Divine Misdemeanors

“Did the policeman who Gilda hit with this wand die or something?” I asked.

“No,” Carmichael said.

“No. What have you heard?” Wilson asked.

She frowned at him.

“What?” he asked.

I said, “This room is only for things that scare the police. Major relics, things designed to do bad things that you haven’t figured out how to de-magick or destroy yet. What did Gilda’s wand do to earn a place here?”

The two wizards looked at each other.

“Whatever you hold back,” Jeremy said, “may be the key to deciphering this wand’s power.”

“Tell us what you see first,” Wilson said.

“I’ve told you what I think,” Jeremy said.

“You said this might be sidhe workmanship. I want to know what some sidhe think of it.” Wilson looked from one to another of us; his face was very serious now. He was studying us the way he’d study anything magical that interested him. Wilson had the unsettling tendency to see the fey as another type of magical thing sometimes, as if he’d study us to see what we’d do.

The men looked at me. I shrugged and said, “Magical symbols in white and yellow are crawling over the wood with those odd sparks of orangey red. The symbols aren’t static but seem to be still moving. That’s unusual. Magical symbols glow sometimes to the i

The men with me nodded. “That’s why I thought it might be a sidhe creation,” Jeremy said.

“I don’t follow,” I said.

“The last time I saw magic that stayed that fresh, it was an enchanted item made by one of your people’s great wizards. They hide the core of the magic behind metalwork, or living greenery that is kept fresh by the magic, but it’s all pretend, Merry. It’s just meant to hide the core.”

“I understand what you’re saying, but why does that make it sidhe workmanship?”

“Your people are the only ones I’ve ever seen who could keep magic interlaid over something this fresh and vital.”

“We’ve never seen anything able to do this,” Wilson said.

“What makes it sidhe?” I asked.

“It isn’t,” Barinthus said.

We looked at him.

Jeremy looked a little uncomfortable, but he looked at the tall man and asked, “Why isn’t it sidhe magic?”

Barinthus managed to look as disdainful as I’d ever seen him. He didn’t get along with Jeremy. I’d thought it was personal at first, but realized it was some prejudice Barinthus had against Jeremy being a Trow. It was like a racial thing for Barinthus, as if a Trow wasn’t worthy enough to be the boss of us.

“I doubt I could explain it in a way you would understand,” Barinthus said.

Jeremy’s face darkened.

I turned to Wilson and Carmichael, smiling, and said, “Could you excuse us for a minute? I’m sorry, but if you could just step over there somewhere.”

They looked at each other, then at Jeremy’s angry face and Barinthus’s haughty figure, and they went to stand away from us. No one wants to be standing right next to the seven-foot-tall man when he starts a fight.

I turned back to the seven-foot-tall man. “Enough,” I said, and I poked a finger into his chest, hard enough to move him a little. “Jeremy is my boss. He pays us most of the money that clothes and feeds all of us, including you, Barinthus.”

He looked down at me, and two feet is enough distance to make haughty work really well, but I’d had all I was taking from this ex-sea god.

“You aren’t bringing in any money. You don’t contribute a damned thing to the upkeep of the fey here in L.A., so before you go all high and mighty on us, I’d think about this. Jeremy is more valuable to me and to the rest of us than you are.”

That got through the haughtiness, and I saw uncertainty on his face. He hid it, but it was in there. “You didn’t say that you needed me to contribute in that way.”

“We may be getting Maeve Reed’s houses for free, but we can’t keep letting her feed the army of us. When she comes back from Europe she may want her house back, all her houses back. What then?”

He frowned.

“Yeah, that’s right. We are more than a hundred people, counting the Red Caps, and they’re camping out on her estate because the houses already won’t hold everyone. You don’t get it. We have what amounts to a faerie court, but we don’t have a royal treasury, or magic to clothe and feed us. We don’t have a faerie mound to house us all that will just grow bigger as we need it.”

“Your wild magic created a new piece of faerie inside the gates of Maeve’s land,” he said.

“Yes, and Taranis used that piece of faerie to kidnap me, so we can’t use it to house anyone until we can guarantee that our enemies can’t use it to attack us.”

“Rhys has a sithen now. More will come.”

“And until we know that our enemies can’t use that new piece of faerie to attack us, too, we can’t move many people in there.”

“It’s an apartment building, Barinthus, not a traditional sithen,” Rhys said.

“An apartment building?”

Rhys nodded. “It magically appeared on a street and moved two buildings so that it could appear in the middle of them, but it looks like a rundown apartment building. It’s definitely a sithen, but it’s like the old ones. I open a door one time and the next time there’s a different room behind the door. It’s wild magic, Barinthus. We can’t move people in there until I know what it does, and what plans it has.”

“It is that powerful?” he said.

Rhys nodded. “It feels it, yes.”

“More sithens will come,” Barinthus said.

“Maybe, but until they do, we need money. We need as many people as possible bringing in money. That includes you.”

“You didn’t tell me that you wanted me to take the bodyguarding jobs he offered.”

“Don’t call him ‘he’; his name is Jeremy. Jeremy Grey, and he’s been making a living out here among the humans for decades, and those skills are a hell of a lot more useful to me now than your ability to make the ocean come up and smash into a house. Which was childish, by the way.”

“The people in question don’t need bodyguards. They simply want me to stand around and be stared at.”

“No, they want you to stand around and be handsome and attract attention to them and their lives.”

“I am not a freak to be paraded for cameras.”

“No one remembers that story from the fifties, Barinthus,” Rhys said.

One reporter had called Barinthus the Fish Man because of the collapsible webbing between his fingers. That reporter had died in a boating accident. Eyewitnesses said that the water just came up and slapped the boat.

Barinthus turned away from us, his hands going into his coat pockets. Doyle said, “Frost and I have both guarded humans who didn’t need guarding. We have stood and let them admire us and pay money for it.”

“You did one job and then you refused after that,” Frost said to Barinthus. “What happened to make you say no after that?”

“I told Merry it was beneath me to pretend to guard someone when I should be guarding her.”

“Did the client try to seduce you?” Frost asked.

Barinthus shook his head; his hair moved more than it should have, like the ocean on a windy day. “Seduction is not crude enough for what the woman did.”

“She touched you,” Frost said, and just the way he said it made me look at him.

“You say that like it’s happened to you, too.”

“They invite us to the parties to do more than guard them, Merry, you know that.”

“I know they want media attention but none of you told me that the clients had gotten that out of hand.”

“We’re supposed to be protecting you, Meredith,” Doyle said, “not the other way around.”

“Is that why you and Frost are back to guarding mostly just me?”

“See,” Barinthus said, “you’ve distanced yourself from it, too.”

“But we help Meredith with her investigations. We didn’t just stop doing the parties and then hide away by the sea,” Doyle said.