The fourth house Zee took me to looked no more remarkable than any of the others had appeared. A beige house trimmed unimaginatively in white with nothing but dead and dying grass in the yard.
"This one hasn't been cleaned," he said sourly as he opened the door. "Once we had a third victim, the focus of effort changed from concealing the crime from the humans to figuring out who the murderer is."
He wasn't kidding when he said it hadn't been cleaned. I hopped over old newspapers and scattered clothing that had been left lying in the entryway.
This fae had not been killed in the living room or kitchen. Or in the master bedroom where a family of mice had taken up residence. They scurried away as I stepped inside.
The master bathroom, for no reason I could see, smelled like the ocean rather than mouse like the rest of this corner of the house. Impulsively, I closed my eyes, as I had in the first house, and concentrated on what my other senses had to tell me.
I heard it first, the sound of surf and wind. Then a chill breeze stirred my fur. I took two steps forward and the cool tile softened into sand. When I opened my eyes, I stood at the top of a sandy dune at the edge of a sea.
Sand blew in the wind, stinging my nose and eyes and catching in my fur as I stared dumbfounded at the water while my skin hummed with the magic of the place. It was sunset here, too, and the light turned the sea a thousand shades of orange, red, and pink.
I slipped down through the sharp-edged salt grass until I stood on the hard-packed beach. Still I could see no end of the water whose waves swelled and gentled to wash up on shore. I watched the waves for long enough to allow the tide to come in and touch my toes.
The icy water reminded me that I was here to work, and as beautiful and impossible as this was, I was unlikely to find the murderer here. I could smell nothing but sea and sand. I turned to leave the way I'd come before true night fell, but behind me all I could see were endless sand dunes with gentle hills rising behind them.
Either the wind in the sand had erased my paw prints while I'd been watchingor else they had never been there at all. I couldn't even be sure which hill I'd come down.
I froze where I stood, somehow convinced that if I moved so much as a step from where I was, I'd never find my way back. The peaceful spell of the ocean was entirely dispelled, and the landscape, still beautiful, held shadows and menace.
Slowly I sat down, shivering in the breeze. All I could do was hope that Zee found me, or that this landscape would fade away as quickly as it had come. To that end I lowered myself until my belly was on the sand with the ocean to my back.
I put my chin on my paws, closed my eyes, and thought bathroom and how it ought to smell of mouse, trying to ignore the salt-sea and the wind that ruffled my fur. But it didn't go away.
"Well, now," said a male voice, "what have we here? I've never heard of a coyote blundering Underhill."
I opened my eyes and spun around, crouching in preparation to run or attack as seemed appropriate. About ten feet away, between me and the ocean, a man watched me. At least he looked mostly like a man. His voice had sounded so normal, sort of Harvard professorial, that it took me a moment to realize just how far from normal this man was.
His eyes were greener than the Lincoln green that Uncle Mike had his waitstaff wear, so green that not even the growing gloom of night dimmed their color. Long pale hair, damp with saltwater and tangled with bits of sea plants, reached the back of his knees. He was stark naked, and comfortable with it.
I could see no weapons. There was no aggression in his posture or voice, but my instincts were screaming. I lowered my head, keeping eye contact, and managed not to growl.
Staying in coyote form seemed the safest thing. He might think me simply a coyotewho had wandered into the bathroom of a dead fae and from there to wherever here was. Not likely, I had to admit. Maybe there were other paths to get here. I'd seen no hint of another living thing, but maybe he'd believe I was exactly what I looked like.
We stared at each other for a long time, neither of us moving. His skin was several shades paler than his hair. I could see the bluish cast of veins just below his skin.
His nostrils fluttered as he drew in my scent, but I knew I smelled like a coyote.
Why hadn't Zee used him? Obviously this fae used his nose, and he didn't seem powerless to me.
Maybe it was because they thought he might be the murderer.
I shuffled through folklore as he watched me, trying to think of all the human-seeming fae who dwelt in or about the sea. There were a lot of them, but only a few I knew much about.
Selkies were the only ones I could remember that were even neutral. I didn't think he was a selkiemostly because I couldn't be that luckyand he didn't smell like something that would turn into a mammal. He smelled cold and fishlike. There were kinder things in lakes and lochs, but the sea spawns mostly horror stories, not gentle brownies who keep houses clean.
