34. Well, Shit. This Isn’t Good

Wrapping my mind around an oddly colored blip, I checked to make sure I had Leticia and not some new creature I was unaware of. It was her, but she felt all wrong. Her mind was strangely chaotic. I heard her steady voice in my head, willing someone to relax, that all was well, while something else screeched. It was like nails on a chalkboard, if those nails were sentient and desperate.

I dove deeper, past the voices, and saw through her eyes. She was draining the life out of a mermaid, her arms clamped like iron bars around her victim. The mermaid was losing strength, the screeching now mere whimpers. When she was little more than a desiccated husk fading into nothing, Leticia dropped her and swam toward shore.

I tried what I had done in New Orleans, when those vamps had attacked Stheno and me in an alley. I envisioned my magic like a golden thread and wrapped it around Leticia's mind. Once done, I yanked, but the threads slid off. Confused, I tried again, doing exactly as I had done before. A few of the threads snagged as though they had caught hold, but then they slid through again.

I was a necromancer. I had no control over the fae. The only thing that made sense was now that she had glutted herself with fae blood, she'd altered her own chemistry to such a degree, I couldn't touch her. It wouldn't last. Vampires needed to feed regularly because their bodies—actually, I wasn't entirely sure how that worked, but I knew they needed blood on a daily basis. My only hope was to get her between feedings, when she'd be without the fae protection.

Opening my eyes, I turned back to the room, defeated. "Found her."

"Where?" Clive was already standing.

"The ocean." It sounded ridiculous. Given the way everyone was staring at me with varying degrees of confusion, they agreed.

"She's on a boat?" Medusa asked.

Shaking my head, I looked at Clive. "You guys don't need to breathe, right?"

All three vampires looked decidedly uncomfortable.

"She's—what? She's swimming around? Sitting on the bottom, watching fish go by?" Godfrey threw up his hands and walked across the room.

"She's feeding on the water fae. She just drained a mermaid dry. Do the fae disappear when they die?" If I couldn't kill her, maybe the vamps could catch her in the water.

Clive dropped back down on the couch, his head in his hands. "She's killing the fae," he said quietly to himself.

"Shit," Stheno breathed. "Even we don't fuck with the fae."

"Is there a way to contact an emissary, explain that this isn't us?" There had to be something we could do to distance ourselves from Leticia.

"Which us?" Godfrey asked as he dropped into a chair near me. "Vampires? San Francisco? All non-fae?" He dragged a hand down his face. "Can you imagine if Faerie decided to set her warriors against us?"

"You'd be annihilated," Euryale answered.

"Aye."

"Is that the goal?" I asked.

Clive lifted his head and turned to me.

"I mean, you all seem to know what a bad idea it is to piss off Faerie, so is Leticia doing it to burn it all down, you included? Her mom's back in England. Maybe the plan is to stir up apocalyptic shit here and then hop across the pond to wait out our destruction."

"What about your great-aunt's wife?" Russell asked. "Would she be willing to act as an envoy, to explain we're hunting Leticia, that she isn't one of us?"

Clive shook his head.

"I'm not her favorite person and she's currently in Faerie, recovering from the last time she healed me."

"Liam?" Godfrey suggested.

"He's not really happy with me, given what my aunt did to him." This was hopeless.

"You said there was a door into Faerie at the Wicche Glass. Could you step through and talk to someone?" Russell ventured.

"No!" Clive and Stheno responded as one.

"You do not step foot in Faerie without an invitation and guarantees of safety. Too many would love nothing more than to eat you," Euryale explained.

"How do we get an invitation?" I asked.

Godfrey leaned forward, bracing his forearms on his thighs. "You said earlier that Sam is now considered a friend of the dragons. Would they fly her in, vouch for her?"

Clive stood, his face drawn. "Sam is not going into Faerie, and certainly not alone."

"Couldn't you just hurry up and kill the bloodsucker? Then you could give Faerie the body and say, ‘See? We took care of it?'" Medusa suggested.

"She'd be a pile of dust," I said.

"Okay, even better. Get her close to death and hand her over. Then Faerie gets to do the honors." Medusa filled her cup again.

"Maybe we should go talk with Coco and George's grandmother again. See what she thinks?"

Clive nodded slowly, taking his phone out of his pocket. "I need to call first."

I'd felt the pull through that mirror in The Wicche Glass. Faerie wanted me. I was terrified I wouldn't get back out if I went in. My life was here: Clive, my friends, the bookstore and bar. It was all here. I didn't want to visit Faerie for what seemed like an afternoon, only to return home and find everyone hundreds of years dead. I needed to go to keep everyone safe, but in doing so, I might lose them all.

Clive walked back, nodding. "She'll see us."

Knowing what a stickler for etiquette the matriarch of the dragon clan was, I ran upstairs and changed into a long, soft, slim-fitting sweater dress in a rich wine color. I was sitting on the side of the bed, sliding into black leather boots when Clive strode in.

"You always look posh," I said. "You don't need to change."

He distractedly looked down at himself. "No. I don't want to set this plan in motion. I don't want to make Faerie aware of you. She's capricious and vicious. She could decide she likes you and engage you in a conversation you believe to be an hour long, only to return to this realm sometime in the next century. Or she could take a dislike to you and give you to one of her monsters—like that thing that attacked you in The Wicche Glass—to eat."

