Iron Kissed mt-3

by Patricia Briggs

  I put my paws on the window ledge and stared out at the woods beyond, and wonder replaced the childish disappointment of discovering the reservation to be a particularly unimaginative suburbia.

  The coyote wanted to go explore the secrets that we just knew lay within the deep green forest. But we had a job to do. So I pulled my nose away from the glass and hop-scotched on the dry places on the floor until I was back out in the hallway—which looked just as it always had.

  There were two bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a kitchen. My job was made easier because I was only interested in fresh scents, so the search didn't take me long.

  When I looked back into the living room, on my way out of the house, its windows still looked out to forest rather than backyard. My eyes lingered for a moment on the easy chair which was positioned to look out at the trees. I could almost see him sitting there, enjoying the wild as he smoked his pipe in a haze of rich-smelling smoke.

  But I didn't see him, not really. He wasn't a ghost, just a figment of my imagination and the scent of pipe smoke and forest. I still didn't know what he'd been, other than powerful. This house would remember him for a long time, but it held no unquiet ghosts.

  I walked out the open front door and back into the bland little world the humans had built for the fae to keep them out of their cities. I wondered how many of those opaque cedar fences hid forests—or swamps—and I was grateful that my coyote form kept me from being able to ask questions. I doubt I'd have had the willpower to keep my mouth shut otherwise, and I thought the forest was one of those things I wasn't supposed to see.

  Zee opened the truck door for me and I hopped in so he could drive me to the next place. The girl watched us drive off, still not speaking. I couldn't read the expression on her face.

  The second house we stopped at was a clone of the first, right down to the color of the trim around the windows. The only difference was that the front yard had a small lilac tree and a flower bed on one side of the sidewalk, one of the few flower beds I had seen since I came in here. The flowers were all dead and the lawn was yellowed and in desperate need of a lawn mower.

  There was no guardian at this porch. Zee put his hand on the door and paused without opening it. "The house you were in was the last one who was killed. This house belongs to the first and I imagine that there have been a lot of people in and out since."

  I sat down and stared up into his face: he cared about this one.

  "She was a friend," he said slowly as his hand on the door curled into a fist. "Her name was Connora. She had human blood like Tad. Hers was further back, but left her weak." Tad was his son, half-human and currently at college. His human blood hadn't, as far as I could see, lessened the affinity for metals he shared with his father. I don't know whether he'd gotten his father's immortality: he was nineteen and looked it.

  "She was our librarian, our keeper of records, and collector of stories. She knew every tale, every power that cold iron and Christianity robbed us of. She hated being weak; hated and despised humans even more. But she was kind to Tad."

  Zee turned his face so I couldn't see it and abruptly, angrily, opened the front door.

  Once again I entered the house alone. If Zee hadn't told me Connora had been a librarian, I might have guessed. Books were stacked everywhere. On shelves, on floors, on chairs and tables. Most of them weren't the kind of books that had been made in the last century—and none of the titles I saw were written in English.

  As in the last house, the smell of death was present, though, as Zee had promised, it was old. The house mostly just smelled musty with a faint chaser of rotten food and cleaning fluids.

  He hadn't said when she died, but I could guess that there hadn't been anyone here for a month or more.

  About a month ago, the demon had been causing all sorts of violence by its very presence. I was pretty sure that the fae had considered that, and was reasonably certain the reservation was far enough away to have escaped that influence. Even so, when I regained my human form, I thought I might ask Zee about it.

  Connora's bedroom was soft and feminine in an English cottage way. The floor was pine or some other softwood covered with scattered handwoven rugs. Her bedspread was that thin white stuff with knots that I always have associated with bed-and-breakfasts or grandmothers. Which is odd, since I've never met any of my grandparents—or slept in a bed-and-breakfast.

  A dead rose in a bud vase was on a small table next to the bed—and there wasn't a book to be found.

