A Caress of Twilight

Chapter 21-22

Chapter 21
The Grey Detective Agency didn't usually get called to murder scenes. We had helped the police in the past when something mystical was doing something bad, but that was usually as decoys or advisers. I could count on both hands the number of murder scenes I'd seen and still have a couple of fingers left over.
I had one less finger to count today. The woman's body was already on a gurney. Her yellow hair trailed across her face, darker gold where the ocean had touched it. Her very short evening dress was pale blue on the edges but dark blue where the water had soaked into it. A broad ribbon, probably white, sat just under her breasts, tightening the dress enough to show cleavage. Her long legs were bare and tanned. Her toenails were painted a funky blue to match the fingernails. Her lips were an odd blue color, too; but it was lipstick, not some sign of her death.
"The lipstick color is called asphyxiation."
I turned to the tall woman just behind me. Detective Lucinda Tate walked up with her hands plunged inside the pockets of her slacks. She tried to give me her usual smile, but it didn't work. Her eyes stayed worried and the smile vanished before it had really gotten started. Her eyes were always cynical under the humor, but today the cynicism had spilled out and swallowed the humor.
"I'm sorry. Lucy, what did you say about the lipstick?"
"It's called asphyxiation. It's supposed to mimic the lip color of a corpse who died from suffocation. Nicely ironic," she said.
I looked down at the woman again. There were bluish and white tints around the eyes, the nose, the edges of the lips. I had a strange urge to wipe off the lipstick and see if the lips really were the same color. I didn't do it, but the urge was like a great itch across my palms.
"So, she suffocated," I said.
Lucy nodded. "Yeah."
I frowned. "She didn't drown?"
"I doubt it. None of the others did."
I stared up at her. "Others?"
"Jeremy's had to go with Teresa to the hospital."
"What happened?" I asked.
"Teresa touched a lipstick that one of the women had been about to put on before she died. Teresa started hyperventilating, then she couldn't breathe. If we hadn't had paramedics on the scene, she might have died. I should have known better than to invite one of the most powerful clairvoyants in the country into this mess."
She glanced at Frost, who was standing a little out of the way, one hand on the other wrist, very bodyguardish. The effect was somewhat ruined by his silver hair spilling around him in the wind, as if it was trying to pull loose from the ponytail. A pale pink shirt matched the show hankie in the white suit jacket that matched the slacks. The slender silver belt matched his hair. His shiny loafers were creamy tan. He looked more like a fashion plate than a guard, though the wind gave occasional glimpses of the black shoulder holster underneath all that V white and pink.
"Jeremy said you were running late today," Detective Lucy said. "You getting much sleep lately, Merry?"
"Not much." I didn't bother to explain it wasn't Frost who had kept me up last night. We were doing friendly banter, empty, meaningless, something to say to fill the windy silence while we stood over the dead woman.
I looked down at her face, lovely even in death. The body looked thin, not exactly strong, more like she'd dieted her way to a size whatever. If she'd known she would die last night, would she have gone off her diet the day before?
"How old was she?"
"Her ID says twenty-three."
"She looks older," I said.
"Dieting and too much sun will do that to you." Any flash of humor had gone now. She was somber as she looked up on the cliff above us. "You ready to see the rest?"
"Sure, but I'm a little puzzled about why you called Jeremy and all of us in. It's sad, but she got herself killed, or choked to death, or something. She suffocated, it's horrible, but why call us in?"
"I didn't call in your two bodyguards." For the first time there was true hostility on her face. She pointed down the beach at Rhys. Frost might have been uncomfortable, but Rhys was having a very good time.
He watched everything with an eager eye, smiling, humming the theme song to Hawaii Five-O under his breath. Or at least that's what he'd been humming when he went farther down the beach to watch some of the uniforms wade in the surf. Rhys had already done Magnum, P.I., until Frost told him to stop. Rhys preferred film noir and would always be a Bogart fan at heart, but Bogie wasn't making movies anymore. In the last few months Rhys discovered reruns in color that he actually enjoyed.
