slamming the door behind her. “Peter,” she said, staring at the door. “That was Peter.”
“I thought you didn’t have any night vision. How can you be sure?”
“No one else in this company has wings.”
“Damn.” I looked back toward the door. “I need to go in there.”
“Are you sure that’s wise?” Jan asked, frowning.
“Without backup?” asked Quentin.
“I need to see the body, and that means I need to get the generators back up. How do I do that?” Death doesn’t bother me, but murder makes me edgy, and my lack of weaponry suddenly felt like a potentially fatal mistake. If we got back to the hotel alive, I wasn’t coming here again without my knife and the baseball bat. And maybe a tank, if I could find one fast enough.
“Right.” Jan sighed. “There’s an orange switch on the second box inside the door. If there’s any gas left in the generators, you should be able to force them back online by flipping the switch, waiting thirty seconds, and flipping it again.”
“Okay.” Looking to Quentin, I said, “Stay here. If you see anything out of the ordinary or anyone acting strangely, grab Jan and run; I’ll catch up. Understand?”
“Yes,” he said. If he disapproved of my orders, he wasn’t showing it.
Jan looked like she was going to argue, but quieted when I glared at her. She was starting to display signs of sense.
“Good,” I said, before opening the generator room door and stepping inside.
The room was dark, lit only by a small, thick-glassed window, and looked deserted. That didn’t mean there was nothing in the room with me—just that anything that might be hiding in those shadows knew how to be quiet. Sometimes I wish I wasn’t such a positive thinker.
I paused, scanning the shadows while my eyes adjusted. I caught a flicker of motion out of the corner of one eye and whirled. There was nothing there. The “motion” was just the late afternoon sunlight slanting through the window and glinting along the edge of a steel girder. I stopped, taking a shuddery breath.
Finding the second generator from the door wasn’t hard: I inched along the wall until my thigh hit something sharp, stepped back, and then inched forward again until I hit something else. I wasn’t willing to move away from the wall; Peter was a dark blur at the center of the floor, and I didn’t want to step on him by mistake.
I was jumpier than I thought. I groped around until I found the panel with the switches; figuring out which one to flip was harder. The longer I stood there, the shakier I was getting, and Jan and Quentin were in the hall alone and unarmed. Time mattered. I settled for flipping the largest switch I could find, waiting thirty seconds and flipping it again. My heart thudded in my ears like a steel drum until the sound of the generator revving drowned it out. The engine coughed twice, turned over—and the lights came back on. I almost immediately wished that they hadn’t.
Peter was on his back, barely recognizable as the man we met when we arrived. Death had finally removed his human disguise. He was four feet tall, with delicate antennae and feathered gray hair, lying on a blanket made by his own gray-and-green wings. He’d been a Cornish Pixie, almost the only pixie breed large enough to interact with the bulk of Faerie as an equal.
Well, he wasn’t going to be doing anything as an equal anymore: he wasn’t going to be arguing about whether Klingon was a language, or confusing visiting changelings by wearing a human disguise when everyone else had shed theirs. It was starting to look like the ALH retirement plan was “get found dead in the back room.” Punctures broke his skin at the wrists and throat, dispelling the illusion that he was only sleeping. He was never going to wake up.
I knelt, touching his throat, and winced as I felt the lingering warmth of his skin. Blood and a thin film of dust covered my fingers: pixie-sweat. That gave me a time of death. Pixies stop “dusting” when they die, and the glittery traces they leave behind dissolve quickly. He couldn’t have been dead when the lights went out, or the pixie-sweat would have already faded.
The lights came back up too easily to have been sabotaged, but it made no sense for whoever had killed Peter to have also killed the power. The body would have gone undiscovered for hours,