Divine Misdemeanors Read Online Free PDF Page B

our car. That had happened twice since we came back to Los Angeles. I didn’t want a repeat.
    The Fear Dearg dropped back to talk to us. “I have never seen a sidhe able to use glamour so well.”
    “That’s high praise coming from you,” I said. “Your people are known for their ability at glamour.”
    “The lesser fey are all better at glamour than the bigger folk.”
    “I’ve seen sidhe make garbage look like a feast and have people eat it,” I said.
    Doyle said, “And the Fear Dearg need a leaf to create money, a cracker to be a cake, a log to be a purse of gold. You need something to pin the glamour to for it to work.”
    “So do I,” I said. I thought about it. “So do the sidhe that I’ve seen able to do it.”
    “Oh, but once the sidhe could conjure castles out of thin air, and food to tempt any mortal that was mere air,” the Fear Dearg said.
    “I’ve not seen …” Then I stopped, because the sidhe didn’t like admitting out loud that their magic was fading. It was considered rude, and if the Queen of Air and Darkness heard you, the punishment would be a slap, if you were lucky, and if you weren’t, you’d bleed for reminding her that her kingdom was lessening.
    The Fear Dearg gave a little skip, and Frost was forced a little back from my side, or he would have stepped on the smaller fey. Doyle growled at him, a deep rumbling bass that matched the huge black dog he could shift into. Frost stepped forward, forcing the Fear Dearg to step ahead or be stepped on.
    “The sidhe have always been petty,” he said, as if it didn’t bother him at all, “but you were saying, my queen, that you’d never seen such glamour from the sidhe. Not in your lifetime, eh?”
    The door of the Fael was in front of us now. It was all glass and wood, very quaint and old-fashioned, as if it were a store from decades before this one.
    “I need to speak with one of the demi-fey,” I said.
    “About the murders, eh?” he asked.
    We all stopped moving for a heartbeat, then I was suddenly behind the men and could only glimpse the edge of his red coat around their bodies.
    “Oh, ho,” the Fear Dearg said with a chuckle. “You think it’s me. You think I slit their throats for them.”
    “We do now,” Doyle said.
    The Fear Dearg laughed, and it was the kind of laugh that if you heard it in the dark, you’d be afraid. It was the kind of laugh that enjoyed pain.
    “You can talk to the demi-fey who fled here to tell the tale. She was full of all sorts of details. Hysterical she was, babbling about the dead being dressed like some child’s story complete with picked flowers in their hands.” He made a disgusted sound. “Every faery knows that no flower faery would ever pick a flower and kill it. They tend them.”
    I hadn’t thought of that. He was absolutely right. It was a humanmistake, just like the illustration in the first place. Some fey could keep a picked flower alive, but it was not a common talent. Most demi-fey didn’t like bouquets of flowers. They smelled of death.
    Whoever our killer was, they were human. I needed to tell Lucy. But I had another thought. I tried to push past Doyle, but it was like trying to move a small mountain; you could push, but you didn’t make much progress. I spoke around him. “Did this demi-fey see the killings?”
    “Nay”—and what I could see of the Fear Dearg’s small wizened face seemed truly sad—“she went to tend the plants that are hers on the hillside and found the police already there.”
    “We still need to talk to her,” I said.
    He nodded the slip of his face that I could see between Doyle and Frost’s bodies. “She’s in the back with Dobbin having a spot of something to calm her nerves.”
    “How long has she been here?”
    “Ask her yourself. You said you wanted to talk to a demi-fey, not her specifically. Why did you want one to speak with, my queen?”
    “I wanted to warn the others that they might be in danger.”
    He turned so that one