Stealing the Elf-King's Roses: The Author's Cut Read Online Free PDF Page A

way she looked at plaintiffs or the accused in the courtroom. Yet it was impossible ever to turn the Sight completely off, and insights did slip through… Oh, come on , she thought, annoyed at her own attempt to rationalize it. Eavesdropping at a perfect stranger like that… and this one, in particular. What’s the matter with   me?—
    But when Lee looked up again, the Elf-King had turned his attention back to his dinner companions as if nothing had happened, and business went on uninterrupted on the other side of the room. Dessert arrived, and Gelert  did  get chocolate in his fur, and Herr Egli scolded him goodnaturedly and sent to the kitchen for hot towels and club soda. Only much later, over the remains of the coffee and snifters of Grand Marnier, while the check was being reckoned up, did Gelert lean toward Lee, and say, “What was  that  about?” He flicked one ear backward, in the direction of the Elf-King’s table.
    “I don’t know,” Lee said. “Curiosity.” And the first part of that was truer than the second. She snitched a final puff of toasted meringue off the dessert plate, ignoring Gelert’s indignant growl. “Come on, better dig out your plastic, or we’ll have nothing left to catch but the red-eye.”
    And he did, and they did, so that an hour or so later the two of them stepped from late evening at Kennedy to summer sunset at Los Angeles Intercontinual—a late-lingering volcano sunset that lowered red hot over the Santa Susanas and turned Lake Val San Fernando to a sea of blood, flat and thick-looking under the breathless, baking air. They caught choppers for home in opposite directions—Lee, as soon as she’d recovered from the inevitable tummyflutter that gating caused her, heading eastward to the park-and-fly and her house in Pasadena; Gelert heading west to his mate and pups and their condo in a  madrin  coop at Malibu. Neither of them thought much of that dinner at Le Chalet in the days that followed.
    But that night, as the late news came on, Lee thought about it for some time. “A fatal ‘gangland’-style shooting late tonight in the Wilshire District,” said the eleven o’clock anchor; and the camera cut from the studio to a remote of a murky scene lit in pink-yellow streetlights and the flashing reds and blues of ambulances and police black-and-whites. The on scene newsman babbled on about names and circumstances and unclear motives. But what froze Lee in horror, blocking words away, was the quick shot of the slim, well-muscled form, all the Alfen elegance and strength gone out of it now, lying sprawled face down on the pavement. Lee made a face. It was sweeps week, and all the stations’ news coverage had become unusually sensational of late. But as they maneuvered the body onto the stretcher, she still couldn’t look away from the handsome, cool, clean-chiseled face, pale and smudged with street grime, still beautiful in death. She did look away when the hastily tucked drape slipped just enough askew in the moving to show the wet pink-and-white gleam of ribs splintered by a shotgun blast to the back.
    In the morning and in days to follow, Lee would read the conjectures in the  Ellay Times  about successful or unsuccessful attempts by the Mob to get one of the local Alfen to “play ball” in some unspecified racket. But right now Lee found herself thinking about the expression being slowly frozen by rigor into the dead Elf’s face, and how very similar it was to the way the Elf-King had looked at his poor dinner companions. That aloof, gentle immortal’s gaze; fearless, calmly certain, invulnerable to the petty machinations of those who knew far better than the Alfen how to die…
    Lee breathed out and settled back to wait for the weather report.

*2*
     

    The next morning was like most mornings the day after a court appearance: filled with paperwork and dogged by a lingering hung-over feeling that didn’t even have associated with it the guilty satisfaction