Prince Charming Doesn’t Live Here

by Christine Warren

  “That’s not a very polite thing to ask an Other, Danice, darling,” he scolded. “But I’ll let you off the hook this time. As it happens, I am not a full-blooded Other, but I am half Fae.”

  It looked like she needed a minute to digest that, so he took another sip of beer and waited.

  Finally, she squirmed a little in her seat. “Okay, I’m going to assume that when you say you’re half Fae, you’re not trying to tell me that you’re half homosexual. Besides, wouldn’t that be bisexual? You’re not, right?”

  He nearly spewed beer all over her doubtlessly expensive business suit. “Of course not!”

  “Okay.” She seemed to relax a little at that, which made him wonder if she was relieved to hear he was straight, or just relieved that they apparently still spoke the same language. “Then when you say ‘Fae,’ you mean like…like a fairy?”

  “Faerie,” he corrected, tweaking her pronunciation just a tiny bit around the vowel sounds. “But yes, that’s what I mean.”

  “You’re trying to tell me that you’re half fair—er, half Faerie? As in the Fair Folk. As in, Darby O’Gill and the Little People?” She shook her head. “Maybe I’m just imagining this whole conversation.”

  He winced at her characterization of his heritage, even though he’d heard all of it before. Humans really could be so clueless sometimes. “No, those are not Faeries; they’re fairy tales. In fact, there’s no such thing as a Faerie. Faerie is a place. The people who are native to that place are called the Fae.”

  “Right. I’m so sorry that I’m not up on the intricacies of the Tinker Bell set.” She took a healthy swallow of wine.

  “Now you’re being deliberately offensive.”

  “Am I?”

  He leveled his gaze at her. “Do I look like someone you should be referring to as ‘Tinker Bell’?”

  She at least had the decency to blush. It had to be guilt. She hadn’t had that much wine.

  “You said you’re only half Fae.”

  “I am. My mother was Fae.”

  “And your father?”

  “Human. That makes me a changeling.”

  “And here I thought I had a complicated ethnic identity,” she muttered. After a second, her expression settled into a frown. “Wait, I thought a changeling was part of the fairy-tale crowd. Isn’t that when the fairies kidnap a human child and leave some kind of demon-spawn in its place? And then the human family ends up raising the Bad Seed, or something?”

  “That’s just Hollywood. Changeling means half-blooded Fae. That’s it.”

  She considered him for a moment, then finally, hesitantly, ventured, “So can you, like, do stuff?”

  He cocked an eyebrow. “What stuff? You mean magic?”

  She looked shocked, as if she really didn’t know what she’d meant. “You mean there’s such a thing as magic?”

  “I thought you said you knew all about The Others? Have you never met a witch?”

  “There are witches? Real witches?” she squeaked.

  He laughed. “Of course.”

  “Christ.” She rubbed a hand over her eyes. “First of all, I never said I knew ‘all about’ The Others. I said I was familiar with their existence. But the only ones I’ve met have been either vampires or were-somethings. I never thought about there being other kinds!”

  Mac briefly considered blowing her mind and listing all the types of Others he had encountered during his life—and he hadn’t met more than a fraction of all the different varieties that existed. Then he thought better of it. She wouldn’t be very helpful if she fell into a catatonic stupor.

  Some human minds really did blow when they heard the truth. They overloaded on the information and short-circuited. The effects could last a few minutes or a lifetime, and Mac didn’t want to take any chances.

  “Trust me,” he settled on, as he lifted his beer. “There are other kinds.”

  “Let’s just…” She stopped herself, drained her glass, and set it back down with a distinct click. “Let’s leave that alone for the moment. Please.” She drew a deep breath and pressed her hands down on the seat beside her until her shoulders climbed up near her ears. Then she let it out, long and slow. “Can you please just tell me what all of this has to do with Rosemary? We are here to talk about Rosemary, right?”

  Mac nodded, feeling a stirring of sympathy. Danice might have known about the existence of Others when she’d started her day, but he doubted she’d envisioned them playing quite this big a role in her life.

  “All of the information I collected on Rosemary up until yesterday indicated she was staying at the Connecticut house and that she’d settled in there for an extended stay,” he told her, leaning forward and wrapping both hands around the beer bottle, just to give them something to do. Something other than reaching out and touching the woman who faced him. “I talked to locals in the area and learned she’d had the place cleaned and aired a week before her arrival, and that she’d instructed the housekeeper to make sure the kitchen was stocked for at least a month.”

  She nodded and motioned for him to continue.

  “You don’t think it’s odd that she would state her intention to stay at the house for at least a month and then suddenly up and relocate without letting anyone know?”

  “I don’t know Rosemary personally, so I can’t hazard a guess as to what’s odd for her and what isn’t,” Danice said. “But I think you’d need to prove she hasn’t gone back to the house since we were there before you assign some sort of mysterious significance to the fact that she wasn’t there when we were. How do you know she didn’t just run into town for something the housekeeper forgot to pick up?”

  “Because I’m good at my job, Danice, and I didn’t get that way by jumping to conclusions. I’m keeping in touch with a contact in Connecticut, and he’s told me that she hasn’t been seen at the house since Wednesday evening.”

