He forged ahead, only his peeping fangs betraying his internal struggle to keep on task. “Right, well, there have always been two philosophies, shall we say, regarding the relationship between our kind and humans. One says that we should live alongside humans—not entirely separate and not entirely equal—but peacefully. The other philosophy preaches a more ‘demon overlord’ approach to the whole matter. To make an extremely long and complicated story short, Orin and Morrigan are of the former train of thought, as were those of us who fought with them. Whereas the party that lost thought we should enslave humanity and seize our rightful position as their natural leaders. The war was long—it lasted a few hundred years. Eventually, I was old enough to choose sides, and I chose Orin and Morrigan’s. That’s where we get to Nyx.”
Ryu turned over to lie on his back, his arms pillowed under his head. I snuggled up against him, placing my ear on his chest to hear his voice purring from the source.
“Nyx is my cousin, but she’s older than me by a few hundred years. When the war started, she was firmly on the side of the ‘crush humanity’ faction. Basically, she despises humans as anything but lunch. But she’s also an extremely capable political animal, so when the tide started to turn in favor of Orin and Morrigan she did what any two-faced bitch worth her salt would do. She sold herself and her copious knowledge of the enemy to our side for the price of her life and a position in the new Court. Where, believe it or not, she’s made quite a name for herself. People think that because they know she can’t be trusted, they understand how to deal with her. Which totally underestimates the depths of her depravity and is eventually going to sink us all into some seriously profound doo-doo.
“So that’s Nyx, in a nutshell,” he concluded, sighing. I could see that what he’d just told me meant that there was big trouble in little Rockabill. The disturbing nature of the idea that Jakes had been cataloging halflings was suddenly very evident, and for the first time that night, I confronted the idea that Peter had been collecting my own data for his little inventory. Should have left the little shit in the Sow.
“What do you think Nyx wants with Peter’s catalog?” I asked.
Ryu exhaled noisily, scrubbing his hands through his hair in what I’d come to know was his gesture indicating extreme concentration. “I have no idea,” he said, at last. “But it can’t be good.”
He rubbed a hand over his face and then sat up to take a mouthful of wine. He drank slowly, and then very deliberately corked the bottle and set it aside. I was lying on my back, mulling over everything I’d just been told. Ryu’s world sounded incredibly complicated. And while I didn’t know shit from Shinola, I feared that, because of Peter Jakes, I was involved whether I wanted to be or not.
Ryu had opened Peter’s case file, and I sat up to see what was inside. In the pocket labeled “master list,” there was a register of names and places, about eighteen in all, with the first twelve of them crossed off. I shivered when I saw that “Jane True—Rockabill, ME” was written underneath the last name that had been crossed off.
There were thirteen sections of the accordion file that had been labeled, and the names on the labels accorded with the twelve names that had been crossed off, with one for me. Naturally, we started at mine.
Written in small, almost typewriter-perfect print was everything about me. There were my parents’ names, their status—“selkie” and “human”—and their current whereabouts. I stifled my disappointment when I saw next to my mother’s name the word “location unknown.” There was my physical description, address, place of work, and even a list of my hobbies. Next to the heading “powers” was written “Manipulation of water elements; strength as yet to be determined.”
Ryu and I exchanged a long look, and he put the contents of my personal file back into the folder. Then we took a brief look through the other files, but they all contained similar information. I was eager to snoop and see what the other halflings out there were like, so I took the file marked “Gonzalez, Joe” and was poring over it while Ryu rummaged through the rest of the folder. Then he pulled out from the very back a sealed Ziploc baggie. It had been stuck in an unlabeled section and folded small so that you wouldn’t see it if you just glanced at the folder.
I kept reading about Joe, who was the product of a male dryad and a female human. He was forty-eight years old, and lived in Shreveport, Louisiana. He had never met his father and had no idea of the man’s true nature. He had very weak control over earth elements, his file read, but not enough for contact to have been necessary. Mr. Gonzalez apparently just thought he had an unusually green thumb. I shook my head, putting the file back into the folder while Ryu mulled over the clippings. He appeared to be comparing them to the master list of halfling names.
“Shit,” he swore. “This is not good.”
“What?” I asked, leaning toward him.
Ryu handed me the master list and the clippings. My heart froze when I saw that one of the clippings bore a headline about the murder of a local man, Joe Gonzalez. I picked it up, reading that the body of Mr. Gonzalez, 48, native of Shreveport, Louisiana, had been found in his garden, a trowel buried in his skull. With trembling fingers I picked up the other clippings, all about murders, and compared them to the other names surrounding Joe’s on the list. They matched.
“They’re all there,” he said. “All twelve halflings that Peter had investigated are now dead. And all under suspicious circumstances.”
We sat in silence while I read the clippings. None of the victims had anything in common. They were all different sexes, races, ages, and were from all walks of life. They lived all over the country. Unless you knew they were halflings, you’d never know they had any connection to each other whatsoever. But now they sure do, my brain commented drily, as I felt a wave of nausea. Nearly all of the clippings mentioned the fact that whoever had killed the victim had sliced off a single ear, presumably as a trophy. And I’d been next on the list.
I stopped myself from going there; if I went there, I’d freak out. Instead, I mimicked calm as I put the clippings back into their bag, zipped it shut, and then put it back in the folder. Ryu wordlessly handed me the bottle of wine, watching as I pulled the cork out with my teeth and chugged another quarter of it down.
When I was finished, I took a deep breath. “Do you think Peter murdered these people?” I asked, already knowing the answer. But I wanted to hear Ryu say it.
“No,” he said, confirming my suspicion. “I think whoever murdered Peter, Martin, and Gretchen is the one responsible for these killings, as well.”
“Was Peter working with the killer, then? Tipping him off? Those clippings, the way they were hidden away like that—maybe he was hoarding them so he could get off on them at night, or maybe he was hiding them. He told Iris that something was going on, and she knew he was scared, but just because he was scared or in over his head doesn’t mean he wasn’t involved.”
Ryu shrugged helplessly. “I wish I knew. Because if we knew what Peter’s intentions were, we might catch a glimmer of Nyx’s intentions in sending him out to create this catalog. Because that’s the real question: Why does she want to inventory halflings and what does the inventory have to do with the murders?”
“Which leads us to why Peter was murdered, at all,” I interjected. “Iris said he recognized someone—someone who shouldn’t be around. Assuming that he was telling her the truth, and that he was innocent of any involvement with the killings, he presumably caught a few glimpses of somebody when he was out and about doing his investigations, and then, when he found out about the deaths, he put two and two together and figured out the identity of the murderer. And therefore became another victim.”
“But how the hell did Martin and his firm get involved?” Ryu asked. “They do not answer to Nyx. They work exclusively for the Alfar, and that means our King and Queen. And I figure Martin was probably murdered the same night as Peter, so Martin had to have been out here either investigating Peter or doing the same investigation as Peter.” Ryu growled with frustration, his hands back in his hair. “We have lots of questions and no answers.”
I thought about that, and then I took a great leap. “Why don’t you just go ask them?” I asked. “Nyx,” I clarified, “and your Court thingy?”
Ryu looked at me like I’d gone gaga. He snorted, shaking his head disdainfully. Then the head shaking stopped, and then it turned into a slow nod, and then he was laughing.
“Oh, Jane.” He drew me toward him, burying his face in my hair. “Why don’t we just ask them?” he said, laughing. I tried not to shiver.
What you talkin’ ’bout “we” for, vampire? I thought. There was no way I was going anywhere near Ryu’s Court. None whatsoever. Not a thing on earth could get me to…
And then Ryu was kissing me.
And then I was agreeing to everything he said.
Little rat bastard.