Grave War

by Price, Kalayna

  “Compelled to do so?” I lifted an eyebrow. “Compelled by the former queen or by their own desires?” Though wouldn’t the latter fall under “by choice”?

  “By the High King, ultimately, but yes, by the seasonal rulers directly.” Nori had that tone like she was instructing a rather dense toddler, but when I continued to stare at her, she sighed and said, “Faerie runs on belief magic. Humans forget very easily, especially those who are not exposed to as much magic as those inside folded spaces. Fae are sent out into the world to remind humans we are real.”

  “Ah. And how often are the FIB contacted about cases outside of Nekros?”

  Nori shrugged again. “Humans who are not accustomed to interacting with magic tend to be more prickly. They report on minor grievances more often—in which case we typically solve the problem by removing the fae in question. Disappearances resulting from human violence against fae are the bigger problem. That will usually demand an agent’s actual presence.”

  “Is that common?”

  “It happens. The largest cities have a field office where a single agent is stationed. They serve there for three- to four-month assignments. You will be in charge of creating the rotation.”

  Well, wouldn’t that make me popular. It probably also explained the attitude of the law enforcement personnel I’d met at the conference I’d attended the previous week. When I’d introduced myself as a PI turned FIB agent most had dismissed me out of hand. I’d thought it was my background—PIs were rarely taken seriously by real cops. But over the course of the weekend, I’d found that the general attitude tended to be that the entire FIB organization was worthless. It had shocked me, because in Nekros, while I wouldn’t say the FIB were respected by the local cops, they were at least acknowledged as a legitimate agency and one to be taken seriously. The conference had been in Texas, though, pretty damn far from the door to Faerie. If most big cities only had a single FIB agent who was responsible for the entire surrounding area, and that agent rotated out three to four times a year . . . Yeah, I could see why agencies outside Nekros thought they were a joke.

  We discussed how many agents were in North America’s FIB team, both in Nekros and serving in cities across winter’s territory. Then Nori hauled a large stack of manila envelopes onto the desk in front of me.

  “These are the reports from our field agents since the king’s reign began. Some are cases they’ve marked as closed and others are more general reports,” she said, and I eyed the daunting stack of files. Falin had only been king for about a month.

  Nori wasn’t finished yet. She next retrieved a nearly equally large stack, but this one was loose paper. “And these are queries, complaints, and requests from the territories outside of Nekros. A few are from law enforcement, some are from independent or stationed fae, but most are from humans. And this stack is composed of the reports from our local agents.” She dropped a third pile of manila folders in front of me. It rivaled the first two, despite being for only Nekros. “Here are the queries, complaints, and requests for our local office. And finally, here are the files on our active open cases.” She put a fifth pile on my desk. This one at least was only a handful of folders. “We’ll address the foreign offices later.”

  I stared at the piles of files and papers in front of me. Had Falin really done so much paperwork when he’d been head of the FIB? I’d always seen him more as an action guy, but then that was typically the role he played when we were together on a case. I never saw him in the office, though now that I thought about it, he did spend a fair number of late nights on his laptop. Between the paperwork, the cases he worked, and the fact that he’d spent a significant amount of time fighting the former queen’s duels, I wasn’t sure how he’d been keeping up with everything. Had he really gone through every complaint and request personally, or was Nori trying to overwhelm me?

  I picked up the stack of local current cases first. It was the smallest stack, which made it a little less intimidating. I thumbed through the top few quickly, noting that each started with a request or complaint form on which someone—I was guessing Nori, as the handwriting wasn’t Falin’s—had scratched out a few notes as well as an agent assignment. The next few pages were mostly handwritten daily reports from the assigned agent on what had been accomplished.

  The first case involved searching for who had carved their initials into a dryad’s tree trunk. That seemed like a fairly trivial crime until I realized the case being built was for aggravated assault. Right, dryads didn’t just live in trees—they were trees. The next case involved a dispute between two fae over ownership of a flower. I stopped and read that again. The agent running the case had been interviewing neighbors and attempting to establish which fae held rightful ownership of the flower.

  A flower.

  Then I realized the fae in question were diminutive sprites, and the flower was where they lived. This was a home ownership/squatter issue.

  I was so out of my depth here. My knowledge of fae—or really my lack thereof—was going to be a major stumbling block.

  I quickly scanned the rest of the active files, multiple times having to check my perspective and try to puzzle out why the case was a case. Then I grabbed the stack of outstanding requests, complaints, and queries and flipped through them quickly, knowing I was going to have to get Nori to help me prioritize them. Some of the forms were complete, with all the boxes filled in. Other forms had clearly been transcribed from a message, with barely any information provided at all, just a short summary of the problem and the source of the complaint or request. Most seemed trivial, but so had the flower and the carved initials at first blush. Some of the files already had notes jotted on them marking them as not a priority or waiting for confirmation before further investigation. The handwriting was the same as I’d seen on the assigned cases, which I was guessing meant the notes were written by Nori. Some of the forms were older than a month, a few considerably older, and while I spotted a couple with Falin’s penmanship, most were Nori’s. Which I guessed meant Falin hadn’t gone through all these files himself.