  She appeared to have no answer to that.

  Mac continued. “Well, you might want to reserve judgment, but I thought it was odd, so I did a little digging.”

  “On Rosemary?”

  “At first. I went back to the club where she supposedly met her mystery lover and asked some more questions. It turns out they’re familiar with that routine. It’s not the first time someone has come by to ask about a girl no one can find.”

  Alarm flashed across her face. “What’s the supposed to mean? Do you think Rosemary is the victim of a crime? That she was picked up by some serial killer?”

  “No, because some of them turned up unharmed. One or two seem to have had alcohol-induced blackouts and forgotten a few days at a time, but if there were really a killer out there, the police would be on it. They’d at least be looking into it. No, I didn’t meant to imply I thought Rosemary was a victim. I actually think the other kind of digging I did turned up more promising information.”

  “On where Rosemary might be?”

  He shook his head. “On who hired me to find her.”

  Now she was starting to look uneasy. “And what did you find out?”

  “Nothing good.” He paused. “I still don’t have a name, but I’m beginning to suspect that whoever wants me to find Rosemary is a member of the Unseelie Court.”

  Danice stared at him blankly. “The un-what-y what?”

  “The Unseelie Court. It’s one of the two halves of the kingdom of Faerie. And frankly, it’s the half that’s even less inclined to look kindly on humans than the Seelie Court.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning they usually don’t have the slightest use for humans, and when they do, the humans tend to get the short end of the bargain.”

  “But what on earth could some Fae person who doesn’t even like humans possibly want with Rosemary Addison?”

  Mac’s mouth tightened. “I was really hoping you’d be able to tell me that.”

  Nine

  This couldn’t be happening.

  At least, that’s what Danice tried telling herself. There was no wa
y that she’d somehow gotten mixed up in some kind of weird business with Fae and Faerie and missing heiresses and her boss’s granddaughter disappearing under mysterious circumstances.

  And how did she know she couldn’t have gotten mixed up in that kind of thing?

  Because shit like this did not happen to Danice Lynn Carter, scholar, attorney, and overachiever.

  Danice was the normal one. The sensible one. She didn’t work in advertising like Regina, and she certainly wasn’t a vampire like her friend. She hadn’t married a werewolf, like Missy. She had never been an internationally famous teenage model, like Ava. Hell, she didn’t even have a job as unusual and interesting as Corinne, who was a staff reporter at a local New York tabloid newspaper. Danice was normal.

  She came from a normal family. Sure, her dad had been born in England to a local woman and a black South African man, and her mom was the product of the forbidden relationship between a Japanese American soldier and the Cuban woman he’d fallen in love with. But that was just details. Silly stories about skin color and ethnic divides. When it came down to it, her dad was an electrician and her mom worked in a beauty salon, and they had raised her and her older sister Daphanie to be ambitious and independent and kindhearted. They went to church on Sundays and paid their taxes and planned to live in their same apartment in Brooklyn until they stopped living altogether. They were normal.

  So why in the hell was this happening to her?

  She really needed another glass of wine.

  Her voice sounded hollow in her own ears when she asked, “How in the world should I know what an evil Faerie—sorry, Fae—what an evil Fae could possibly want with my boss’s granddaughter? I didn’t even know what one was half an hour ago. Hell, I’m not sure I do even now.”

  “But you know her family. Have you ever heard anything about Fae blood in the family tree? A weird aunt no one talks about? Some third cousin who talks to animals? Literally?”

  Danice closed her eyes and wished very hard that when she opened them, she’d find herself in her own bed in her own apartment and none of this evening would ever have happened. If she could go back to Tuesday, so much the better. That would mean she would never even have gotten this nightmare assignment from Yorke.

  Unfortunately, when she lifted her lids, her eyes focused right on Mac Callahan’s gorgeous, yet dreaded face. Damn it.

  “Of course not.” She sighed. “You’re talking as if I’m her best friend or her big sister. I’ve never met the woman, either. The only things I know about her are the few things her grandfather told me—which mostly consist of how annoying he finds it that she won’t bow down whenever he snaps his fingers—and what little I’ve read in the press. Since I don’t normally spend a lot of time on the gossip columns, that’s not even very much. I don’t see how I can help you.”

  “How you can help me isn’t really what I think either of us needs to be concerned with right now,” he said, his voice as grim as his expression. “The reality is that if someone from the Unseelie Court has been sending me on a hunt for Rosemary Addison, there’s a good chance they’ve sent others, too.”

  Danice felt her stomach clench. “Do you mean others, or Others?”

  “Truthfully? Both.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “That’s been my thought, as well.”

  She shot him a glare to let him know she wasn’t amused.

  He pulled a face. “I could be overreacting, but the way I see it, the current situation boils down to one of two scenarios.”

  “Am I going to like either one of them?”

  “Probably not.”

  She held up a hand to stop him. “In that case, I’m really going to need another glass of wine.” She motioned to the waitress.

  “I thought you didn’t drink while you were working.”

  “Since it’s my work that’s driving me to drink, I’m going to make an exception. Do you have a problem with that?”

