back to the Unseelie Court and you can find out firsthand how Andais sacrifices the blood of all the fey to try to control the magic that remakes her kingdom. She thought that if I left, the magic would stop and she would be able to control it again, but the Goddess herself is moving again. Faerie is alive again, and I think all you old ones have forgotten what that means."
"I have forgotten nothing," he said.
"That is a lie," I said.
"I would never lie to you," he said.
"Then you lie to yourself," I said. I turned to the others. "Come on, everybody. We have a crime scene to visit."
I started for the door and most of the people in the room followed me out. I called back over my shoulder. "Be at the main house tonight in time for dinner, Barinthus, or be on a plane back to St. Louis."
"She will torture me forever if I go back," he said.
I stopped in the doorway and the crowd of guards had to make an opening so I could see him. "And isn't that exactly what you threatened to do to Galen just minutes ago?"
He looked at me, just looked at me. "You are still moved by your heart and not your head, Meredith."
"You know what they say. Never come between a woman and what she loves. Well, don't threaten what I love, for I will move the Summerlands themselves to protect what is mine." The Summerlands was one of our words for Heaven.
"I will be there for dinner," he said, and he bowed. "My Queen."
"I look forward to it," I said, and that last I didn't mean at all. The last thing I wanted at the main house was an egotistical, angry ex-deity, but sometimes decisions aren't about what you want, but about necessity. Right now, we needed to go to a crime scene and try to earn the paychecks that helped support the mass of people we'd become. If only my title had come with more money, more houses, and less trouble, but I'd yet to meet a princess of faerie who wasn't in trouble of some kind. Fairy tales are true in one respect. Before you get to the story's end, bad things and hard choices are lived through. In a way I'd come to my happily ever after ending, but unlike fairy tales, in real life there's no ending, happy or otherwise. Your story, like your life, goes on. One minute you think you have your life relatively under control, and then the next minute you realize that all that control was just an illusion.
I prayed to the Goddess that Barinthus wouldn't force me to kill him. It would hurt my heart to do it, but as we walked out into the California sunshine and I slid my sunglasses on, there was something hard and cold inside me. It was a surety that if he pushed hard enough I would do exactly what I'd threatened. Maybe I was more my aunt's niece than I cared to think about.
Chapter Twenty-nine
Doyle and Frost, with Usna driving, took the Suv, and Usna used glamour to make him appear as me. It had surprised me that he had his driver's license, but apparently years before I was born he had left faerie to explore the country. When I'd asked why, he'd replied, "Cats are curious." And I knew just by the look on his face that that was all the answer I would get.
Usna wasn't good enough at glamour to walk through a crowd. One bump and the illusion would have shattered, which was why he wasn't going with me. There'd be a crowd where I was going. But we were hoping the more elementary illusion would lure the press from the outer gates, so we could drive off unmolested.
But his partner, Cathbodua, was good enough to go with us. There was a moment when she stood in the middle of the living room in her raven-feather cloak with that shoulder-length hair mingling with the feathers so that she, like Doyle, was dark enough that where one blackness ended and the other began the eye couldn't sort out. It made her skin seem to almost float against all the darkness.
Then the feathers smoothed out, and she was wearing the long black trench coat that it so often appeared to be. Cathbodua only had to soften her skin from the otherworldly paleness to a more human shade of pale. Most of the