I felt suddenly slow, and not up to the job. I was supposed to be the detective, and Lucy had called me in because of my expertise on faeries. Some expert I turned out to be.
Chapter Four
This fear Dearg was smaller than I but only by a few inches. He was just under five feet. Once he'd have probably been average size for a human. His face was wizened, with grayish whiskers sticking out from his cheeks like fuzzy muttonchop sideburns. His nose was thin, long, and pointed. His eyes were large for his face and up-tilted at the corners. They were black, and seemed to have no iris until you realized that, like Doyle's, his irises were simply as black as his pupils, so you had trouble seeing them.
He walked ahead of us up the sidewalk, with its happy couples walking hand in hand and its families all smiling, all laughing. The children stared openly at the Fear Dearg. The adults took quick looks at him, but it was us that they stared at. I realized that we looked like ourselves. I hadn't thought to use glamour to make us look human, or at least less noticeable. I had been too careless for words.
The parents did double takes, then smiled, and tried to make eye contact. If I did that, they might want to talk, and we really needed to warn the demi-fey. Normally I tried to be friendly, but not today.
Glamour was the ability to cloud the minds of others so that they saw what you wished them to see, not what was actually there. It had always been my strongest magic, until a few months ago. It was still the magic I was most familiar with, and it flowed easily across my skin now.
I spoke low to Doyle and Frost. "We're getting stared at, and the press isn't here to complain."
"I can hide."
"Not in this light you can't," I said. Doyle had this uncanny ability to hide like some kind of movie ninja. I'd known he was the Darkness, and you never see the dark before it gets you, but I hadn't realized that it was more than just centuries of practice. He could actually wrap shadows around himself and hide. But he couldn't hide us, and he needed something other than bright sunlight to wrap around himself.
I pictured my hair simply red, human auburn, but not the spun garnet of my true color. I made my skin the paleness to go with the hair, but not the near pearlescent white of my own skin. I spread the glamour out to flow over Frost's skin as we walked. His skin was the same moonlight white as my own, so it was easier to change his color at the same time. I darkened his hair to a rich gray and kept darkening it as we moved until it was a brunette shade that was black with gray undertones. It matched the white skin and made him look like he'd gone Goth. He was dressed wrong for it, but for some reason I found this color to be the easiest for me on him. I could have chosen almost any color if I had had enough time, but we were attracting attention, and I didn't want that today. Once too many people "saw" us as us, the glamour might break under their knowledge. So it was down and dirty, change as we walked, and a thought out to the people who had recognized us, so that they would do a double take and think they'd been mistaken.
The trick was to change hair and skin gradually, smoothly, and to make people not notice that you were doing it, so it was really two types of glamour in one. The first just simply an illusion of our appearance changing, and the second an Obi Wan moment where the people just didn't see what they thought they saw.
Changing Doyle's appearance was always harder for some reason. I wasn't sure why, but it took just a little more concentration to turn his black skin to a deep, rich brown, and the oh-so-dark hair to a brown that matched the skin. The best I could do quickly was to make him look vaguely Indian, as in American Indian. I left the graceful curves of his ears with their earrings, even though now that I'd changed his skin to a human shade, the pointed ears marked him as a faerie wannabe, no, a sidhe wannabe. They all seemed to think that the sidhe had pointy ears like something out of fiction, when in fact it marked Doyle as not pure-blooded, but part lesser fey. He almost never hid his ears, a defiant gesture, a finger in the eye of the court. The wannabes were also fond of calling the sidhe elves. I blamed Tolkien and his elves for that.
I'd toned us down, but we were still eye-catching, and the men were still exotic, but I would have had to stop moving and concentrate fully to change them more completely.
The Fear Dearg had enough glamour that he could have changed his appearance, too. He simply didn't care if they stared. But then a phone call to the right number wouldn't make the press descend on him until we had to call other bodyguards to get us to our car. That had happened twice since we came back to Los Angeles. I didn't want a repeat.
The Fear Dearg dropped back to talk to us. "I have never seen a sidhe able to use glamour so well."
"That's high praise coming from you," I said. "Your people are known for their ability at glamour."