He turned toward us and waved, smiling. His white trench coat billowed out around him like wings as he began to trudge his way back up the beach. He had had to take off his tan fedora to keep it from blowing into the sea.
"Rhys is creepy around murder scenes," Detective Lucy said. "He always has such a good time, like he's happy someone's dead."
I didn't know how to explain that Rhys had once been worshipped as a god of death, so death didn't bother him all that much. But that part was best not shared with the police. I said, "You know how much he loves film noir."
"This isn't a movie," she said.
"What's got you all upset, Lucy? I've seen you at worse murder scenes than this. Why are you so ... bothered?"
"You just wait. You won't need to ask once you've seen it."
"Can you just tell me, Lucy, please?"
Rhys came up to us, face all shiny like a kid on Yule morning. "Hi, Detective Tate. There's no burst blood vessels in the girl's eyes, no bruising anywhere that I could find. Does anyone know how she suffocated?"
"You looked at the body?" Her voice was cold.
He nodded, still smiling. "I thought that's what we were here to do."
She pointed a finger at his chest. "You weren't invited to this show. Merry was, and Jeremy was, and Teresa was, but you -- " She poked the finger into his chest, " -- were not."
The smile faded and left his tricolored blue eye cold. "Merry has to have two bodyguards with her at all times. You know that."
"Yeah, I know that." She poked again, hard enough that he was shoved backwards just a little. "But I don't like you around my murder scenes."
"I know the rules, Detective. I haven't messed with your evidence. I've stayed out of the way of everyone from the EMTs to the video photographer."
The wind gusted, blowing her dark hair across her face, so she was forced to take a hand out of her pocket to smooth it back. "Then stay out of my way, too, Rhys."
"Why, what did I do wrong?"
"You enjoy this." The last was almost spit in his face. "You're not supposed to enjoy it." She stalked back up the beach toward the stairs that led up to the road, the parking lot, and the club on its little promontory.
"Who licked her fur the wrong way?" he asked.
"She's creeped out by whatever's up the stairs, and she needs someone to take it out on. You're it."
"Why me?"
Frost had joined us. "Because she is human and humans mourn death. They don't enjoy poking at it like you do."
"That's a lie," Rhys said. "A lot of the detectives enjoy their work, and I know the medical examiner does."
"But they don't go around humming at the crime scene," I said.
"Sometimes they do," Rhys said.
I frowned at him, trying to figure out how to make it more clear. "Humans hum, or sing, or tell bad jokes over the bodies so they won't be scared. You hum because you're happy. This doesn't bother you."
He glanced down at the dead woman. "She doesn't care anymore. She's dead. We could stage a Wagnerian opera on top of her and she wouldn't care."
I touched his arm. "Rhys, it's not the dead you should try to placate; it's the living."
He frowned at me.
"Be less happy in front of the humans when you are looking at their dead," Frost said.
"Very well, but I don't understand why I should pretend."
"Pretend that Detective Tate is Queen Andais," I said, "and it bothers her that you go around chortling over the dead."
I watched some thought slip over his face, then he shrugged. "I can seem less happy around the detective, but I still don't understand why."
I sighed, and looked at Frost. "Do you understand why?"
"If it were my kinswoman on the gurney, I would feel something for her death."
I turned back to Rhys. "See."
He shrugged. "I'll be sad around Detective Tate."
"Just somber will do, Rhys." I'd had this sudden image of him falling on the next corpse with weeping and wailing. "Don't overdo it."
He grinned at me, and I knew that he'd been thinking of exactly what I'd feared. "I mean it, Rhys. If you don't behave yourself, Tate could get you barred from crime scenes."
He suddenly looked somber; that mattered to him. "Okay, okay, I'll be good. Sheesh."
Detective Tate yelled back at us, her voice riding the wind like seagulls overhead. She was halfway up the stairs, and it was impressive that her voice carried back to us so clearly. "Hurry it up. We don't have all day here."
"Actually, we do," Rhys said.
I was already walking through the soft sand toward the stairs. I was very sorry that I'd worn high heels today, and I didn't protest when Frost offered me his arm. "Actually we do what?" I asked.
