Iron Kissed

"Zee's perfectly capable of killing," I told him. "However, I have it on very good authority that he didn't kill this person." I didn't tell him that if Zee had found O'Do

"Who is your very good authority—and did they happen to mention who did kill our victim?"

I pinched the top of my nose. "I can't tell you—and they don't know—just that the killer was not Zee. He found O'Do

"Can you give me something more substantial? He was found kneeling over the body with blood on his hands and the blood was still warm. Mr. Adelbertsmiter is a fae, registered with the BFA for the past seven years. Nothing human did this, Mercy. I can't talk about the specifics, but nothing human did this."

I cleared my throat. "I don't suppose you could keep that last bit out of the official report, eh? Until you catch the real killer, it would be a very good idea not to have people stirred up against the fae."

Tony was a subtle person, and he caught what I wasn't saying. "Is this like when you said it would be very good if the police didn't go looking for the fae as a cause of the rise in violent crime this summer?"

"Exactly like that." Well, not quite, and honesty impelled me to correct myself. "This time, though, the police themselves won't be in danger. But Zee will, and the real killer will be free to kill elsewhere."

"I need more than your word," he said finally. "Our expert consultant is convinced that Zee is our culprit, and her word carries a lot of weight."

"Your expert consultant?" I asked. As far as I knew, I was the closest thing to an expert consultant on fae that the Tri-Cities police forces had.

"Dr. Stacy Altman, a folklore specialist from the University of Oregon, flew in this morning. She is paid a lot, which means my bosses think we ought to listen to her advice."

"Maybe I should charge more when I consult for you," I told him.

"I'll double your paycheck next time," he promised.

I got paid exactly nothing for my advice, which was fine with me. I was liable to be in enough trouble without the local supernatural community thinking I was narking to the police.

"Look," I told him. "This is unofficial." Zee hadn't told me not to say anything about the deaths on the reservation—because he hadn't thought he would have to. It was something I already knew.

However, if I spoke fast, maybe I could get it all out before I thought about how unhappy they might be with me for telling the police. "There have been some deaths among the fae—and good evidence that O'Do

If that were true, it might save Zee (at least from the local justice system), but the political consequences could be horrific. I'd been just a kid when the fae had first come out, but I remembered the KKK burning a house with its fae occupants still in it and the riots in the streets of Houston and Baltimore that provided the impetus to confine the fae on reservations.

But it was Zee who mattered. The rest of the fae could rot as long as Zee was safe.

"I haven't heard anything about people dying in Fairyland."

"Why would you?" I asked. "They don't bring in outsiders."

"Then how do you know about it?"

I'd told him I wasn't a fae or a werewolf—but some things bear repeating so eventually they believe you. That's the theory I was working with. "I told you I'm not fae," I said. "I'm not. But I know some things and they thought I might be able to help." That sounded really lame.

"That's lame, Mercy."

"Someday," I told him, "I'll tell you all about it. Right now, I can't. I don't think I'm supposed to be telling you about this either, but it's important. I believe O'Do

"Someone strong enough to rip a grown man's head off, Mercy. Both of his collarbones were broken by the force of whatever did it. Our high-paid consultant seems to think Zee could have done it."

Oh? I frowned at my cell phone.

"What kind of fae does she say that Zee is? How much does she know about them?" I figured if Zee hadn't told me any of the stories about his past, and I had looked for them, this consultant could not possibly know any more than I did.

"She said he's a gremlin—so does he, for that matter. At least on his registration papers. He's not said a word since we picked him up."

I had to think for a minute on how to best help Zee. Finally I decided that since he was actually i

"You're consultant isn't worth squat," I told Tony. "Either she doesn't know as much as she says she does, or she's got her own agenda."

"Why do you say that?"

"There are no such things as gremlins," I told him. "It's a term made up by British pilots in the Great War as an explanation for odd things that kept their planes from working. Zee is a gremlin only because he claims he is."

"Then what is he?"

"A Mettalzauber, one of the metalworking fae. Which is a very broad category that contains very few members. Since I met him, I've done a lot of research on German fae out of sheer curiosity, but I've never found anything quite like him. I know he works metal because I've seen him do it. I don't know if he'd have had the strength to rip someone's head off, but I do know that there is no way that your consultant would know one way or another. Especially if she's calling him a gremlin and acting like that is a real designation."

"World War One?" asked Tony thoughtfully.

"You can look it up on the Internet," I assured him. "By the Second World War, Disney was using them in cartoons."

"Maybe that's when he was born. Maybe he's where the legends come from. I could see a German fae tampering with the enemy's planes."

"Zee is a lot older than World War One."

"How do you know?"

It was a good question, and I didn't have a proper answer for it. He'd never really told me how old he was.

"When he is angry," I said slowly, "he swears in German. Not modern German, which I can mostly understand. I had an English prof who read us Beowulf in the original language—Zee sounds like that."

"I thought Beowulf was written in an old version of English, not German."

Here I was on firmer ground. History degrees aren't entirely useless. "English and German both come from the same roots. The differences between medieval English and German are a lot smaller than the modern languages."

Tony made an unhappy noise. "Damn it, Mercy. I have a brutal murder and the brass wants it solved yesterday. Especially as we have a suspect caught red-handed. Now you're telling me that he didn't do it and that our high-paid, expert consultant is lying to us or doesn't know as much as she says she does. That O'Do

"Yes."

He swore nastily. "The hell of it is that I believe you, but I'll be damned if I can figure out how I'm going to tell any of this to my boss—especially as I'm not really in charge of this case."

There was a long silence on both our parts.

"You need to get him a lawyer," he said. "He's not talking, which is wise of him. But he needs to have a lawyer. Even if you are sure he is i