Iron Kissed (Mercy Thompson #3)(5)

I don't know what kind of ID I would have had them use, but a picture ID was worthless. Of course, the fae tried really hard to pretend that they could only take one human form without ever saying exactly that. Maybe they'd convinced some bureaucrat to believe it.

"Will you please get out of the truck, ma'am," the moron said, stepping out of the guardhouse and crossing in front of the truck until he was on my side of the vehicle.

Zee nodded. I got out of the car.

The guard walked all the way around me, and I had to restrain my growl. I don't like people I don't know walking behind me. He wasn't quite as dumb as he first appeared because he figured it out and walked around me again.

"Brass doesn't like civilian visitors, especially after dark," he said to Zee, who had gotten out to stand next to me.

"I am allowed, sir," Zee replied, still in that deferential tone.

The guard snorted and flipped through a few pages on his clipboard, though I don't think he actually was reading anything. "Siebold Adelbertsmiter." He pronounced it wrong, making Zee's name sound like Seabold instead of Zeebolt. "Michael McNellis, and Olwen Jones." Michael McNellis could be Uncle Mike - or not. I didn't know any fae named Olwen, but I could count the fae I knew by any name on one hand with fingers left over. Mostly the fae kept to themselves.

"That's right," Zee said with false patience that sounded genuine; I only knew it was false because Zee had no patience with fools - or anyone else for that matter. "I am Siebold." He said it the same way O'Donnell had.

The petty tyrant kept my license and walked back to his little office. I stayed where I was, so I couldn't see exactly what he did, though I could hear the sound of computer keys being tapped. He came back after a couple of minutes and returned my license to me.

"Stay out of trouble, Mercedes Thompson. Fairyland is no place for good little girls."

Obviously O'Donnell had been sick the day they'd had sensitivity training. I wasn't usually a hard-core stickler, but something about the way he said "little girl" made it an insult. Mindful of Zee's wary gaze, I took my license and slipped it into my pocket and tried to keep what I was thinking to myself.

I don't think my expression was bland enough, because he shoved his face into mine. "Did you hear me, girl?"

I could smell the honey ham and mustard he'd had on his dinner sandwich. The garlic he'd probably eaten last night. Maybe he'd had a pizza or lasagna.

"I heard you," I said in as neutral a tone as I could manage, which wasn't, admittedly, very good.

He fingered the gun on his hip. He looked at Zee. "She can stay two hours. If she's not back out by then, we'll come looking for her."

Zee bowed his head like combatants do in karate movies, without letting his eyes leave the guard's face. He waited until the guard walked back to his office before he got back in the car, and I followed his lead.

The metal gate slid open with a reluctance that mirrored O'Donnell's attitude. The steel it was built of was the first sign of competence I'd seen. Unless there was rebar in the walls, the concrete might keep people like me out, but it would never keep fae in. The concertina wire was too shiny to be anything but aluminum, and aluminum doesn't bother the fae in the slightest. Of course, ostensibly, the reservation was set up to restrict where the fae lived and to protect them, so it shouldn't matter that they could come and go as they pleased, guarded gate or not.

Zee drove through the gates and into Fairyland.

I don't know what I expected of the reservation; military housing of some sort, maybe, or English cottages. Instead, there were row after row of neat, well-kept ranch houses with attached one-car garages laid out in identical-sized yards with identical fences, chain link around the front yard, six-foot cedar around the backyard.

The only difference from one house to the next was in color of paint and foliage in the yards. I knew the reservation had been here since the eighties, but it looked as though it might have been built a year ago.

There were cars scattered here and there, mostly SUVs and trucks, but I didn't see any people at all. The only sign of life, aside from Zee and me, was a big black dog that watched us with intelligent eyes from the front yard of a pale yellow house.

The dog pushed the Stepford effect up to ubercreepy.

I turned to comment about it to Zee when I realized that my nose was telling me some odd things.

"Where's the water?" I asked.

"What water?" He raised an eyebrow.

"I smell swamp: water and rot and growing things."

He gave me a look I couldn't decipher. "That's what I told Uncle Mike. Our glamour works best for sight and touch, very good for taste and hearing, but not as well for scent. Most people can't smell well enough for scent to be a problem. You smelled that I was fae the first time you met me."

Actually he was wrong. I've never met two people who smell exactly alike - I'd thought that earthy scent that he and his son Tad shared was just part of their own individual essences. It wasn't until a long time later that I learned to distinguish between fae and human. Unless you live within an hour's drive of one of the four fae reservations in the U.S., the chances of running into one just weren't that high. Until I'd moved to the Tri-Cities and started working for Zee, I'd never knowingly met a fae.