“How strong does eating it make you? As strong as one of them?”
I considered it. I didn’t know, and told him that.
“So, it might?”
I shrugged. “Regardless, you still can’t kill them. They don’t die. They’re immortal.”
“Why do you think we have prisons, Ms. Lane? We’re not allowed to kill the serial murderers, either.”
“Oh.” I blinked. “I never thought of imprisoning them. I’m not certain anything would hold them.” Except an Unseelie prison woven from the fabric of the Song of Making. “They sift, remember?”
“All of them?”
He’d made another good point. I’d never seen a Rhino-boy sift. I supposed it was possible only the more powerful Fae could do it; the princes and the one-of-a-kinds like the Gray Man.
“Isn’t it worth a try? Maybe we lowly humans can come up with a few surprises. While you do your thing, others can be doing theirs. The word in the street is that something bad is coming, soon. What’s going on?”
I told him about Halloween, and the walls, and what would happen if they came down.
He placed his cup and saucer on the table. “And you would have me go out there defenseless?”
“It has other downsides, too. I’m not sure what they all are, but one of them is that if you get wounded by one of the immortal weapons, you’ll . . .” I described Mallucé ’s death for him. The decomposing flesh, the dying body parts.
“How many of these immortal weapons are there, Ms. Lane?”
“Two.” How far he’d come from denying missing parts of the maps to so casually speaking of dining on monsters and immortal weapons!
“Who has them?”
“Uh, me and someone else.”
He smiled faintly. “I’ll take my chances.”
“It’s addictive.”
“I used to smoke. If I can quit that, I can quit anything.”
“I think it changes you somehow.” I was pretty sure eating Unseelie was why I’d been able to get closer to the Sinsar Dubh. There was a lot about eating Dark Fae I wasn’t clear on, but something had made the Book perceive me as . . . tarnished, diluted.
“Lady, you’ve changed me more than an early heart attack. Quit stalling. No more tips, remember?”
For the time being, I didn’t want tips. I had no desire to know where the Book was, other than as a means of avoiding it.
“You didn’t give me a choice when you opened my eyes,” the inspector said roughly. “You owe me for that.”
I studied his face, the set of his shoulders, his hands. How far I’d come, too. Far from seeing an enemy, an impediment to my progress, I saw a good man sitting in my store, having tea with me. “I’m sorry I made you eat it,” I said.
“I’m not,” he said flatly. “I’d rather die seeing the face of my enemy than die blind.”
I sighed. “You’ll have to come back every few days. I don’t know how long it lasts.”
I went to the counter, rummaged in my purse. He accepted the jars a bit eagerly for my taste, revulsion married to anticipation on his face. I felt like a supplier to a junkie. I felt like a mom, sending her child off to face the perils of first grade. I had to do more than pack his lunch and put him on the bus; I had to give him advice.
“The ones that look like Rhinos are watchdogs for the Fae. They spy, and lately, for some bizarre reason, they’ve been doing utility work. I think the ones that fly prey on children, but I’m not sure. They follow them, behind their shoulders. There are dainty, pretty ones that can get inside you. I call them Grippers. If you see one coming toward you, run like hell. The shadowy dark ones will devour you in an instant if you stumble into a Dark Zone. At night, you’ve got to stay to the lights. . . .” I was half hanging out the door, calling after him. “Start carrying flashlights at all times. If they catch you in the dark, you’re dead.”
“I’ll figure it out, Ms. Lane.” He got in his car and drove away.
At eleven o’clock, I was in Punta Cana, walking on the beach with V’lane, wearing a gold lamé bikini (me, not V’lane; tacky, I know; he chose it) with a hot pink sarong.
I’d released his name to the wind and summoned him shortly after Jayne had left, desperate for answers, and not at all averse to a little sunshine. I’d been thinking about the walls all night and most of the morning. The more we knew about them, the better our odds were of fortifying them. The surest bet for information was a Fae Prince, one of the queen’s most trusted, and one who’d not drunk from the cauldron for a long, long time.