Frost helped me down from the SUV, which I needed. I always had a moment of feeling childlike when I had to climb in or out of the Escalade. It was like sitting in a chair where your feet swing. It made me feel like I was six again, but Frost’s arm under mine, the height and solidness of him, reminded me that I was no longer a child, and decades from six.

Doyle’s voice came. “Fear Dearg, what are you doing here?”

Frost stopped in mid-motion and put his body more solidly in front of me, shielding me, because Fear Dearg was not a name. The Fear Dearg were very old, the remnants of a faerie kingdom that had predated the Seelie and the Unseelie courts. That made the Fear Dearg more than three thousand years old, at minimum. Since they did not breed, for they had no females, they were all simply that old. They were somewhere between a brownie, a hobgoblin, and a nightmare—a nightmare that could make a man think that a stone was his wife, or that a cliff into the sea a path of safety. And some delighted in the kind of torture that would have pleased my aunt. I’d once seen her skin a sidhe noble until he was unrecognizable and then she made him follow her on a leash like a dog.

The Fear Dearg could be taller than an average human or they could be shorter than me by a foot, and almost any size in between. The only sameness from one to the other was that they were not humanly handsome and they wore red.

The voice that answered Doyle’s question was high pitched though definitely male, but it was querulous with that tone that usually means great age in a human. I’d never heard that tone in the voice of a fey. “Why, I saved a parking spot for you, cousin.”