I picked it up and turned around. Slowly, so as not to attract the attention of the fae in the room - who were all looking at the fairy queen and not at her new thrall. The queen was leaning over the arm of her throne, talking to her witch. I shot the queen three times in the heart. The witch was watching me and smiled as I pulled the trigger.
"Huh," said a voice right next to me. I turned my head and had to look down at a human-seeming child who appeared to be no more than eight or nine years old.
She smiled at me. "And they were afraid something would happen to you if we waited until everyone could come to the party. Just like a coyote to spoil the fun for everyone."
The last time I'd seen this fae, she'd been playing with a yo-yo in the front yard of a murder scene she was guarding. I didn't know her name, just that she was plenty powerful, people were scared of her, and she was a lot older than she looked.
For an instant I almost saw something completely different standing beside me, then she smiled at me, and said, "Not my glamour you don't, Mercedes."
The other fae in the room didn't move, frozen in the moment of the fairy queen's death.
Yo-yo Girl walked forward to the dead queen, and I followed her. The witch had grabbed the body and was taking handfuls of the queen's blood and painting it over the silver thrall necklace around her neck.
"I don't think so," said Yo-yo Girl. She bent and touched the remains, and said something that might have been a word. The queen's body turned to dust.
Yo-yo Girl started to back away - and then saw the forest lord in his chains beyond the throne. Somehow I don't think that she'd seen him before reducing the queen to so many ashes.
The silver ring popped off the witch's neck - only to be replaced by small fingers. I heard only the echo of a whisper, then the witch was dust, too. Yo-yo Girl took a handful of the resultant gray mass, lifted it to her mouth, and licked it like an ice-cream cone.
"Yum," she said to me. Her hands, her clothes, and her mouth were covered with ashes. "I love witches."
"I'll take chocolate, if it is all the same to you," I told her.
"Mercy!" roared Adam from somewhere beyond the hall.
"Uh-oh," said Yo-yo Girl. "Someone missed out on all the killing."
"Here!" I called. "We're okay."
And then it was true. Because Adam was there and he had his arms around me and that made everything all right.
* * *
I KICKED THE SNOW AND STUBBED MY TOE ON THE kitchen sink. It was the night of the big rescue, and everyone was partying over at Adam's house. I'd been hugged and fussed over until I decided that it was a good time to go check out the remains of my home.
The snow hid a lot, and the pack had cleaned it up. They'd had the whole month that I'd been missing to do it. I suppose I was lucky it hadn't been a year or a century.
They hadn't been able to find the Elphame after Zee had been forced to let his door close. Apparently, as Zee explained it to me, the Elphame moved in relation to the reservation, and Ariana hadn't been able to find me.
It was only when the bond between Adam and me reconnected that they were able to locate the Elphame. While Zee worked to make another entrance, they'd sent Yo-yo Girl ahead to make sure I was safe. She apparently didn't need anything as crude as an entrance to find her way to the Elphame. She probably had a name besides Yo-yo Girl, but the fae are funny about names, and no one wanted to give her a real one.
The fae who had belonged to the fairy queen were being housed in the reservation temporarily. Some of them had no memory of how they'd come to follow the fairy queen. Some of them were angry that I'd killed her, but not so angry they'd made any move against me. Zee said that the Gray Lords were torn between anger at the way the fairy queen had used a forest lord and a black witch, and triumph at the proof that Underhill was returning some power to all of the fae.