him in my car trunk, I guess, or I could call the sheriff.” I wanted to impress this unknown with the fact
that I wasn’t completely needy and helpless. “But there’s the whole thing with you guys being secret,
and he didn’t seem to have a weapon, and obviously I can’t prove this guy said he’d enjoy killing me.”
“You . . . have killed a fairy.”
“I said that. Way back.” Mr. Slow-on-the-Uptake. I peered out the window again. “Yeah, he’s still not
moving. Dead and gone.”
This time the silence lasted so long that I thought I must have blanked out and missed something. I said,
“I’m sorry?”
“Are you really? We’ll be there very soon.” And he hung up.
I couldn’t not look, and I couldn’t bear to look. I’d seen the dead before, both human and nonhuman.
And since the night I’d met Bill Compton in Merlotte’s, I’d seen more than my share of bodies. Not that
that was Bill’s fault, of course.
I had goose pimples all over.
In about five minutes, Niall and another fairy walked out of the woods. There must be some kind of
portal out there. Maybe Scotty had beamed them up. Or down. And maybe I wasn’t thinking too clearly.
The two fairies stopped when they saw the body and then exchanged a few words. They seemed
astonished. But they weren’t scared, and they weren’t acting like they expected the guy to get up and
fight, so I crept across the back porch and out the screen door.
They knew I was there, but they continued their eyeballing of the body.
My great-grandfather raised his arm and I crept under it. He held me to him, and I glanced up to see that
he was smiling.
Okay, that was unexpected.
“You’re a credit to our family. You’ve killed my enemy,” he said. “I was so right about humans.” He
looked proud as punch.
“This is a good thing?”
The other fairy laughed and looked at me for the first time. He had hair the color of butterscotch, and his
eyes matched his hair, which to me was so weird that it was really off-putting—though like all the fairies
I’d met, he was gorgeous. I had to suppress a sigh. Between the vampires and the fairies, I was doomed
to be a plain Jane.
“I’m Dillon,” he said.
“Oh, Claudine’s dad. Nice to meet you. I guess your name means something, too?” I said.
“Lightning,” he said, and gave me a particularly winsome smile.
“Who is this?” I said, jerking my head at the body.
“He was Murry,” Niall said. “He was a close friend of my nephew Breandan.”
Murry looked very young; to the human eye, he’d been perhaps eighteen. “He said he was looking
forward to killing me,” I told them.
“But instead, you killed him. How did you do it?” Dillon asked, as if he was asking how I rolled out a
flaky piecrust.
“With my grandmother’s trowel,” I said. “Actually, it’s been in my family for a long time. Not like we
make a fetish of gardening tools or anything; it just works and it’s there and there’s no need to buy
another one.” Babbling.
They both looked at me. I couldn’t tell if they thought I was nuts or what.
“Could you show us this gardening tool?” Niall said.
“Sure. Do you-all want some tea or something? I think we’ve got some Pepsi and some lemonade.” No,
no, not lemonade! They’d die! “Sorry, cancel the lemonade. Tea?”
“No,” said Niall quite gently. “I think not now.”
I’d dropped the bloody trowel in among the cannas. When I picked it up and approached them, Dillon
flinched. “Iron!” he said.
“You don’t have the gloves on,” Niall said to his son chid ingly, and took the trowel from me. His hands
were covered with the clear flexible coating developed in fairy-owned chemical factories. Coated with
