Iron Kissed (Mercy Thompson #3)(10)

Zee touched my back. "I'll have to carry you to take you back." He didn't wait for a response, just picked me up. There was a nauseating moment when all my senses swam around me, and then he set me down on the tile of the bathroom floor. The room was dark as pitch.

Zee turned on the light, which looked yellow and artificial after the colors of the sunset.

"Can you continue?" he asked me.

I looked at him, but he gave his head a sharp shake. He didn't want to talk about what happened. It irked me, but I'd read enough fairy tales to know that sometimes talking about the fae too directly lets them listen in. When I got him out of the reservation, I would get answers if I had to sit on him.

Until then, I put my curiosity aside to consider his question. I sneezed twice to clear my nose and then put it down on the floor to collect more people from this house.

This time Zee came with me, staying back so as not to interfere, but close on my heels. He didn't say anything more and I ignored him as I struggled for an explanation of what had just happened to me. Was this house real? Zee told the other fae that I had broken the glamour - wouldn't that mean that it was the other landscape that was real? But that would mean that there was an entire ocean here, which seemed really unlikely - though I could still smell it if I tried. I knew that Underhill was the fairy realm, but the stories about it were pretty vague where they weren't outright contradictory.

The sun had truly set and Zee turned on lights as we went. Though I could see fine in the dark, I was grateful for the light. My heart was still certain that we were going to be eaten, and it pounded away at twice its usual speed.

Death's unlovely perfume drew my attention to a closed door. If I'd been on my own, I could have opened the door easily enough, but I believe in making use of others. I whined (coyotes can't bark, not like a dog) and Zee obediently opened the door and revealed the stairs going down into a basement. It was the first of the houses that had had a basement - unless they'd been hidden somehow.

I bounded down the stairs. Zee turned on the lights and followed me down. Most of the basement looked like basements look: junk stored without rhyme or reason, unfinished walls and cement floor. I padded across the floor, following death to a door, shut tight. Zee opened that one without me asking and I found, at last, the place where the fae who had lived here was murdered.

Unlike the rest of the house, this room had been immaculate before the resident had been murdered. Underneath the rust-colored stains of the fae's blood, the tile floor gleamed. Cracked leather-bound tomes with the authentic lumpiness of pre - printing press books sat intermingled with battered paperbacks and college math and biology texts in bookcases that lined the walls.

This room was the bloodiest I'd seen so far - and given the first murder, that was saying something. Even dried and old, the blood was overwhelming. It had pooled, stained, and sprayed as the fae had fought with his attacker. The lower shelves of three bookcases were dotted with it. Tables had been knocked over and a lamp was broken on the floor.

Maybe I wouldn't have realized it if I hadn't just been thinking about them, but the fae here had been a selkie. I had never met one before that I knew, but I'd been to zoos and I knew what seals smelled like.

I didn't want to walk into the room. I wasn't usually squeamish, but lately I'd been walking in enough blood. Where the blood had pooled - in the grout between tiles, on a book lying open, and against the base of one of the bookcases where the floor wasn't quite level - it had rotted instead of dried. The room smelled of blood, seal, and decaying fish.

I avoided the worst of the mess where I could and tried not to think too much about what I couldn't avoid. Gradually what my nose told me distracted me from the unpleasantness of my task. I quartered the room, while Zee waited just outside it.

As I started for the door, I caught something. Most of the blood here belonged to the fae, but on the floor, just in front of the door, were a few drops of blood that did not.

If Zee had been a police officer, I'd have shifted then and there to tell him what I'd found. But if I pointed my finger toward a suspect, I was pretty sure I knew what would happen to the person I pointed it at.

Werewolves dealt with their criminals the same way. I don't have any quarrel with killing murderers, but if I'm the one doing the accusing, I'd like to be absolutely certain, given the consequences. And the person I'd be accusing was an unlikely choice for killing this many fae.

Zee followed me up the stairs, turning off lights and closing doors as we went. I didn't bother looking further. There had only been two scents in the basement room besides Uncle Mike's. Either the selkie didn't bring guests into his library, or he had cleaned since the last time. Most damning of all was the blood.

Zee opened the front door and I stepped out into full night where the silvered moon had fully risen. How long had I sat staring at the impossible sea?

A shadow stirred on the porch and became Uncle Mike. He smelled of malt and hot wings, and I could see that he was still dressed in his tavern-keeper clothes: loose ivory-colored khakis and green T-shirt with his own name in the possessive across his chest in sparkling white letters. It wasn't egocentrism; Uncle Mike's was the name of his tavern.

"She's wet," he said, his Irish thicker than Zee's German.

"Seawater," Zee told him. "She'll be all right."

Uncle Mike's handsome face tightened. "Seawater."