Rosemary and Rue

there is to know about whoever made it, but I’m not one of them. All I know is what I’ve learned through experience, and my experience was telling me that something was wrong.

There are two kinds of problems in my world: human and fae. Back when I was doing private investigation on a professional basis, most human problems could be solved with a camera and a well-placed microphone, and when a human problem looked like it was getting deadly, I gave it back to the humans. They can handle their own trash.

Fae problems are another matter, because my loyalty is to Sylvester, even now, and my actions reflect on him. I’m his knight, and that means that no matter how bad the fae problems get, I have to see them through. This was a fae problem. Whether I liked it or not, it needed a fae solution.

Some of the blood in the carpet was still wet enough that it was soaking through the knees of my jeans. I ran a finger across one of the deeper stains, forcing fresh blood to well up through the fiber.

My mother is Daoine Sidhe. That means I am, too, debased as I may be. There are ways of talking to the dead that are almost exclusively ours—or, if not talking to them, at least coming to a better understanding. Evening’s blood could let me taste her death. The body was gone, but the blood would remember. Blood always remembers.

I raised my finger to my lips.

Blood magic is dangerous, because it skips the brain and goes straight for the gut. When you’re talking about someone as weak as I am, you’re lucky if nobody winds up trying to fly off the top of a ten-story building. Out of all Titania’s descendants, only the Daoine Sidhe can measure another’s death by the taste of their blood; everyone else with that capacity descends from Maeve and the darker paths of Faerie. Evening was my fifth time. It doesn’t get any better with practice.

The world twisted until I was looking at the apartment through a red-tinted fog. The police and the body were gone; this was what the world looked like through Evening’s eyes just before the end. It was disorienting but not painful, like trying to walk after three beers. The knowledge that coming down from this would be worse than a hangover hovered on the edge of my awareness, but I pushed it away, forcing myself deeper into the red.

The room snapped into focus, clean, perfect, and unmarred by any signs of a struggle. A warm wave of satisfaction flowed over me. Everything was where it belonged.

Especially the key.

Pulling myself back from the veil of Evening’s memories, I dragged my fingers across the bloody carpet again. Key? What key? Her blood was bitter and sweet at the same time, and my eyes unfocused, sending me crashing back into the moments before Evening’s death.

The door slams open, but it doesn’t matter; they’re too late. I know that as I turn to face them, phone in my hand. It’s too late. October knows, and she’ll come to chase her answers to ground. They’re too late, too late to take the key, and she’ll find what’s been left for her to find, she’ll end this mockery at last . . .

A flash of memory that wasn’t mine cut across the images the blood was feeding me:

I was handing a key to a small winged figure—a sprite? Where did the sprite come from?—and it took a gift of blood from my palm, running a hand along the shallow cut I had opened there, and then it flew away, leaping out of my window with the key in its arms. And then I made a final phone call, summoned October, who would never understand, who would end this at last, and the door slammed open, and I screamed, and then . . .

Then the pain came.

Riding the memories of the dead is unpleasant at the best of times. Whatever they felt, you feel, and there’s always the risk you’ll hold on too long. Following them into death is like riding a roller coaster into hell: if you’re lucky you might come back, but you shouldn’t bet on it. I ripped myself out of her memories after the shots were fired, after her throat was slit, and just before her heart stopped.

I staggered to my feet and out of the apartment, shoving my way past the police. I made it halfway down the hall before my knees buckled. I grabbed the rim of the nearest decorative pot as I fell, retching. No amount of gagging was going to get the foul taste out of my mind. You ride the blood and you pay the price, and part of that is remembering whatever you set out to remember. You get to keep it and treasure knowing what death feels like for however long you live.

I’d ridden deaths before, and come through shaken but stable. But Evening . . . oh, rowan and ash, what they did to Evening.

There are a lot of ways to kill the fae. Most of the things that kill humans will kill us—I’ve yet to meet anyone short of a Manticore that could survive being hit by a train or wouldn’t be bothered by losing their head. Even so, there are ways of killing us that would make decapitation seem like a picnic, and the worst is death by iron. It kills the magic, then the mind, and finally the body. It’s the great leveler, the one thing that can kill anyone. Death by iron is slow, painful, and all too often inevitable.

And the bastards killed her with it. It wasn’t enough that they’d invaded her privacy and ended her life: they had to make a show of it. What could she possibly have done to deserve that?

A cop walked by, heading for the apartment, and muttered, “Rookie,” as he passed. I’d obviously hit him before, and he was still seeing me as whatever he wanted to see; good. The last thing I needed was questions about why I was kneeling outside a murder scene covered in blood when my head was still spinning.

Even inside Evening’s memory, I hadn’t seen her killers. They’d somehow managed to keep themselves out of sight, or had erased themselves from the blood before they went. I didn’t know if that was possible, but I couldn’t discount it. These people were dangerous, and this was bigger than murder: someone used iron to end a life. Not just any life, either. The purebloods might have looked the other way if it had been a changeling, called it a “reprehensible affair” and left it alone . . . but Evening was one of them, born under the hills when mankind still thought fire was a neat new idea. The purebloods have their failings, but they look out for their own.

If I didn’t move quickly, things were going to explode.

FIVE

GOING BACK INTO THAT apartment took all the self-control I had, but I did it; I had to. I had heard three shots fired, and there were only two gunshot wounds on the “body.” That meant one of the bullets might still be somewhere in the room. If I wanted to be certain of the way that Evening died, I needed to find it.

Iron bullets are heavy and uneven. That changes their ballistics; they can’t fly smoothly. Even if the police knew about the third bullet, they would’ve been starting their search from the shooter’s position with an incorrect idea of how far the bullet could have gone. I found it buried in the wainscoting of the wall across from the balcony, a small, uneven sphere that told me everything I needed and didn’t want to know.

It was iron, pure enough to sting even from several feet away. I left it where it was and left the apartment for the last time. Physical evidence wasn’t required, and you can’t work sympathetic magic with iron. I’d just needed to know.

The news van was still on the street as I walked back to my car, got inside, and pulled away, but the camera crew was nowhere in sight. That was good. My misdirection spells aren’t strong enough to stand up on film, and I didn’t want them recording me with blood caked on my hands and jeans.

The iron told me two things: first, that Evening’s killers were fae, since no human would have used that particular weapon, and second, that I wasn’t dealing with any of the usual suspects. My own wounded sensibilities wanted to jump straight to the assumption that Simon and Oleander were involved, but they depended too much on magic to carry that much iron. They don’t have many scruples. That doesn’t mean they’d be willing to deaden their own magic for weeks, maybe even months, by having that much contact with iron. All that would do was get them caught, and they’re just too smart for that.

Evening’s blood had its own share of information to impart, although it was a bit more nebulous in its usefulness. She didn’t call anyone else before she died; I was the only one who knew she was gone, other than the night-haunts—and her killers. Somehow I doubted the people who killed her would be spreading the news that they’d broken Oberon’s first law—the prohibition against killing purebloods except in formally declared war—and the night-haunts aren’t big conversationalists. I don’t even know anyone who’s actually seen them. I was on my own,