  Nori was hazing me.

  I pressed my lips together to keep from calling her on it, and kept scanning the pile of paperwork. After all, even if it was some sort of dominance play, I was learning something. A request from the Nekros City Police Department caught my eye. It referenced a file—which wasn’t attached and I had no idea where to find it—but the brief summary mentioned disturbances inside a home in Nekros City in which fae involvement was possible. Not suspected, just listed as possible. From what I could gather, the original owner had died, and after probate, the house was put up for rent. No renters would stay more than a few weeks, most claiming the house was haunted. I frowned. That sounded more like a job for Tongues for the Dead, my PI firm, than for the FIB. I was surprised the cops hadn’t contacted me to look into the case. I’d been on retainer for the local PD for years, and while usually they called me in to raise shades, I had been asked to investigate a haunting or two. Of course, I wasn’t on the best terms with the police department currently. Too many of my recent cases had landed me in the middle of their murder investigations, and as some of the bad guys had ended up dust, there were questions I couldn’t answer.

  At the bottom of the request for assistance page, Nori had jotted a note that it might be a boggart and the priority was low. I frowned at the note. I’d read through dozens of complaints and requests, and this was one of the few that came from the PD—shouldn’t it have been prioritized, if just for law enforcement relations?

  I held up the sheet. “Why is this low priority?”

  Nori’s lips twitched downward, but she walked over and took the paper from me, scanning it quickly before shaking her head. “Because if it is a fae, it is likely a boggart.”

  “And he or she is apparently damaging personal property and driving humans out of their home. Shouldn’t that warrant a little more investigation?”
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  Nori rolled her eyes, as if terribly put upon that I was asking her to explain herself. “Brownies only transform into boggarts when they are really pissed. If it is a boggart, most likely the brownie is attached to the house and was upset when the owner died and strangers started showing up and moving stuff around. While not impossible to relocate a brownie, it’s a pain in the ass and complicated. Brownies rarely remain in full-on boggart mode long, so waiting for it to calm down is more expedient than relocating it.”

  I knew a couple brownies, but they were attached to people, not places. I had heard stories of the tenacity and dedication the small fae tended to display, so while I didn’t doubt that moving an angry one would be complicated, I also didn’t think it would be a waste to check out the site. I put the request to the side, planning to have the mentioned file located and check out the house myself. At least I would be able to determine if it was an angry ghost or a pissed fae causing the trouble.

  I continued through the stack of papers, reading quickly. A few I separated, intending to discuss further with Nori and have agents assigned to look into them. Others I left in the main pile, not sure what to make of them, or trusting Nori’s triage notes denoting them as low priority. One report made me pause. It was short, the form scarcely completed, as if the fae who’d filed the request hadn’t done so in person and someone in the agency had simply jotted down the most pertinent information. The summary was short, just a single sentence:

  The nixies in the swamp south of Nekros have reported one of their ponds has fouled.

  That and a date three weeks past was all the information listed. At the bottom, in the space reserved for internal use only, Nori had noted the complaint as a low priority.

  I stared at the form, as if it would reveal more than the few words it held. Months ago, Falin and I’d had a nearly deadly run-in with a water hag named Jenny Greenteeth in the swamp below Nekros. She’d been part of a conspiracy to destabilize the winter court that had resulted in the deaths of many fae and quite a few humans, but she’d escaped, and was presumed to have fled winter’s territory. We’d located her last time because she fouled the bodies of water where she made her home. Was she back? The report was already nearly a month old and didn’t say exactly where the fouled water was—the swamp was a big place—but I put the form aside to follow up on as soon as possible.

  I was slowly working my way through the first of the stacks when a knock sounded on my office door. The door wasn’t actually closed, so the woman outside had knocked on the frame only in an attempt to be polite.

  “This was delivered for you,” she said in a dreamy voice that didn’t match the girl-next-door glamour she wore.

  The “this” she’d mentioned wasn’t immediately obvious. Then she stepped aside, and a man walked in carrying an enormous bouquet of red roses.

  The blood drained from my face at the sight of the flowers.

  “Where would you like them?” he asked. He wore one of those stretchy athletic jackets cyclists favored, so I guessed he worked for a courier company, or maybe the flower company, not the FIB.

  I nudged the small trash bin next to my desk toward him. “In there.”

  The guy looked down at the bin and then back up at me. “Excuse me?”

  I opened my mouth, and then closed it and cleared my throat. Acting like I was afraid of a bouquet of flowers was not going to earn me points with my agents, and Nori and Tem were both watching me. So was the agent who had led in the delivery guy, and everyone looked bewildered by my actions.

  I forced myself to smile, but judging by the way the guy shrank back a step, maybe it wasn’t my best attempt. “Do you know who sent them?”

  “I’m just the delivery guy,” he said, dropping the flowers on the corner of my desk. “You might check the card.”

