mean, look at all of her, not just her face.”

I frowned, but did what he asked, and the moment I could see her bare arms and legs without the horror of her face getting in the way I understood what he meant. “She’s a brownie.”

“Exactly,” he said.

“She’s been butchered to look like one,” Lucy said.

“No, Rhys means her arms and legs. They’re longer, shaped a little differently. I would bet she’s had some kind of electrolysis to get rid of the more-than-human body hair.”