He paced across the room. "I have no power, no influence in Faerie. None. If anything, she hates vampires, as we're considered unnatural."

"The Unseelie Court—or the dark sidhe, or whatever the proper term is—aren't exactly flower fairies," I said.

"No, but they're part of the natural order. Light, dark, day, night; in our literature we separate them into seelie and unseelie, good and evil, but it's never that simple. The fae wield extraordinary power and adhere to a code of ethics that's foreign to us."

He ran his hand through his hair, a rare sign of agitation for him. "It would be like attributing evil to a snake. It acts as it was designed to act. Good and evil don't factor in its behavior. The fae are self-serving. Beneficence is not prized. Trickery is. If they can mislead you, get you to agree to something you believe is right, but then twist it to cause harm, they'd celebrate the deception and glory in your destruction. They tricked you and won."

"I thought the fae couldn't lie."

"Who knows?" He sat beside me on the bed. "It may be lauded as superior strategy and manipulation to deceive while speaking truth. It's just as possible that their inability to lie is a tale they've spread far and wide to make us think we stand a chance against them. Only the fae know what they're capable of."

"Okay, let's stop and think this through. The goal is not to survive a visit to Faerie, but to keep her from attacking us because of Leticia. Let's find out how to send a message to Faerie explaining the problem, and then let's stop Leticia before she causes war between the realms. None of us needs to actually enter Faerie."

Clive blew out a breath. "Good. Come." He took my hand and pulled me to my feet. "We'll ask Benvair for advice."

The street and house were much the same as before: clean, wealthy, exclusive. A few windows in Benvair's home glowed in the night. Clive parked on the street in front of the mansion. He met me on the sidewalk and took my hand.

Squeezing it, he held my gaze and said, "Faerie can't have you."

"Who says she wants me? Lord knows you didn't. Remember? You kept finding ways to ditch me." I forced a laugh, trying to lighten the mood, even though my stomach was sinking. I did not want to enter Faerie. With any luck, we'd figure out how to avoid it.

He lifted our hands, turning them so my engagement ring shone in the dim light. "Bad example."

Before we reached the porch, the front door swung open. Fyffe in his black suit stood in the light and then stepped out of the way. "This way, please." Shutting the door behind us, he led the way back into the sitting room we'd met in last time.

Benvair was already seated, a cup of tea in her hand. Looking every inch the queen she was, she wore a gold silk blouse with black trousers and heels. Canary diamonds glittered at her ears and on her finger.

When Clive and I sat, she motioned to the tea service. Fyffe poured and handed us each a delicate cup. The scent was amazing. I breathed deeply, savoring, before I took a sip.

Clive drank and said, "Good. My package arrived." He never missed a trick, already sending her that super expensive tea he'd mentioned last time.

"It did." She held her cup like she was protecting her newest treasure.

Clive put his down. "Thank you for meeting us on short notice." At her nod, he continued. "We seek your knowledge and advice."

Raising her eyebrows, she waited.

I struggled not to grin. The woman was such a badass, I wanted to shake her hand for making the great Clive measure his words so exactingly. As I was on Clive's side, though, that seemed rude.

"There is a vampire—not one from my nocturne—who is attacking the fae."

Benvair's hand paused as she brought the cup to her lips. It was brief, but for a woman so in control, it screamed shock. "I now see the reason for the late-night visit."

"The vampire's name is Leticia, and her goal is to kill me. She's feeding on supernaturals, a werewolf and now the fae, in an effort to alter her scent, to make herself more difficult to hunt."

Benvair tipped her head to the side. "I've never heard of that."

"Nor had I." May I tell her?

I wasn't sure what he planned to tell her, but we needed her help, and I was kind of in awe of her, so I said, Yes.

"It was Sam who put it together. You know she's a necromancer and can speak with the dead. It seems vampires are dead enough to qualify."

Benvair returned her cup to its saucer on the coffee table, her gaze pinning me to the couch. "Explain."

Clive opened his mouth and she flicked her hand to silence him. She pointed at me. "You explain."

When a woman whose other form is the size of this room, probably a few rooms, latches her predator's focus solely on you…it was a lot. "Ma'am, I'm able to sense vampires. If I concentrate hard enough, I can sometimes hear their thoughts, like I can with the dead."

"It's not without pain," Clive said.

Benvair barely spared him a glance. "Did you find the vampire?"

"I did, but it was far more difficult than usual. The first time I located her, she was up in Bodega Bay—"

"You could sense her that far away?" Benvair leaned forward in her chair.

"Yes, ma'am. Her signature was off though. She didn't feel like a vampire, not completely. When I tried to read her, I realized why. She had a werewolf held captive and was feeding solely on him, trying to turn him, actually."

"And did it work? Was she able to create a werewolf-vampire hybrid?"

Careful.

"No. What she created was a horrible, mindless monster, neither wolf nor vampire. It tried to attack anything it saw. She had it chained down."

"You killed it?"

"Of course."

Nodding, she leaned back. "Good. Continue."