to her, and wasted the lives she hadn’t even thought about ruining. That was the trouble with being tainted by the Fair Folk, the Strangers, the Gentle Ones.
You could never be innocent.
“Jesus Christ,” Clyde kept repeating, rubbing at his face.
Jeremiah agreed completely.
One in the morning, the entire trailer park still and quiet. Porch lights burned, and the serious domestic disturbances had either finished over dinner or wouldn’t get under way for another hour or so. He eased his truck down a long shallow grade and back up, going slow out of habit. Their trailer—only his now, since Daisy was gone—was at the top of another slight rise, the very last on a loop of crazycracked concrete. The garden she’d worked so hard over was a shambles, vines clutching at the fence he’d cobbled together, weeds thriving.
The Garnier place next door was dark. Melody had thrown Paul out a week ago, and the man was probably still on a bender somewhere. He’d be crawling back after the weekend, repentant and filthy. In the meantime, it was quiet, and the Garnier kids were probably enjoying it that way. On the other side, Mama Loth’s ancient cave of a trailer listed, looking like the next good wind would blow it away.
The old lady wasn’t sidhe, but she wasn’t quite mortal, either. The world was more crowded than mortals ever dreamed, even if they spun themselves stories out of hints and moonlight. If the religious or the door-to-door salesmen came through the park, they often avoided Loth’s home. Those who didn’t had a certain hard gleam in their gazes, a certain aggressiveness in their stride—but after they mounted her steps and knocked at her rickety screen door, there was no more trouble from them.
Ever.
Loth’s sagging rocker on the gap-boarded porch moved a little, pushed by the unsettled breeze. Behind them, the field sloped down to a stand of trashwood, and there was even a grove of pale young beeches behind the scruffy bushes. The field was reasonably level and studded with refuse, but he hadn’t stepped out to practice in a long time.
Tonight might change that, though. The urge to hurt something, even just empty air, itched under his skin.
The truck rumbled into its oil-spotted parking space under the listing carport Daisy had laughingly called “the arbor.” She’d planted climbing roses, and coaxed them up the supports… but they were dead now, brown leaves and thorns reaching their bony knotted fingers for the roof.
He twisted the key, drew it loose. The engine shut itself off.
The cops hadn’t asked him a single question, assuming he’d already been spoken to. Clyde thought he’d been swept outside in the chaos of the fight. Panko’s van still crouched back near the Wagon Wheel; there was nobody to come pick it up. At least, not unless the cops could find someone who cared. Panko’s neurotic wife was never going to be mocked for fearing the cellar ever again.
Monday morning at the jobsite was going to be awkward at best. Should he dislike himself for dreading the disruption of the routine, inevitable questions, mortal curiosity hemming him in?
Jeremiah scrubbed at his face, thin skin moving over bone. Stubble scraped his fingers. Daisy would have been frantic with worry at his lateness, standing in the door outlined in golden light, her hair a mess of ruddygold curls because she would have been pushing her hands back through it and—
Stop it. He opened his left fist. The quirpiece glinted; he walked it over his knuckles like a gambler’s shadowcoin, felt the sardonic scowl twisting his mouth down. The truck’s engine popped and pinged, metal cooling.
The lance’s marks itched. Restless and unsatisfied.
“She looked like Daisy.” His own voice startled him. When he looked up again, the truck’s windows were fogged. How long had he been sitting here, staring at the gleam of the quirpiece, flipping over his knuckles one by one, his hand moving without any real direction on his part? Round and silver, its surface brushed with faint scratches, it caught a stray gleam from the porch lights.
He should have left it in the bar. In the morning it would be a dead leaf, or moss. He would likely never see the redheaded sidhe again. Gone like a whisper, gone like the wind.
Jeremiah opened the truck door, climbed out. Stamped up his porch stairs. He still remembered Daisy bringing him cold beer while he measured and sawed and hammered, and her delight when he’d finished. You’d’ve thought he’d built her a palace.