Divine Misdemeanors

“It’s an SUV,” I said, “more a truck than a car.” I was looking for a parking spot, and not having much luck. This was a section of town where people came to stroll on a lovely Saturday, and there were lots of people, which meant lots of cars. It was L.A. Everyone drove everywhere.

The SUV actually belonged to Maeve Reed, like so much of our stuff. Her chauffeur had offered to drive us around, but the moment the police called, the limo stayed at home. I had enough problems with the police not taking me seriously without showing up in a limo. I’d never live that down, and Lucy wouldn’t live it down either, and that mattered more. It was her job. In a sense, the other police were right; I was just sightseeing.

I knew that part of the problem was the car itself, all that technology and metal. Except that I knew several lesser fey who owned cars and drove. Most of the sidhe had no trouble in the big modern skyscrapers, and they had plenty of metal and technology. Doyle was also afraid of airplanes. It was one of his few weaknesses.

Frost called out, “Parking spot.” He pointed and I maneuvered the huge SUV toward it. I had to speed up and almost hit a smaller car that was trying to outmuscle me for the spot. It made Doyle swallow hard and let out a shaky breath. I wanted to ask him why riding in the back of the limo didn’t bother him to this degree, but refrained. I wasn’t sure if pointing out that he was only this afraid in the front seat of a car would make him more afraid in the limo. That we did not need.

I got the parking spot, though parallel parking the Escalade wasn’t my favorite thing to do. Parking the Escalade was never easy, and parallel parking was like getting a master’s degree in parking. Would that make parking a semi the doctoral test? I really never wanted to drive anything bulkier than this SUV, so I’d probably never find out.

I could see Fael’s sign from the car, just a few storefronts down. We hadn’t even had to go around the block once; perfect.

I waited for Doyle to make his shaky way out of the car, and for Frost to unbuckle and come around to my door. I knew better than to simply get out without one of them beside me. They had all made very certain that I understood that part of being a good bodyguard was to train your guardee how to be guarded. Their tall bodies blocked me at almost every turn when we were on the street. If there had been a credible threat I’d have had more guards. Two was minimum and precautionary. I liked precautionary—it meant no one was trying to kill me. The fact that it was a novelty that no one was trying said a lot about the last few years of my life. Maybe it wasn’t the happily ever after the tabloids were painting, but it was definitely happier.

Frost helped me down from the SUV, which I needed. I always had a moment of feeling childlike when I had to climb in or out of the Escalade. It was like sitting in a chair where your feet swing. It made me feel like I was six again, but Frost’s arm under mine, the height and solidness of him, reminded me that I was no longer a child, and decades from six.

Doyle’s voice came. “Fear Dearg, what are you doing here?”

Frost stopped in mid-motion and put his body more solidly in front of me, shielding me, because Fear Dearg was not a name. The Fear Dearg were very old, the remnants of a faerie kingdom that had predated the Seelie and the Unseelie courts. That made the Fear Dearg more than three thousand years old, at minimum. Since they did not breed, for they had no females, they were all simply that old. They were somewhere between a brownie, a hobgoblin, and a nightmare—a nightmare that could make a man think that a stone was his wife, or that a cliff into the sea a path of safety. And some delighted in the kind of torture that would have pleased my aunt. I’d once seen her skin a sidhe noble until he was unrecognizable and then she made him follow her on a leash like a dog.

The Fear Dearg could be taller than an average human or they could be shorter than me by a foot, and almost any size in between. The only sameness from one to the other was that they were not humanly handsome and they wore red.

The voice that answered Doyle’s question was high pitched though definitely male, but it was querulous with that tone that usually means great age in a human. I’d never heard that tone in the voice of a fey. “Why, I saved a parking spot for you, cousin.”

“We are not kin, and how did you know to save a parking place for us?” Doyle asked, and there was now no hint of his weakness in the car in his deep voice.

He ignored the question. “Oh, come. I’m a shape-shifting, illusion-using goblin, and so was your father. Phouka is not so far from Fear Dearg.”

“I am the Queen’s Darkness, not some nameless Fear Dearg.”

“Ah, and there’s the rub,” he said in his thin voice. “It’s a name I’m wanting.”

“What does that mean, Fear Dearg?” Doyle asked.

“It means I ha’ a story to tell, and it would best be told inside the Fael, where your host and my boss awaits ye. Or would ye deny the hospitality of our establishment?”

“You work at the Fael?” Doyle asked.

“I do.”

“What is your job there?”

“I am security.”

“I didn’t know the Fael needed extra security.”

“Me boss felt the need. Now I will ask once more, will you refuse our hospitality? And think long on this one, cousin, for the old rules still apply to my kind. I have no choice.”

That was a tricky question, because one of the things that some Fear Deargs were known for was appearing on a dark, wet night and asking to warm before the fire. Or the Fear Dearg could be the only shelter on a stormy night, and a human might wander in, attracted by their fire. If the Fear Dearg were refused or treated discourteously, they would use their glamour for ill. If treated well, they left you unharmed, and sometimes did chores around the house as a thank-you, or left the human with a gift of luck for a time, but usually the best you could hope for was to be left in peace.

But I could not hide behind Frost’s broad body forever, and I was begi

“Doyle, he has done nothing but be courteous to us.”

“I have seen what his kind does to mortals.”

“Is it worse than what I’ve seen our kind do to each other?”

Frost actually looked down at me then, being alert for whatever threat might, or might not, be coming. The look even through his glasses said that I was oversharing in front of someone who was not a member of our court.

“We heard what the gold king did to you, Queen Meredith.”

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. The gold king was my maternal uncle Taranis, more a great-uncle, and king of the Seelie Court, the golden throng. He’d used magic as a date-rape drug, and I had evidence in a forensic storage unit somewhere that he had raped me. We were trying to get him tried among the humans for that rape. It was some of the worst publicity the Seelie court had ever had.

I tried to peer around Frost’s body and see who I was talking to, but Doyle’s body blocked me, too, so I talked to the empty air. “I am not queen.”

“You are not queen of the Unseelie Court, but you are queen of the sluagh, and if I belong to any court left outside the Summerlands, it is King Sholto’s sluagh.”

Faerie, or the Goddess, or both, had crowned me twice that last night. The first crown had been with Sholto inside his faerie mound. I had been crowned with him as King and Queen of the Sluagh, the dark host, the nightmares of faerie so dark that even the Unseelie would not let them skulk about their own mound, but in a fight they were always the first called. The crown had vanished from me when the second crown, which would have made me high queen of all the Unseelie lands, had appeared on my head. Doyle would have been king to my queen there, and it was once traditional that all the kings of Ireland had married the same woman, the Goddess, who had once been a real queen whom each king “married,” at least for a night. We had not always played by the traditional human rules of monogamy.