"We have all day. We have all eternity. The dead aren't going anywhere."
I glanced at him. He was watching the tall detective with a sort of faraway, almost dreamy look on his face. "You know what, Rhys?"
He looked at me, raising one eyebrow.
"Lucy's right. You're creepy at a murder scene."
He grinned again. "Not nearly as creepy as I could be."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
Rhys wouldn't answer. He just started walking ahead of us in his lower-heeled shoes. I looked up at Frost. "What did he mean by that?"
"Rhys was once called the Lord of Relics."
"And that means what?" I asked, nearly stumbling in the heels, holding tighter to his arm.
"Relics is an old poetic word. It means corpse."
I stopped him with my hands on his arm and stared up at him. I tried to see his eyes through a tangle of his silver hair and my own red fluttering across my face. "When a sidhe is called a lord of anything, it means they have power over it. So you're saying what? That Rhys can cause death? I knew that."
"No, Meredith, I am saying that he could at one point raise the old dead, those that had grown stiff and cold, to rise and fight on our side in battle."
I just stared at him. "I didn't know Rhys had that kind of power."
"He no longer does. When the Nameless was created, Rhys lost the power to raise armies of the dead. We had no more use for armies among ourselves, and to fight the humans in such a way would have meant our expulsion from this country." Frost hesitated, then said, "Many of us lost our most otherworldly powers when the Nameless was cast. But I do not know of any who lost so much as Rhys."
I watched Rhys walking ahead of us, his white curls blowing in the wind to mingle with the white of his coat. He had gone from being a god who could raise armies at his will, to being... Rhys. "Is that why he won't tell me his real name, the name he was worshipped under?"
"When he lost his powers, he took the name Rhys and said that the other was dead along with his magic. Everyone, including the queen, has always respected that. It could so easily have been any one of us who gave the most of ourselves to the spell."
I balanced on one foot while I slipped off the heels. My stocking feet would do for the sand. "How did you get everyone to agree to the Nameless?"
"Those in power decreed death for any who opposed it."
I should have guessed. I transferred my shoes to one hand and slipped my other hand back on Frost's arm. "I mean, how did Andais get Taranis to agree?"
"That is a secret only the queen and Taranis know." He touched my hair, smoothing it back from my face. "Unlike Rhys, I do not like being around so much death and sadness. I look forward to tonight."
I turned my face and kissed his palm. "Me, too."
"Merry!" Lucy Tate screamed at me from the top of the steps. Rhys was almost even with her. Lucy walked out of sight, with Rhys almost but not quite chasing her. If you could call it chasing at a casual walk.
I tugged on Frost's arm. "We had better hurry."
"Yes," Frost said. "I do not trust Rhys's sense of humor alone with the detective."
We exchanged a glance on the windy beach, then we began to hurry toward the steps. I think we were both hoping to get there before Rhys did something cute and unfortunate. I, for one, didn't believe we'd make it in time.
Chapter 22
Some of the bodies were in body bags, plastic cocoons from which nothing would wake. But they'd run out of body bags and just started laying the uncovered bodies out. I could not count at a glance how many there were. More than fifty. Maybe a hundred, maybe more. I couldn't bring myself to start counting, to make them just things in a row, so I stopped trying to estimate. I tried to stop thinking at all.
I tried to pretend that I was back at court and this was one of the queen's "entertainments." You never dared show distaste, disgust, horror, or least of all fear at one of her little shows. If you did, she'd often make you join in on the fun. Her shows ran more to sex and torture than true death, and suffocation wasn't one of Andais's kinks, so this little disaster wouldn't have pleased her. She'd probably see it as a waste. So many people who could have admired her, so many people she could have terrorized.
I pretended that my life depended on keeping a blank face and feeling nothing. It was the only way I knew to walk among the bodies and not have hysterics. My life depended on not going into hysterics. I repeated it in my head like a mantra -- my life depends on not having hysterics; my life depends on not having hysterics -- and it kept me moving down the rows, kept me able to look down at all this horror and not scream.
