I opened it and found a foil-covered glass pan with a couple of enchiladas in it. I ate dinner, fed Medea, then washed my hands and took the book into the living room to read.
I hadn't expected a page that said, "This is who killed O'Donnell," but it might have been nice if each page of the six-hundred-page book hadn't been covered with tiny, handwritten words in old faded ink. At least it was in English.
An hour and a half later I had to stop because my eyes wouldn't focus anymore.
I'd turned to Chapter Five and gotten through maybe ten pages of the impossible text and three stories. The first story had been about the walking stick, a little more complete than the story I'd read off the Internet. It also had a detailed description of the stick. The author was obviously fae, which made it the first book I'd ever knowingly read from a fae viewpoint.
All of Chapter Five seemed to be about things like the walking stick: gifts of the fae. If O'Donnell had stolen the walking stick, maybe he'd stolen other things, too. Maybe the murderer had stolen them in return.
I took the book to the gun safe in my room and locked it in. It wasn't the best hiding place, but a casual thief was a little less likely to run off with it.
I washed dishes and mused about the book. Not so much about the contents, but what Tad had been trying to tell me about it.
The man at the bookstore had told me that the fae treasure things like the walking stick, no matter how useless they are in our modern world.
I could see that. For a fae, having something that held the remnant of magic lost to them was power. And power in the fae world meant safety. If they had a record of all the fairy-magicked items, then the Gray Lords could keep track of them--and apportion them as they chose. But the fae are a secretive people. I just couldn't see them making up a list of their items of power and handing it over.
I grew up in Montana, where an old, unregistered rifle was worth a lot more than a new gun whose ownership could be traced. Not that the gun owners in Montana are planning on committing crimes with their unregistered guns--they just don't like the federal government knowing their every move.
So what if...what if O'Donnell stole several magic items and no one knew what they were, or maybe what all of them were. Then some fae figured out it was O'Donnell. Someone who had a nose like mine-- or who saw him, or maybe tracked him back to his house. That fae could have killed O'Donnell to steal for himself the things O'Donnell had taken.
Maybe the murderer had timed it so Zee would be caught, knowing the Gray Lords would be happy to have a suspect wrapped up in a bow.
If I could find the killer and the things O'Donnell had stolen, I could hold those things hostage for Zee's acquittal and safety. I could see why a fae would want the walking stick, but what about O'Donnell? Maybe he hadn't known exactly what it was? He'd had to have known something about it, or else why take it? Maybe he'd intended to sell it back to the fae. You'd think that anyone who'd been around them for very long would know better than to think you'd survive long selling back stolen items to the fae.
Of course, O'Donnell was dead, wasn't he?
Someone knocked on my door--and I hadn't heard anyone drive up. It might have been one of the werewolves, walking over from Adam's house. I took a deep breath, but the door effectively blocked anything my nose might have told me.
I opened the door and Dr. Altman was standing on the porch. The seeing eye dog was gone--and there was no extra car in the driveway. Maybe she'd flown here.
"You've come for the walking stick?" I asked. "You're welcome to it."
"May I come in?"
I hesitated. I was pretty sure the threshold thing only worked on vampires, but if not...
She smiled tightly and took a step forward until she was standing on the carpet.
"Fine," I said. "Come in." I got the old stick and handed it to her.
"Why are you doing this?" she asked.
I deliberately misunderstood. "Because it's not my stick--and that sheep thing won't do me any good."
She gave me an irritated look. "I don't mean the stick. I mean why are you pushing your nose into fae business? You are undermining my standing with the police--and that may be dangerous for them in the long run. My job is to keep the humans safe. You don't know what is going on and you're going to cause more trouble than you can handle."
I laughed. I couldn't help it. "You and I both know that Zee didn't kill O'Donnell. I just made sure that the police were aware that someone else might be involved. I don't leave my friends out to swing in the wind." "The Gray Lords will not allow someone like you to know so much about us." The aggressive tension she'd been carrying in her shoulders relaxed and she strode confidently across my living room and sat in Samuel's big, overstuffed chair.
When she spoke again, her voice had a trace of a Celtic lilt. "Zee's a cantankerous bastard, and I love him, too. Moreover, there are not so many of the iron kissed left that we can lightly lose them. At any other time I would be free to do what I could to save him. But when the werewolves announced themselves to the public, they caused a resurgence of fear that we cannot afford to make worse. An open-and- shut case, with the police willing to keep mum about the condition of the murder victim, won't cause too much fuss. Zee understands that. If you know as much as you think you do, you should know that sometimes sacrifices are necessary for the majority to survive."
Zee had offered himself up as a sacrifice. He wanted me to get mad enough I'd leave him to rot because he knew that otherwise I'd never give up, I'd never agree to leave him as a sacrifice no matter what the cost to the fae.
"I came here tonight for Zee," she told me earnestly, her blind eyes staring through me. "Don't make this harder on him than it already is. Don't let this cost you your life, too."
"I know who you are, more or less, Nemane," I told her.
"Then you should know that not many get a warning before I strike."