Iron Kissed

"Will you please get out of the truck, ma'am," the moron said, stepping out of the guardhouse and crossing in front of the truck until he was on my side of the vehicle.

Zee nodded. I got out of the car.

The guard walked all the way around me, and I had to restrain my growl. I don't like people I don't know walking behind me. He wasn't quite as dumb as he first appeared because he figured it out and walked around me again.

"Brass doesn't like civilian visitors, especially after dark," he said to Zee, who had gotten out to stand next to me.

"I am allowed, sir," Zee replied, still in that deferential tone.

The guard snorted and flipped through a few pages on his clipboard, though I don't think he actually was reading anything. "Siebold Adelbertsmiter." He pronounced it wrong, making Zee's name sound like Seabold instead of Zeebolt. "Michael McNellis, and Olwen Jones." Michael McNellis could be Uncle Mike—or not. I didn't know any fae named Olwen, but I could count the fae I knew by any name on one hand with fingers left over. Mostly the fae kept to themselves.

"That's right," Zee said with false patience that sounded genuine; I only knew it was false because Zee had no patience with fools—or anyone else for that matter. "I am Siebold." He said it the same way O'Do

The petty tyrant kept my license and walked back to his little office. I stayed where I was, so I couldn't see exactly what he did, though I could hear the sound of computer keys being tapped. He came back after a couple of minutes and returned my license to me.

"Stay out of trouble, Mercedes Thompson. Fairyland is no place for good little girls."

Obviously O'Do

I don't think my expression was bland enough, because he shoved his face into mine. "Did you hear me, girl?"

I could smell the honey ham and mustard he'd had on his di

"I heard you," I said in as neutral a tone as I could manage, which wasn't, admittedly, very good.

He fingered the gun on his hip. He looked at Zee. "She can stay two hours. If she's not back out by then, we'll come looking for her."

Zee bowed his head like combatants do in karate movies, without letting his eyes leave the guard's face. He waited until the guard walked back to his office before he got back in the car, and I followed his lead.

The metal gate slid open with a reluctance that mirrored O'Do

Zee drove through the gates and into Fairyland.

I don't know what I expected of the reservation; military housing of some sort, maybe, or English cottages. Instead, there were row after row of neat, well-kept ranch houses with attached one-car garages laid out in identical-sized yards with identical fences, chain link around the front yard, six-foot cedar around the backyard.

The only difference from one house to the next was in color of paint and foliage in the yards. I knew the reservation had been here since the eighties, but it looked as though it might have been built a year ago.

There were cars scattered here and there, mostly SUVs and trucks, but I didn't see any people at all. The only sign of life, aside from Zee and me, was a big black dog that watched us with intelligent eyes from the front yard of a pale yellow house.

The dog pushed the Stepford effect up to übercreepy.

I turned to comment about it to Zee when I realized that my nose was telling me some odd things.

"Where's the water?" I asked.

"What water?" He raised an eyebrow.

"I smell swamp: water and rot and growing things."

He gave me a look I couldn't decipher. "That's what I told Uncle Mike. Our glamour works best for sight and touch, very good for taste and hearing, but not as well for scent. Most people can't smell well enough for scent to be a problem. You smelled that I was fae the first time you met me."

Actually he was wrong. I've never met two people who smell exactly alike—I'd thought that earthy scent that he and his son Tad shared was just part of their own individual essences. It wasn't until a long time later that I learned to distinguish between fae and human. Unless you live within an hour's drive of one of the four fae reservations in the U.S., the chances of ru

"So where is the swamp?" I asked.

He shook his head. "I hope that you will be able to see through whatever means our murderer has used to disguise himself. But for your own sake, Liebling, I would hope that you would leave the reservation its secrets if you can."

He turned down a street that looked just like the first four we'd passed—except that there was a young girl of about eight or nine playing with a yo-yo in one of the yards. She watched the spi

"No one has entered," she said.

Zee nodded. "This is the latest murder scene," he told me. "We found it this morning. There are six others. The rest have had a lot of people in and out, but except for this one" — he indicated the girl with a tip of his head—"who is a Council member, and Uncle Mike, there have been no other trespassers since his death."

I looked at the child who was one of the Council and she gave me a smile and popped her bubblegum.

I decided it was safest to ignore her. "You want me to see if I can smell someone who was in all the houses?"

"If you can."

"There's not exactly a database where scents are stored like fingerprints. Even if I scent him out, I'll have no idea who it is—unless it's you, Uncle Mike, or your Council member here." I nodded my head toward Yo-yo Girl.

Zee smiled without humor. "If you can find one scent that is in every house, I will personally escort you around the reservation or the entire state of Washington until you find the murdering son of a bitch."

That's when I knew this was personal. Zee didn't swear much and never in English. Bitch, in particular, was a word he'd never used in my presence.

"It will be better if I do this alone then," I told him. "So the scents you're carrying don't contaminate what is already there. Do you mind if I use the truck to change?"

"Nein, nein," he said. "Go change."

I returned to the truck and felt the girl's gaze on the back of my neck all the way. She looked too i

I got into the truck, on the passenger side to get as much room as possible, and stripped out of all my clothes. For werewolves, the change is very painful, especially if they wait too long to change at a full moon and the moon pulls the change from them.

Shifting doesn't hurt me at all—actually it feels good, like a thorough stretch after a workout. I get hungry, though, and if I hop from one form to the other too often, it makes me tired.