A Caress of Twilight

She looked at all of us in turn, and finally came back to me, Doyle, and Frost. "Talk to me, Merry, please. Talk to me. I won't tell the lieutenant. I can't. Please help me stop this, whatever it is."

I looked at Doyle, Frost, Rhys. Galen came back out of the kitchen, but he spread his hands wide and shrugged. "I haven't been doing much of the detective stuff lately, so I don't feel like I should get a vote."

Nicca spoke up, which surprised us all. "The queen won't like it." His voice was clear, filling the room, but somehow soft, like a child whispering in the dark, afraid to be overheard.

"She didn't tell us not to share with the human police," Doyle said.

"She didn't?" Nicca's voice seemed so small, so much younger than that tall, strong body.

I turned on the couch so Nicca could see full into my face. "No, Nicca, the queen didn't tell us not to talk to the police."

He let out a large breath. "Okay." Again it was a child's answer. The grownups had told him he wouldn't get in trouble, and he believed us.

We all exchanged looks one more time, then I said, "Rhys, tell her about the spell."

He did. We emphasized that we weren't sure anyone left in the courts could still do the spell, and that it might possibly be a human magician or witch. It wasn't anyone at the Unseelie Courts, that we were sure of.

"How can you be so sure?" Lucy asked.

We exchanged another series of looks. "Trust me, Lucy, the queen doesn't have to sweat civil rights or review boards. She's very thorough."

She studied our faces. "How thorough can you guys be?"

I frowned at her. "What do you mean?"

"I've heard rumors about what your queen does to people. Can you do anything that effective without leaving marks?"

I raised my eyebrows at that. "Are you asking us to do what I think you're asking us to do?"

"I'm asking you to stop this from happening again. The fey in the hospital won't talk to the police; he won't talk to the social worker that the Bureau of Human and Fey Affairs sent over. The fey went wild when I suggested we could contact the ambassador personally if he wasn't comfortable with a human social worker. Seeing how scared he was to talk to the ambassador made me think he might be even more scared of you guys."

"Why?" I asked.

"The ambassador isn't sidhe."

"What do you expect us to do to this fey?" Doyle asked.

"I expect you to do whatever it takes to get him to talk. We've got over five hundred dead, Doyle, almost six hundred. Besides, from what Rhys says, if these things aren't stopped, if we just keep letting them feed, they'll regenerate or something. I don't want a pack of newly born ancient deities with a taste for killing ru

We agreed to go with her, but first we made a phone call. We called Maeve Reed and let her know that the ghosts of dead gods had been resurrected to kill her. Which meant it was somebody in the Seelie Court, and moreover they had the king's permission to do it.

Chapter 39

Lucy flashed her badge a lot to get us through the metal detectors with our guns and blades intact. The men even had to show the cards identifying them as queen's guardsmen before the nurse in charge would let us on the floor. But finally we stood at the bedside of a man... well, of a male. He was a tiny, misshapen thing. Sage was tiny, too, but he was perfectly proportioned. He was meant to be the size he was; clearly, the man who lay in the bed with the sheets tucked up under his arms was, even at a glance, wrong.

I am Unseelie Court and I call many shapes right, pleasant, but something about this one made the hair on the back of my neck crawl. It made me want to look away, as if he was hideous, though he wasn't.

I wasn't the only one having trouble. Rhys and Frost had looked away, turned their backs. Their reaction said that they either knew him or knew what had happened. It was a turning away like a shu

I forced myself to keep looking, to try to figure out what it was about this small man that made me want to cringe. He was a little over two feet tall, his tiny feet making small bumps in the sheet. Something about his body seemed foreshortened, even though everything was there. His head was a little big for the thin torso. His eyes were large and liquid, far too large for the face. It was as if the eyes were left over from some other face. His nose matched the eyes, but because the rest of the face had receded, the nose looked too large, as well. That was what it looked like, as if his eyes and nose had been left stranded while the rest of his face had grown smaller, meaner, pinched, and wasted.

Nicca moved through the rest of us and held his hand out. "Oh, Bucca, what has become of thee?"

The tiny figure on the bed remained immobile at first. Then, slowly, he raised one small hand on an arm so thin it was like thick string. He laid that tiny pale brown hand against Nicca's strong brown one.

Kitto turned a face shining with tears up to the lights. "Bucca-Dhu, Bucca-Dhu, what are you here?"

I thought at first Kitto had left out a word or two; then I realized he hadn't. He'd asked exactly what he wished to know.

"The two of you know him," Doyle said, making it more statement than question.

Nicca nodded, patting the tiny hand ever so gently. He spoke rapidly in the strangely musical tones of one of the old Celtic tongues. It was too rapid for me to follow, but it wasn't Welsh and it wasn't Scots, Gaelic, or Irish, which still left several dialects, not to mention countries to go.

Kitto joined in, speaking something close to what Nicca spoke, but not exactly -- a different dialect or maybe from a different century, like the difference between Middle English and modern English.

I watched Kitto's face, the eagerness, the sorrow. I knew he was very sad to find this man here in this condition, but that was all I could follow.

Doyle spoke in modern English at last. Maybe everyone else had been following just fine, but I had not. "Nicca knew him in a form not so different from this one, but Kitto remembers him as we are now, a sidhe. Bucca was once worshipped as a god."

I looked down at the wizened shape and knew what had made my skin crawl. Those huge brown eyes, that strong, straight nose -- they were very like Nicca's. I'd always assumed that Nicca's brown skin and eyes had come from the demi-fey in his heritage; but now, staring down at the tiny figure, I knew I'd been wrong.

I looked at the man with a renewed fit of horror, for now I could suddenly see it. It was as if someone had taken one of the sidhe and compressed him down into something the size of a large rabbit. I had no words for the horror that lay nearly lost in that hospital bed. And no thought to how he could have come to that form.

"How?" I asked softly, and wished instantly that I hadn't, because the small figure on the bed looked at me with those eyes, that shrunken face.

He spoke in clear though accented English. "I have brought myself to this, girl. Me and me alone."

"No," Nicca said. "That isn't true, Bucca."

The small figure shook his head, his dark hair cut short, but resting thick upon his pillow, bunching as he moved. "There are faces here I know, Nicca, beyond yours and the goblin's. There are others who were once worshipped and eventually lost their followers. They did not waste away like this. I refused to give up my power, because I thought it would diminish me." He laughed, and the sound was bitter enough to choke on. "Now look at me, Nicca, what my pride and my fear have done to me."