"Merry, you in there?"
I nodded and looked at her, glad to look away from the bodies. "Sorry, I just never get used to seeing this kind of thing."
"Oh, you get used to it," she said, "but I hope you don't see enough dead bodies to be that jaded." She sighed, as if she wished she wasn't that jaded either.
"You asked me if the demi-fey are immortal, and the answer is yes." It was all I could say to her until I found out if the mortality of the fey was spreading. So far it had only been a few cases inside faerie.
"Then how did the killer do this?"
I'd only seen one other demi-fey killed by a blade that wasn't cold iron. A noble of the Unseelie Court had wielded that one. A noble of faerie, and my blood kin. We'd killed the sidhe who did it, although he said that he hadn't meant to kill her. He had just meant to wound her through the heart as her desertion of him had wounded his heart - poetic and the kind of romantic drivel you get when you're used to being surrounded by beings who can have their heads chopped off and still live. That last bit hasn't worked in a long time even among the sidhe, but we haven't shared that either. No one likes to talk about the fact that their people are losing their magic and their power.
Was the killer a sidhe? Somehow I didn't think so. They might kill a lesser fey out of arrogance or a sense of privilege, but this had the taste of something much more convoluted than that - a motive that only the killer would understand.
I looked carefully at my own reasoning to make certain I wasn't talking myself out of the Unseelie Court, the Darkling Throng, being suspects. The court that I had been offered rulership of and given up for love. The tabloids were still talking about the fairy-tale ending, but people had died, some of them by my hand, and, like most fairy tales, it had been more about blood and being true to yourself than about love. Love had just been the emotion that had led me to what I truly wanted, and who I truly was. I guess there are worse emotions to follow.
"What are you thinking, Merry?"
"I'm thinking that I wonder what emotion led the killer to do this, to want to do this."
"What do you mean?"
"It takes something like love to put this much attention into the details. Did the killer love this book or did he love the small fey? Did he hate this book as a child? Is it the clue to some horrible trauma that twisted him to do this?"
"Don't start profiling on me, Merry; we've got people paid to do that."
"I'm just doing what you taught me, Lucy. Murder is like any skill; it doesn't fall out of the box perfect. This is perfect."
"The killer probably spent years fantasizing about this scene, Merry. They wanted, needed it to be perfect."