"We have visitors, Bittersweet."
There was a little scream, and the sound of china breaking, and then we were around the corner of the partition. There was nice leather furniture with cushions, a large coffee table, some drink and snack machines almost hidden by an oriental screen, a man, and a small flying faery.
"You promised," she shrieked, and her voice was thin with anger so that there was an edge of buzz to it, as if she were the insect she resembled. "You promised you wouldn't tell!"
The man was standing, trying to comfort her as she hovered near the ceiling. Her wings were a blur, and I knew when she stopped moving that it wouldn't be butterfly wings on her back, but rather something faster, slimmer. Her wings caught the artificial light with little winks of rainbow color. Her dress was purple, only a little darker than my own. Her hair fell around her shoulders in white-blond waves. She would barely fill my hand, tiny even by demi-fey standards.
The man trying to calm her was Robert's partner, Eric, who was five foot eight, slender, neatly dressed, tanned, and handsome in a preppie sort of way. They'd been a couple for more than ten years. Before Eric, Robert's last love of his life had been a woman who he'd been faithful to until she died at eighty-something. I thought it was brave of Robert to love another human so soon.
Robert spoke sharply. "Bittersweet, we promised not to tell everyone, but you were the one who flew in here babbling hysterically. Did you think no one would talk? You're lucky that the princess and her men are here before the police."
She flew at him, tiny hands balled into tiny fists, and her eyes blazed with rage. She hit him. You would think that something smaller than a Barbie doll wouldn't pack much punch, but you'd be wrong.
She hit him, and I was behind him, so I felt the wave of energy that came before and around her fist like a small explosion. Robert was airborne, and pitched backward toward me. Only Doyle's speed put him between me and the falling man. Frost yanked me out of the way of both as they hit the floor.
Bittersweet turned on us, and I watched the ripple of power around her like heat on a summer's day. Her hair formed a pale halo around her face, raised by the wind of her own energy. It was the magic that kept a "human" that small alive without her having to eat multiple times her own body weight every day like a hummingbird or a shrew.
"Do not be rash," Frost said. His skin ran cold against mine as his magic woke in a skin-tingling winter's chill. The glamour that I'd used to hide us fell away, partly because to hold it with his magic coming was harder, and partly because I hoped it would help bring the small fey to her senses.
Her wings stopped, and I had a moment to see the crystal of dragonfly wings on her tiny body as she did the airborne equivalent of a human stumbling on uneven ground. It made her dip toward the ground before she caught herself and rose to eye level with both Frost and Doyle. She'd turned sideways so she could see both of them. Her energy quieted around her as she hovered.
She bobbed an awkward curtsey in the air. "If you hide yourself with glamour, Princess, then how's a fey to know how to act?"
I started to come around Frost's body, but he stopped me partway with his arm, so I had to speak from the shield of him. "Would you have harmed us if we had simply been humans who were part fey?"
"You looked like those pretend elves that the humans dress up as."
"You mean the wannabes," I said.
She nodded. Her blond curls had fallen around her tiny shoulders in beautiful ringlets, as if the power had curled her hair tighter.
"Why would human wannabes frighten you?" Doyle asked.
Her eyes flicked to him, and then back to me as if the very sight of him frightened her. Doyle had been the queen's assassin for centuries; the fact that he was with me now didn't take away his past.
She answered his question while looking at me. "I saw them coming down the hill from where my friends were ..." Here she stopped, put her hands in front of her eyes, and began to weep.
"Bittersweet," I said, "I'm sorry for your