I could smell the honey ham and mustard he'd had on his dinner sandwich. The garlic he'd probably eaten last night. Maybe he'd had a pizza or lasagna.
"I heard you," I said in as neutral a tone as I could manage, which wasn't, admittedly, very good.
He fingered the gun on his hip. He looked at Zee. "She can stay two hours. If she's not back out by then, we'll come looking for her."
Zee bowed his head like combatants do in karate movies, without letting his eyes leave the guard's face. He waited until the guard walked back to his office before he got back in the car, and I followed his lead.
The metal gate slid open with a reluctance that mirrored O'Donnell's attitude. The steel it was built of was the first sign of competence I'd seen. Unless there was rebar in the walls, the concrete might keep people like me out, but it would never keep fae in. The concertina wire was too shiny to be anything but aluminum, and aluminum doesn't bother the fae in the slightest. Of course, ostensibly, the reservation was set up to restrict where the fae lived and to protect them, so it shouldn't matter that they could come and go as they pleased, guarded gate or not.
Zee drove through the gates and into Fairyland.
I don't know what I expected of the reservation; military housing of some sort, maybe, or English cottages. Instead, there were row after row of neat, well-kept ranch houses with attached one-car garages laid out in identical-sized yards with identical fences, chain link around the front yard, six-foot cedar around the backyard. The only difference from one house to the next was in color of paint and foliage in the yards. I knew the reservation had been here since the eighties, but it looked as though it might have been built a year ago.
There were cars scattered here and there, mostly SUVs and trucks, but I didn't see any people at all. The only sign of life, aside from Zee and me, was a big black dog that watched us with intelligent eyes from the front yard of a pale yellow house.
The dog pushed the Stepford effect up to ?bercreepy.
I turned to comment about it to Zee when I realized that my nose was telling me some odd things.
"Where's the water?" I asked.
"What water?" He raised an eyebrow.
"I smell swamp: water and rot and growing things."
He gave me a look I couldn't decipher. "That's what I told Uncle Mike. Our glamour works best for sight and touch, very good for taste and hearing, but not as well for scent. Most people can't smell well enough for scent to be a problem. You smelled that I was fae the first time you met me."
Actually he was wrong. I've never met two people who smell exactly alike--I'd thought that earthy scent that he and his son Tad shared was just part of their own individual essences. It wasn't until a long time later that I learned to distinguish between fae and human. Unless you live within an hour's drive of one of the four fae reservations in the U.S., the chances of running into one just weren't that high. Until I'd moved to the Tri-Cities and started working for Zee, I'd never knowingly met a fae.
"So where is the swamp?" I asked.
He shook his head. "I hope that you will be able to see through whatever means our murderer has used to disguise himself. But for your own sake, Liebling, I would hope that you would leave the reservation its secrets if you can."
He turned down a street that looked just like the first four we'd passed--except that there was a young girl of about eight or nine playing with a yo-yo in one of the yards. She watched the spinning, swinging toy with solemn attention that didn't change when Zee parked the car in front of her house. When Zee opened the gate, she caught the yo-yo in one hand and looked at us with adult eyes.
"No one has entered," she said.
Zee nodded. "This is the latest murder scene," he told me. "We found it this morning. There are six others. The rest have had a lot of people in and out, but except for this one"--he indicated the girl with a tip of his head--"who is a Council member, and Uncle Mike, there have been no other trespassers since his death."
I looked at the child who was one of the Council and she gave me a smile and popped her bubblegum.
I decided it was safest to ignore her. "You want me to see if I can smell someone who was in all the houses?"
"If you can."
"There's not exactly a database where scents are stored like fingerprints. Even if I scent him out, I'll have no idea who it is--unless it's you, Uncle Mike, or your Council member here." I nodded my head toward Yo-yo Girl.
Zee smiled without humor. "If you can find one scent that is in every house, I will personally escort you around the reservation or the entire state of Washington until you find the murdering son of a bitch."
That's when I knew this was personal. Zee didn't swear much and never in English. Bitch, in particular, was a word he'd never used in my presence.
"It will be better if I do this alone then," I told him. "So the scents you're carrying don't contaminate what is already there. Do you mind if I use the truck to change?"
"Nein, nein," he said. "Go change."
I returned to the truck and felt the girl's gaze on the back of my neck all the way. She looked too innocent and helpless to be anything but a serious nasty.
I got into the truck, on the passenger side to get as much room as possible, and stripped out of all my clothes. For werewolves, the change is very painful, especially if they wait too long to change at a full moon and the moon pulls the change from them. Shifting doesn't hurt me at all--actually it feels good, like a thorough stretch after a workout. I get hungry, though, and if I hop from one form to the other too often, it makes me tired.