  Right. I glanced at the bouquet. There was a small card attached to a plastic pole bound in with the flowers. The outside was simple ivory with silver embossing around the edges. I’d have to touch it to see if it said anything inside. I opened my senses, just a crack, searching both with my ability to sense magic and visibly looking with my psyche at the flowers and card, scouring them for any hidden spells.

  Nothing.

  I’d removed my gloves to flip through the piles of paperwork Nori had given me, but now I retrieved them, pulling them on before reaching for the card. I plucked it from its post and flipped it open. I was hoping I’d see Falin’s neat cursive, that he’d sent me flowers because I’d been nervous and this had nothing to do with the roses the night before.

  No such luck.

  In tight, unfamiliar block print, the card read:

  Lexi, congratulations on your big promotion.

  No signature. No stamp or mention of the florist they’d been ordered from. Nothing overtly menacing, and yet a cold chill crawled down my spine. Who the hell was sending me flowers?

  I dropped the unhelpful note and looked back up at the delivery guy. “You’re a bike courier?” I asked, again noting his athletic wear and lack of uniform. “Did you pick these up at a flower shop or . . . ?”

  The courier glanced down at his phone. “It was a private pickup. Guy met me at the park in the Quarter with the flowers. Listen, I have another job, if you’re not going to tip me . . .” He started backing out of the room.

  Shit. I hadn’t even considered that he was waiting for a tip. Do you tip someone for delivering what might be a threat? Not that it was his fault. I reached for my purse and he paused when he saw me move, obviously anticipating some money.

  “What did the guy look like?” I asked as I dug out my wallet. I had all of two dollars in cash. I poked around searching for more as I waited for him to answer.

  The courier shrugged. “Tall. Dressed like he had money.”

  Which told me nothing. “Do you have his customer information?”

  “Uh, I know you are kind of like a cop, but if you want that, you’ll have to go through the company. I just pick up and deliver.”

  Right. I handed him the two dollars and he made a face like it wasn’t enough. I didn’t care. It wasn’t like I’d wanted the flowers and he hadn’t been super helpful. Besides, based on the way he assessed the guy he’d picked up the flowers from, I was guessing he was tipped on both ends.

  “That’s not a normal reaction to receiving flowers, boss,” Tem said after the courier left the room, the female agent who’d shown him in escorting him out of the building again. Tem’s tone was conversational, but there were questions under the surface.

  I shrugged. I wasn’t going to go into why the flowers bugged me. There was nothing overtly threatening about them. They really might be from some admirer who didn’t know me by anything but the planeweaver the former queen had been trying to add to her court. Hell, it might not even be a romantic admirer, but a courtier simply trying to gain a foot up by entangling themselves with someone—me—they thought the new king had interest in tying tighter to his court.

  I swiped the flowers into the bin beside my desk and then turned back to the files I’d been digging through. I had other things to focus on than a secret admirer.

  Chapter 5

  So, how was the first day?” Tamara asked, reaching for the bowl of popcorn Rianna had just set on the TV table beside the couch. She couldn’t quite reach and did this odd rolling, straining thing until Holly took pity on her and nudged the entire stand closer. “Thanks,” she said, balancing the bowl on her enormously pregnant belly like it was a table. Then she looked over at me, waiting for my answer.

  “Uh . . . it was . . . really long.”

  “That’s seriously not all the information you’re getting away with giving us,” Holly said, staring rather longingly at Tamara’s popcorn. “Dish. We want all the details.”

  I shrugged. “Truly, it was boring. I spent most of the day doing paperwork,” I said as I queued up an episode
of Curse Breakers on Tamara’s big-screen TV. The opening credits began rolling, but I knew I wouldn’t get out of the questions that easy.

  “And how did it go stepping up as a superior to the fae that once arrested you?” Rianna asked, settling down on the couch with her own bowl of popcorn.

  Holly watched Rianna toss a kernel of popcorn, gleaming yellow with a heavy covering of butter, into her mouth and shook her head. “How can you eat that?”

  Rianna examined another smothered piece and then shrugged, tossing it in her mouth. “I like the motions. It brings back memories.”

  And only memories, I guessed. Holly hadn’t questioned Rianna because of the health ramifications of the heavily buttered popcorn, but because Rianna was a changeling and as such, couldn’t gain any nutrition from mortal food. It turned to ash on her tongue, which sounded rather disgusting, but Rianna just picked up another piece, tossing it high and tilting her head back to catch it in midair.

  “I’ve always enjoyed popcorn and movies,” she said.

  Holly wrinkled her nose. She wasn’t a changeling, but she was addicted to Faerie food so mortal food turned to ash for her as well. Unlike Rianna, she didn’t enjoy going through the motions, so she had no popcorn in front of her. On the floor beside Rianna, Desmond, who in appearance looked to be a huge black dog with red eyes, huffed. He clearly disapproved of Rianna’s actions, but I guessed the popcorn wouldn’t actually hurt her, or he probably would have insisted she stop.

  The huge barghest turned and placed his front paws on the couch, about to jump onto the seat.

  “No. No. No dogs on the furniture,” Tamara said, snapping her fingers at Desmond.

  Desmond huffed again, his large jowls blowing outward, and he stared at Tamara.