“That is not your business, Fear Dearg,” Doyle said.

“It’s all right, Doyle. Everyone will know soon enough.”

“No, Meredith, not here, not on the street.” There was something in the way he said it that made me pause. But it was Frost’s hand squeezing my arm, making me look at him, that made me realize that a Fear Dearg might be able to kill the demi-fey. He might be our killer, for the Fear Dearg walked outside many of the normal rules of our kind, for all this one’s talk of belonging to the kingdom of the sluagh.

Was our mass murderer standing on the other side of my boyfriends? Wouldn’t that have been convenient? I felt a flash of hope flare inside me, but let it die as quickly as it had risen. I’d worked murder cases before, and it was never that easy. Murderers did not meet you on the street just after you’d left the scene of their crime. But it would be nifty if just this once it really was that easy. Then I realized that Doyle had realized the possibility that the Fear Dearg might be our murderer the moment he saw him; that was why the extreme caution.

I felt suddenly slow, and not up to the job. I was supposed to be the detective, and Lucy had called me in because of my expertise on faeries. Some expert I turned out to be.

Chapter Four

This fear Dearg was smaller than I but only by a few inches. He was just under five feet. Once he’d have probably been average size for a human. His face was wizened, with grayish whiskers sticking out from his cheeks like fuzzy muttonchop sideburns. His nose was thin, long, and pointed. His eyes were large for his face and up-tilted at the corners. They were black, and seemed to have no iris until you realized that, like Doyle’s, his irises were simply as black as his pupils, so you had trouble seeing them.