  “Absolutely not. In fact, I think it’s a damned fine idea.” He lifted his own hand and held up two fingers.

  Danice drummed her fingertips on the table while they waited for their drinks. A couple of times, Mac opened his mouth as if he intended to say something, but the expression on her face must have stopped him. Instead, he busied himself peeling the label off his beer bottle.

  She was just trying to keep her head from exploding. The ache she’d noticed in her office had grown into a full-blown throbbing of excruciating proportions.

  When the waitress dropped off their drinks a moment later, Danice sipped hers while the other woman blatantly brushed her hip and breasts against Mac’s side in the process of clearing away their empties. In her current mood, it made Danice want to stab the floozy through the eye with a swizzle stick. Fortunately, she didn’t have one on hand, and Mac, to his credit, did his best to ignore the obvious come-on. At least he had enough class not to flirt with one woman while seated at a table with another.

  And why should she care who he flirted with?

  Danice pinched her eyes shut and wished violently for some painkillers. She had absolutely no claim on Mac Callahan, nor did she intend to stake one. He could flirt with whomever he wanted. Clearly the headache was affecting her thinking.

  The waitress finally gave up and left them alone with one last seductive smile aimed in Mac’s direction. Danice ignored it. Along with the twitch in her left eye that seemed to accompany it.

  “Okay,” she said, clutching her wineglass like a life vest. “What are our two scenarios?”

  Mac spun his beer bottle between his palms. “Scenario one: The Fae who hired me also hired someone or something considerably less competent than me to locate Rosemary Addison. She turns out to be an intelligent young woman who caught sight of her other stalker somehow, got spooked, and decided to disappear for a few weeks until this other person gives up and goes away.”

  “Why do I have the very bad feeling that that was the more positive of the two options?”

  “Scenario two: Whoever else my client hired to locate Rosemary is just as good at his job as I am and managed to stay one step ahead of me. He’s already gotten Rosemary and instead of informing her that someone wants to speak to her the way I would have done, he’s forcibly relocating her to the Unseelie Court to instigate the conversation.”

  “It’s like I’m psychic.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” She reached for her cell phone, then paused. “You’re going to tell me that there’s no use calling the police, aren’t you?”

  “Not if I’m right.”

  “And if you’re wrong?”

  “If I’m wrong, we’re talking about an adult woman who’s had a known disagreement with her family. No one has seen or heard anything suspicious, and she has every right to avoid her appointments if that’s what she wants to do. The police are not going to mobilize a task force. They’re going to say give her a few more days, maybe a week or two, then if you still insist, maybe they’ll agree to file a missing persons report.”

  “Seriously. I should give tarot readings,” she muttered and set her phone carefully down on the table. Mostly that was to keep from throwing it against the wall in a supremely immature gesture of frustration. It wasn’t even the immaturity that restrained her; it was the fact that without her cell phone, her life would become entirely impossible. All her important contact information was in there. Otherwise, it would already be on the floor looking like the spare parts from a fourth grader’s science project.

  She glanced back at Mac. “In either of the scenarios you’ve mentioned, the fact remains that Rosemary is missing. This leads me to believe that our first priority should be finding her. If we can do that, we’ll know exactly what’s going on, right?”

  “I certainly hope so.”

  “Appreciate the confidence.”

  “Well, it’s an assumption, but I think we should go with it for the moment.”

  “So the question is, where do we start looking? You’r
e the private investigator. Do you think you could, you know, pick up her trail? Or something.”

  His mouth quirked at that, one corner hitching up in a half smile that even in this morass of disaster still managed to make her heart skip a beat. Or two.

  Man, she needed help.

  “Probably, given enough time. I doubt she’s all that good at the disappearing act,” he said. “But the truth is that either way we look at it, this Unseelie client of mine is the key. Either he already has her, or he’s trying very hard to get her. When you look at it that way, I think it would be smarter to head right for the source. I need to go to Faerie, find out who the mystery man is, and confront him. That way I can find out what he really wants with Rosemary and get a better idea of where she is all at the same time.”

  “Do you really think he’s just going to tell you what you want to know?” she asked. Then she frowned. “How do you know it’s a he?”

  “I don’t. I’m assuming,” he said, waving away her question. “And no, I don’t think he’s going to invite me in for a glass of Faerie wine and spill his guts. I suspect there might be strong language involved. Probably extreme violence. Adult content, without a doubt. Viewer discretion will be advised.”

  Danice stared down into her wine. If he kept giving her news like this, she was going to need more than a cheap Merlot to get her through the next few days. Hell, black tar heroin might not be enough.

  How in God’s name had she gone from thinking clients could get no worse than Henry Hollister and his Goons of Corporate Greed, to a client who might just have been kidnapped by the bogeyman, and who incidentally was the beloved favorite grandchild of an unforgiving boss, in less than forty-eight hours? Really, things like this were not supposed to happen in real life, and certainly not in the real life of Danice L. Carter, Esquire. She was the girl who had it all figured out, the one voted most likely to succeed.

  Now she thought she had a good shot of being voted One Whose Life and Career Dangle by a Thread Over the Fiery Pit of Hell.

  The new title had better at least come with a damned big plaque.