A local habitation

“Oh,” whispered Terrie, eyes wide. “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure. I know what dead looks like.”

“Oh, Maeve, Peter . . .” she said. “He was such a wonderful engineer . . .”

I opened my mouth to snap, and stopped as I saw the look on Quentin’s face. He was watching Terrie with utter adoration, caught up in her pain. That made even less sense than my anger. He’d been temperamental but sane through this whole ordeal, facing everything with calm equanimity. So why was he getting involved now? They’d flirted, but they hadn’t had time to fall in love, and something in his expression reminded me uncomfortably of my own when I was looking at Alex.

I was saved from following that thought to its logical conclusion when the door swung open and Jan and Elliot stepped into the room. Elliot was shaking and glassy-eyed. At least his voice was steady: he answered when I asked if they’d seen anything in the hall. They hadn’t. Not a damn thing.

Explaining what we knew didn’t take long; there wasn’t much to tell. Elliot crossed the room and put his hands on Gordan’s shoulders, but didn’t interrupt. Jan nodded, confirming my story, then offered some useful information—I hadn’t thought to check the generators for loose wires, or realized that their internal systems would record and time stamp the power outage.

Elliot, Quentin, Jan, and I went back to the generator room, leaving Terrie and Gordan behind. Even with the power on, the knowe didn’t seem any friendlier. Some kinds of darkness have nothing to do with whether there’s light.

The wards on the generator room were undisturbed. Quentin released them, and I stepped inside, taking a moment to study the scene before I let the others in. Peter was still intact; the night-haunts weren’t coming. The forensic tests I could perform—checking for footprints, tracks, and blood trails, noting the wounds and their locations on Peter’s body—took only a few minutes. Jan ran the tests on the equipment; there were no loose wires, and the generators time stamped the power outage at 7:49 PM—not exactly the witching hour. No leads there.

I looked to Jan, frowning. “Could he have turned the generators off as he fell? Could this have been a coincidence?”

“No way,” Jan replied. “You have to trip three breakers and press a button on the back of the main generator if you want to shut the system down. Failsafes.”

“Why do you know that?” She’d rattled off that chain of actions a little too glibly for my tastes.

Tiredly, Elliot said, “Jan does a lot of our hardware maintenance, especially now that we’re on a skeleton crew. She has to be able to kill the power in case of an emergency.”

“Plus, I designed a lot of these systems,” Jan said.

Elliot smiled wearily. “That, too.”

“Right,” I said, raking my hair back with both hands and sighing. “So it was intentional.”

“Looks like it,” Jan said. “Unless a dying man knows what fuses to pull.”

“Okay. Let’s get moving.”

The four of us wrapped as much of Peter’s body as we could in a sheet, careful not to break his wings, and we carried him down to the basement, clearing off a counter before laying him down. Elliot shuddered the whole time. He was starting to look rumpled; I was worried that our Ba

“What do we do now?” he asked, not looking at me.

“Now we hunt,” I said. I looked to Jan, expecting an argument, but she nodded. “Elliot, you’re with me; Quentin, with Jan. If you see anything, don’t investigate. Just run.”

“All right,” said Quentin. And we were off.

The halls of ALH were snarled like Möbius strips, bending back on themselves in strange and implausible ways. Some rooms were brightly lit, while others were illuminated only by the dim light lancing in from outside. We searched room by room, hunting through closets and cubbyholes and finding more secret routes than I wanted to believe. Tracking anyone would have been a nightmare, but tracking a native—and that was what we had to be looking for—was going to be all but impossible. Thanks to the recent perso

We found nothing. And I kept thinking of Terrie’s exaggerated mourning and Gordan’s too-clean hands.

Elliot and I had just stepped into the reception room when Quentin and Jan came around the corner. They stopped when they saw us.

“Anything?” I asked.

“Nothing,” said Quentin.

“Right.” Whoever killed Peter was cocky, and the cocky are frequently good; that’s how they live long enough to getthat way. Unless our killer could walk through walls, we were finished. “Come on, Quentin. We’re going back to the hotel.”

Elliot stared at me, eyes shell-shocked and pleading. “Can’t you stay?”

“Stay in groups. No one’s been attacked when they weren’t alone. Quentin and I need to go back to the hotel and get our things.” Mainly, we needed to get my weapons. “We’ll be back before dawn.”

“Be careful,” said Jan.

“We will,” I said. Somehow, I couldn’t be angry with them anymore. Their world was falling apart, and they knew it. “Quentin, come on.”

We walked into the cool night air together, letting the door slide closed behind us. We were halfway to the car when Quentin said, “Toby?”

“Yeah?”

“Are we coming back?”

“Yes, we are. We have a job to do. Are you holding up okay?”

“I’m scared.” He said it like he expected me to yell at him.

I shook my head. “So am I, Quentin. Believe me, so am I.”

TWELVE

THE DESK CLERK CRINGED when we stormed through the lobby. Quentin had crafted his human disguise during the drive from ALH, and I’d slammed mine into place in the parking lot. It wasn’t very well sealed, but I didn’t care. It was just there to keep us out of the tabloids until we’d reached our rooms and taken what we needed. Colin’s sealskin was slung over my arm, disguised to look like a slightly dingy towel; I wanted to keep it out of harm’s way, so that it could be returned to his family when everything was finished—if we survived.

We could probably have done without the disguises; the desk clerk was the only one in sight, and he was a pale, worried man who’d never have recognized what we really were; a child of the modern world, raised to think of faeries as pastel creatures dressed in flower petals and bathing in moonbeams. If he saw us undisguised, he’d think he was looking at a kid playing Star Trek games and a giant Tinker Bell knockoff with PMS, and he wouldn’t understand why he wanted to run away. I glanced at him as we passed, and he flinched. Looking away, I shook my head. It never gets better. I don’t think it ever will.

The humans aren’t stupid, no matter what the purebloods say; they’re just blind, and sometimes, that’s worse. They put their fear in stories and songs, where they won’t forget it. “Up the airy mountains and down the rushy glen, I dare not go a-hunting for fear of little men.” We’ve given them plenty of reasons to fear us. Even if they’ve almost forgotten—even if they only remember that we were beautiful and not why they were afraid—the fear was there before anything else. There were reasons for the burning times; there’s a reason the fairy tales survive. And there’s a reason the human world doesn’t want to see the old days come again.

Neither do most of the fae, myself included. Faerie didn’t need changelings to bridge the worlds in those days: her children ruled the night, and they were going to live forever. It didn’t last—it couldn’tlast—but they didn’t know that then. Time made Faerie weak while it made the humans strong; that’s the reason people like me can exist. Faerie is finally weak enough to need us. So, no, I don’t want the dark years back; I don’t want to rule the night or cower in the dark, and those would be my choices. But there are times when I want to drop the illusions and say, “Look, I’m a person, just like you. Can we please stop hiding from each other? We have better things to do. ”