The bodies that weren't covered all had lips almost the same shade of blue as the girl on the beach, except this obviously wasn't lipstick. They'd all suffocated, but not instantly. They hadn't dropped magically and mercifully in their tracks. There were nail marks on some of the bodies where they'd clawed at their throats, their chests, as if trying to get air into lungs that no longer worked.
Nine bodies seemed different from the others. I couldn't figure out what it was, but I kept pacing in front of the nine, scattered in a row among the others. Frost had paced beside me at first, but he was back at the edge of the floor, trying to stay out of the way of the hurrying uniforms, plainclothes, paramedics, and all the extra people who seem to accumulate at any murder scene. I remembered being surprised the first time I saw how very many people tracked through a murder scene.
Behind Frost was something covered with a tablecloth but it wasn't a body. It took me a few seconds to realize that it was a Christmas tree. Someone had covered the artificial greenery, covered the entire Christmas display. It was as if someone hadn't wanted the tree to see the bodies, like hiding the eyes of the innocent so they won't be tarnished. It should have seemed ridiculous, but it didn't. Somehow, it seemed appropriate to cover the decorations in this room. To hide them away so they wouldn't be spoiled.
Frost seemed unaware of the covered tree, or much of anything else. Rhys, on the other hand, seemed aware of everything.
He stayed right at my side. He wasn't humming or even smiling now. He'd been subdued since we walked in on the carnage. Though carnage seemed the wrong word for it. Carnage seemed to imply blood and flesh ripped and torn. This was strangely clean, almost impersonal. No, not impersonal -- cold. I'd seen people who enjoyed slaughter, and they literally enjoyed the act of cutting someone up, the feel of the blade in flesh. There was no savage joy in this scene. It was just death, cold death, as if the Grim Reaper had been brought to life to ride through this place.
"What is it about these nine that's different?" I hadn't realized I'd spoken aloud until Rhys answered me.
"They went quietly, no nail marks, no signs of struggle. These, and only these nine, just... dropped where they were dancing."
"What in Goddess's name happened here, Rhys?"
"What the fuck are you doing here, Princess Meredith?" We both turned to the far side of the room. The man stalking toward us through the bodies was medium build, balding, obviously muscular, and even more obviously pissed.
"Lieutenant Peterson, isn't it?" I said. The first and last time I'd met Peterson I'd been trying to convince the police to investigate the possibility that a fey aphrodisiac had gotten out into the human population. They'd informed me that aphrodisiacs didn't work, and neither did love spells. I'd proven that it did work, and nearly caused a riot in the Los Angeles Police Department. The lieutenant had been one of the men I'd use to prove my point. They'd had to handcuff him before they could drag him off me.
"Don't be pleasant, Princess. What the fuck are you doing here?"
I smiled. "It's lovely to see you, too, Lieutenant."
He didn't smile. "Get out, now, before I have you thrown out."
Rhys moved an inch closer to my side. Peterson's eyes flicked to him, then back to me. "I see your two gorillas. If they try anything, diplomatic immunity or no diplomatic immunity, they're going to jail."
I glanced back just enough to see that Frost was drifting closer. I shook my head, and he stopped. He frowned, clearly not happy; but he didn't have to be happy, he just had to give me room.
"Have you ever seen this many dead before?" I asked. My voice was quiet.
"What?" Peterson asked.
I repeated my question.
He shook his head. "What does that have to do with anything?"
"It's horrible," I said.
"Yeah, it's horrible, and what the fuck does that have to do with anything?"
"You'd be friendlier if it wasn't such a horrible crime scene."
He made a sound that was almost a laugh, but too harsh to be one. "Well, hell, Princess, this is friendly. This is exactly how friendly I am to murderers like you who hide behind diplomatic immunity." He smiled, but it was a baring of teeth, like a snarl.
I'd once been suspected of killing a man who'd attempted to rape me. I hadn't done it, but without diplomatic immunity I might have gone to jail anyway. I'd have at least seen a trial. I didn't try to deny it again. Peterson wouldn't believe me now any more than he had before.
"Why are these nine bodies the only ones that went quietly?" I asked.
He frowned at me. "What?"
"Why are these nine bodies the only ones without signs of struggle on them?"