  The second bedroom was her office. When Zee said she was collecting stories, I'd somehow expected notebooks and paper, but there was only a small bookcase with an unopened package of burnable discs. The rest of the shelves were empty. Someone had taken her computer—though they'd left her printer and monitor; maybe they'd taken whatever had been on the shelves as well.

  I left the office and continued exploring.

  The kitchen had been recently scrubbed with ammonia, though there was still something rotting in the fridge. Maybe that was why there was one of those obnoxious air fresheners on the counter. I sneezed and backed out. I wasn't going to get any scents from that room—all that trying would do was deaden my nose with the air freshener.

  I toured the rest of the house, and by process of elimination deduced that she'd died in the kitchen. Since the kitchen had a door and a pair of windows, the killer could certainly have entered and left without leaving scent anywhere else. I made a mental note of that, but made a second round of the house anyway. I caught Zee's scent, and more faintly Tad's as well. There were three or four people who had visited here often, and a few who were less frequent visitors.

  If this house held secrets like the last one, I wasn't able to trigger them.

  When I came out of the front door, the last of the daylight was nearly gone. Zee waited on the porch with his eyes closed, his face turned slightly to the last, fading light. I had to yip to get his attention.

  "Finished?" he asked in a voice that was a little darker, a little more other than usual. "Since Connora's was the first murder, why don't we hit the murder scenes in order from here on out?" he suggested.

  The scene of the second murder didn't smell of death at all. If someone had died here, it had been so well cleaned that I couldn't smell it—or the fae who had lived here was so far from humanity that his death didn't leave any of the familiar scent markers.

  There were, however, a number of visitors shared between this house and the first two and a few I'd found only in the first and third house. I kept them on the suspect list because I hadn't been able to get a good scent in Connora the librarian's kitchen. Also, since this house was so clean, I couldn't entirely eliminate anyone who had been only in the first house. It would be handy to be able to keep track of where I'd scented whom, but I'd never figured out any way to record a scent with pen and paper. I'd just have to do the best I could.

  The fourth house Zee took me to looked no more remarkable than any of the others had appeared. A beige house trimmed unimaginatively in white with nothing but dead and dying grass in the yard.

  "This one hasn't been cleaned," he said sourly as he opened the door. "Once we had a third victim, the focus of effort changed from concealing the crime from the humans to figuring out who the murderer is."

  He wasn't kidding when he said it hadn't been cleaned. I hopped over old newspapers and scattered clothing that had been left lying in the entryway.

  This fae had not been killed in the living room or kitchen. Or in the master bedroom where a family of mice had taken up residence. They scurried away as I stepped inside.

  The master bathroom, for no reason I could see, smelled like the ocean rather than mouse like the rest of this corner of the house. Impulsively, I closed my eyes, as I had in the first house, and concentrated on what my other senses had to tell me.

  I heard it first, the sound of surf and wind. Then a chill breeze stirred my fur. I took two steps forward and the cool tile softened into sand. When I opened my eyes
, I stood at the top of a sandy dune at the edge of a sea.

  Sand blew in the wind, stinging my nose and eyes and catching in my fur as I stared dumbfounded at the water while my skin hummed with the magic of the place. It was sunset here, too, and the light turned the sea a thousand shades of orange, red, and pink.

  I slipped down through the sharp-edged salt grass until I stood on the hard-packed beach. Still I could see no end of the water whose waves swelled and gentled to wash up on shore. I watched the waves for long enough to allow the tide to come in and touch my toes.

  The icy water reminded me that I was here to work, and as beautiful and impossible as this was, I was unlikely to find the murderer here. I could smell nothing but sea and sand. I turned to leave the way I'd come before true night fell, but behind me all I could see were endless sand dunes with gentle hills rising behind them.

  Either the wind in the sand had erased my paw prints while I'd been watching—or else they had never been there at all. I couldn't even be sure which hill I'd come down.

  I froze where I stood, somehow convinced that if I moved so much as a step from where I was, I'd never find my way back. The peaceful spell of the ocean was entirely dispelled, and the landscape, still beautiful, held shadows and menace.

