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Ireland had married the same woman, the Goddess, who had oncebeen a real queen whom each king “married,” at least for a night. We had not always played by the traditional human rules of monogamy.
    Sholto was one of the fathers of the children I carried, so the Goddess had shown all of us. So technically I was still his queen. Sholto had not pressed that idea in this month back home; he seemed to understand that I was struggling to find my footing in this new, more-permanent exile.
    All I could think to say aloud was, “I didn’t think the Fear Dearg owed allegiance to any court.”
    “Some of us fought with the sluagh in the last wars. It allowed us to bring death and pain without the rest of you good folk”—and he made sure the last phrase held bitterness and contempt in it—“hunting us down and passing sentence on us for doing what is in our nature. The sidhe of either court have no lawful call on the Fear Dearg, do they, kinsman?”
    “I will not acknowledge kinship with you, Fear Dearg, but Meredith is right. You have acted with courtesy. I can do no less.” It was interesting that Doyle had dropped the “Princess” he normally used in front of all lesser fey, but he had not used queen either, so he was interested in the Fear Dearg acknowledging me as queen, and that was very interesting to me.
    “Good,” the Fear Dearg said. “Then I will take you to Dobbin, ah, Robert, he now calls himself. Such richness to be able to name yerself twice. It’s a waste when there are others nameless and left wanting.”
    “We will listen to your tale, Fear Dearg, but first we must talk to any demi-fey who are at the Fael,” I said.
    “Why?” he asked, and there was far too much curiosity in that one word. I remembered then that some Fear Dearg demand a story from their human hosts, and if the story isn’t good enough, they torture and kill them, but if the story is good enough they leave them with a blessing. What would make a being thousands of years old care that much for stray stories, and what was his obsession with names?
    “That is not your business, Fear Dearg,” Doyle said.
    “It’s all right, Doyle. Everyone will know soon enough.”
    “No, Meredith, not here, not on the street.” There was something in the way he said it that made me pause. But it was Frost’s hand squeezing my arm, making me look at him, that made me realize that a Fear Dearg might be able to kill the demi-fey. He might be our killer, for the Fear Dearg walked outside many of the normal rules of our kind, for all this one’s talk of belonging to the kingdom of the sluagh.
    Was our mass murderer standing on the other side of my boyfriends? Wouldn’t that have been convenient? I felt a flash of hope flare inside me, but let it die as quickly as it had risen. I’d worked murder cases before, and it was never that easy. Murderers did not meet you on the street just after you’d left the scene of their crime. But it would be nifty if just this once it really was that easy. Then I realized that Doyle had realized the possibility that the Fear Dearg might be our murderer the moment he saw him; that was why the extreme caution.
    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