"This is a police investigation, and I am the senior officer on-site. This is my investigation, and I don't care if you are one of our civilian advisers on metaphysical shit. I don't even care if you've helped us out in the past. You've never done shit for me, and I don't need help from any goddamned faerie. So, for the last time, get the fuck out of here."
I'd tried being sympathetic. I'd tried being businesslike. When being good doesn't help, you can always be bad. I reached out toward him, as if to touch his face. He did what I knew he'd do. He backed up.
"What's wrong, Lieutenant?" I made sure to look puzzled.
"Don't ever touch me." His voice was quieter now. And, I realized, much more dangerous than the yelling.
"It wasn't the touch of my skin that drove you mad last time, Lieutenant. It was the Branwyn's Tears."
His voice dropped even lower. "Don't... ever... touch me... again." There was something in his eyes that was frightening. He was afraid of me, really afraid, and that made him hate me.
Rhys stepped a little ahead of me, not quite putting himself between me and the lieutenant but almost. I didn't fight him. It's never comforting to have anyone look at you with such hatred.
"We've met only once, Lieutenant. Why do you hate me?" It was a question so direct that even a human wouldn't have asked it. But I didn't understand, couldn't understand; so I had to ask.
He looked down, hiding his eyes as if he hadn't expected me to see so far into his soul. His voice was very low when he said, "You forget, I saw what you left on that bed -- just a pile of raw meat, cut to ribbons. Without dental records we couldn't have recognized him. And you wonder why I don't want you to touch me?" He shook his head and looked at me, eyes blank and unreadable, cop eyes. "Now, get out, Princess. Take your two goons and get out. I am senior officer in charge, and I won't have you here." His voice was calm now, very calm, too calm for standing in the middle of all this.
"Lieutenant, I called the Grey Detective Agency." Lucy Tate came in from the deck.
"And who authorized that?" Peterson asked.
"I've never needed special authorization to bring them in before." She picked her way through the lines of bodies, and when she got close enough, Lucy was over a head taller than the lieutenant.
"The clairvoyant I understand. Even Mr. Grey, because he's a well-known magician. But why her?" He jerked a thumb at me.
"The sidhe are well known for magic use, Lieutenant. I thought the more heads we have on this one, the better."
"You thought, you thought... Well, don't think, Detective. Just follow procedure. And procedure is that you check with the head of the task force, and that's me. And I say she's not welcome."
"Lieutenant, I -- "
"Detective Tate, if you want to stay on this task force, you'll follow my lead, my orders, and you won't argue with me. Is that clear?"
I watched Lucy struggle with his sharp words, then finally she said, "Yes, sir, that's clear."
"Good," he said, "because the upper brass can think anything they want, but it's my ass on the line here, in the cameras, and I say it's some kind of toxic gas or poison. When they finish the toxicology work on the other bodies, they'll know what it is, and it'll be our job to find out who did it. Look first for whodunit, not whatdunit. You don't have to go to fairy-tale land to solve this murder. It's just another crazy son of a bitch that's as mortal as everyone else in this room."
He turned his head to one side in an odd gesture, then looked at me, at Rhys, and at Frost beyond. "Sorry, my mistake. Mortal as all the rest of us humans in this room. Now, you take you immortal asses and get out of here. And if I hear that anyone on my watch has been talking to you, they'll be up on disciplinary charges. Is that clear to everyone?"
"Yes, sir," Lucy said.
I smiled charmingly at him. "Thanks so much, Lieutenant. I hated being here among all this death. It's been one of the worst things I've ever seen in my life, so thank you for letting me leave, when it was taking everything I had not to run out." I kept smiling as I pulled off the one surgical glove I'd put on. I hadn't touched anything, or any body, because I hadn't wanted to take the feel of their dead flesh back with me.
Rhys stripped off his gloves, too, and he had touched things. We worked our way to the bag set out for glove disposal, and I couldn't help saying just before we stepped out the door, "Thanks again, Lieutenant, for letting me go. I agree with you, I don't know what the hell I'm doing here." With that I left, Rhys and Frost trailing behind me like pale shadows.