  Slowly I sat down, shivering in the breeze. All I could do was hope that Zee found me, or that this landscape would fade away as quickly as it had come. To that end I lowered myself until my belly was on the sand with the ocean to my back.

  I put my chin on my paws, closed my eyes, and thought bathroom and how it ought to smell of mouse, trying to ignore the salt-sea and the wind that ruffled my fur. But it didn't go away.

  "Well, now," said a male voice, "what have we here? I've never heard of a coyote blundering Underhill."

  I opened my eyes and spun around, crouching in preparation to run or attack as seemed appropriate. About ten feet away, between me and the ocean, a man watched me. At least he looked mostly like a man. His voice had sounded so normal, sort of Harvard professorial, that it took me a moment to realize just how far from normal this man was.

  His eyes were greener than the Lincoln green that Uncle Mike had his waitstaff wear, so green that not even the growing gloom of night dimmed their color. Long pale hair, damp with saltwater and tangled with bits of sea plants, reached the back of his knees. He was stark naked, and comfortable with it.

  I could see no weapons. There was no aggression in his posture or voice, but my instincts were screaming. I lowered my head, keeping eye contact, and managed not to growl.

  Staying in coyote form seemed the safest thing. He might think me simply a coyote…who had wandered into the bathroom of a dead fae and from there to wherever here was. Not likely, I had to admit. Maybe there were other paths to get here. I'd seen no hint of another living thing, but maybe he'd believe I was exactly what I looked like.

  We stared at each other for a long time, neither of us moving. His skin was several shades paler than his hair. I could see the bluish cast of veins just below his skin.

  His nostrils fluttered as he drew in my scent, but I knew I smelled like a coyote.

  Why hadn't Zee used him? Obviously this fae used his nose, and he didn't seem powerless to me.

  Maybe it was because they thought he might be the murderer.

  I shuffled through folklore as he watched me, trying to think of all the human-seeming fae who dwelt in or about the sea. There were a lot of them, but only a few I knew much about.

  Selkies were the only ones I could remember that were even neutral. I didn't think he was a selkie—mostly because I couldn't be that lucky—and he didn't smell like something that would turn into a mammal. He smelled cold and fishlike. There were kinder things in lakes and lochs, but the sea spawns mostly horror stories, not gentle brownies who keep houses clean.

  "You smell like a coyote," he said finally. "You look like a coyote. But no coyote ever wandered Underhill to the Sea King's Realm. What are you?"

  "Gnädiger Herr," said Zee cautiously from somewhere just behind me. "This one is working for us and got lost."

  Sometimes I loved that old man as much as I loved anyone, but I'd never been so happy to hear his voice.

  The sea fae didn't move except to raise his eyes until I was pretty sure he was looking Zee in the face. I didn't want to look away, but I took a step back until my hip hit Zee's leg to reassure myself that he wasn't just a figment of my imagination.

  "She is not fae," said the fae.

  "Neither is she human." There was something in Zee's voice that was awfully close to deference, and I knew I'd been right to be afraid.

  The stranger abruptly strode forward and dropped to one knee in front of me. He grabbed my muzzle without so much as a by-your-leave and ran his free hand over my eyes and ears. His icy hands weren't ungentle, but even so, without Zee's nudge I might have objected. He dropped my head abruptly and stood again.

  "She wears no elf-salve, nor does she stink of the drugs that occasionally drop a lost one here to wander and die. Last I knew, rare though it is, your magic was not such as could do this. So how did she get here?"

  As he spoke, I realized that it wasn't Harvard I heard in his voice, but Merrie Old England.

  "I don't know, mein Herr. I suspect that she doesn't know either. You of all people know that the Underhill is fickle and lonely. If my friend broke the glamour that hides the entrances, it would never keep her out."

  The sea creature grew very still—and the waves of the ocean subsided like a cat gathering itself to pounce. The wisps of clouds in the sky darkened.

  "And how," he said very quietly, "would she break our glamour?"

  "I brought her to help us discover a murderer because she has a very good nose," Zee said. "If glamour has a weakness, it is scent. Once she broke that part of the illusion, the rest followed. She is not powerful or a threat."

  The ocean struck without warning. A giant wave slapped me, robbing me of my footing and my sight. In one bare instant it stole the heat of my body so I don't think I could have breathed even if my nose wasn't buried in water.

  A strong hand grabbed my tail and yanked hard. It hurt, but I didn't protest because the water was retreating, and without that grip, it would have carried me out with it. As soon as the water had subsided to my knees, Zee released his hold.

  Like me, he was drenched, though he wasn't shivering. I coughed to get out the saltwater I'd swallowed, shook my fur off, then looked around, but the sea fae was gone.

  Zee touched my back. "I'll have to carry you to take you back." He didn't wait for a response, just picked me up. There was a nauseating moment when all my senses swam around me, and then he set me down on the tile of the bathroom floor. The room was dark as pitch.

  Zee turned on the light, which looked yellow and artificial after the colors of the sunset.

  "Can you continue?" he asked me.

  I looked at him, but he gave his head a sharp shake. He didn't want to talk about what happened. It irked me, but I'd read enough fairy tales to know that sometimes talking about the fae too directly lets them listen in. When I got him out of the reservation, I would get answers if I had to sit on him.

  Until then, I put my curiosity aside to consider his question. I sneezed twice to clear my nose and then put it down on the floor to collect more people from this house.

  This time Zee came with me, staying back so as not to interfere, but close on my heels. He didn't say anything more and I ignored him as I struggled for an explanation of what had just happened to me. Was this house real? Zee told the other fae that I had broken the glamour—wouldn't that mean that it was the other landscape that was real? But that would mean that there was an entire ocean here, which seemed really unlikely—though I could still smell it if I tried. I knew that Underhill was the fairy realm, but the stories about it were pretty vague where they weren't outright contradictory.

  The sun had truly set and Zee turned on lights as we went. Though I could see fine in the dark
, I was grateful for the light. My heart was still certain that we were going to be eaten, and it pounded away at twice its usual speed.

  Death's unlovely perfume drew my attention to a closed door. If I'd been on my own, I could have opened the door easily enough, but I believe in making use of others. I whined (coyotes can't bark, not like a dog) and Zee obediently opened the door and revealed the stairs going down into a basement. It was the first of the houses that had had a basement—unless they'd been hidden somehow.

  I bounded down the stairs. Zee turned on the lights and followed me down. Most of the basement looked like basements look: junk stored without rhyme or reason, unfinished walls and cement floor. I padded across the floor, following death to a door, shut tight. Zee opened that one without me asking and I found, at last, the place where the fae who had lived here was murdered.

  Unlike the rest of the house, this room had been immaculate before the resident had been murdered. Underneath the rust-colored stains of the fae's blood, the tile floor gleamed. Cracked leather-bound tomes with the authentic lumpiness of pre—printing press books sat intermingled with battered paperbacks and college math and biology texts in bookcases that lined the walls.

  This room was the bloodiest I'd seen so far—and given the first murder, that was saying something. Even dried and old, the blood was overwhelming. It had pooled, stained, and sprayed as the fae had fought with his attacker. The lower shelves of three bookcases were dotted with it. Tables had been knocked over and a lamp was broken on the floor.

  Maybe I wouldn't have realized it if I hadn't just been thinking about them, but the fae here had been a selkie. I had never met one before that I knew, but I'd been to zoos and I knew what seals smelled like.

  I didn't want to walk into the room. I wasn't usually squeamish, but lately I'd been walking in enough blood. Where the blood had pooled—in the grout between tiles, on a book lying open, and against the base of one of the bookcases where the floor wasn't quite level—it had rotted instead of dried. The room smelled of blood, seal, and decaying fish.