"You smell like a coyote," he said finally. "You look like a coyote. But no coyote ever wandered Underhill to the Sea King's Realm. What are you?"
"Gnädiger Herr," said Zee cautiously from somewhere just behind me. "This one is working for us and got lost."
Sometimes I loved that old man as much as I loved anyone, but I'd never been so happy to hear his voice.
The sea fae didn't move except to raise his eyes until I was pretty sure he was looking Zee in the face. I didn't want to look away, but I took a step back until my hip hit Zee's leg to reassure myself that he wasn't just a figment of my imagination.
"She is not fae," said the fae.
"Neither is she human." There was something in Zee's voice that was awfully close to deference, and I knew I'd been right to be afraid.
The stranger abruptly strode forward and dropped to one knee in front of me. He grabbed my muzzle without so much as a by-your-leave and ran his free hand over my eyes and ears. His icy hands weren't ungentle, but even so, without Zee's nudge I might have objected. He dropped my head abruptly and stood again.
"She wears no elf-salve, nor does she stink of the drugs that occasionally drop a lost one here to wander and die. Last I knew, rare though it is, your magic was not such as could do this. So how did she get here?"
As he spoke, I realized that it wasn't Harvard I heard in his voice, but Merrie Old England.
"I don't know, mein Herr. I suspect that she doesn't know either. You of all people know that the Underhill is fickle and lonely. If my friend broke the glamour that hides the entrances, it would never keep her out."
The sea creature grew very stilland the waves of the ocean subsided like a cat gathering itself to pounce. The wisps of clouds in the sky darkened.
"And how," he said very quietly, "would she break our glamour?"
"I brought her to help us discover a murderer because she has a very good nose," Zee said. "If glamour has a weakness, it is scent. Once she broke that part of the illusion, the rest followed. She is not powerful or a threat."
The ocean struck without warning. A giant wave slapped me, robbing me of my footing and my sight. In one bare instant it stole the heat of my body so I don't think I could have breathed even if my nose wasn't buried in water.
A strong hand grabbed my tail and yanked hard. It hurt, but I didn't protest because the water was retreating, and without that grip, it would have carried me out with it. As soon as the water had subsided to my knees, Zee released his hold.
Like me, he was drenched, though he wasn't shivering. I coughed to get out the saltwater I'd swallowed, shook my fur off, then looked around, but the sea fae was gone.
Zee touched my back. "I'll have to carry you to take you back." He didn't wait for a response, just picked me up. There was a nauseating moment when all my senses swam around me, and then he set me down on the tile of the bathroom floor. The room was dark as pitch.
Zee turned on the light, which looked yellow and artificial after the colors of the sunset.
"Can you continue?" he asked me.
I looked at him, but he gave his head a sharp shake. He didn't want to talk about what happened. It irked me, but I'd read enough fairy tales to know that sometimes talking about the fae too directly lets them listen in. When I got him out of the reservation, I would get answers if I had to sit on him.
Until then, I put my curiosity aside to consider his question. I sneezed twice to clear my nose and then put it down on the floor to collect more people from this house.
This time Zee came with me, staying back so as not to interfere, but close on my heels. He didn't say anything more and I ignored him as I struggled for an explanation of what had just happened to me. Was this house real? Zee told the other fae that I had broken the glamourwouldn't that mean that it was the other landscape that was real? But that would mean that there was an entire ocean here, which seemed really unlikelythough I could still smell it if I tried. I knew that Underhill was the fairy realm, but the stories about it were pretty vague where they weren't outright contradictory.
The sun had truly set and Zee turned on lights as we went. Though I could see fine in the dark, I was grateful for the light. My heart was still certain that we were going to be eaten, and it pounded away at twice its usual speed.
Death's unlovely perfume drew my attention to a closed door. If I'd been on my own, I could have opened the door easily enough, but I believe in making use of others. I whined (coyotes can't bark, not like a dog) and Zee obediently opened the door and revealed the stairs going down into a basement. It was the first of the houses that had had a basementunless they'd been hidden somehow.
I bounded down the stairs. Zee turned on the lights and followed me down. Most of the basement looked like basements look: junk stored without rhyme or reason, unfinished walls and cement floor. I padded across the floor, following death to a door, shut tight. Zee opened that one without me asking and I found, at last, the place where the fae who had lived here was murdered.
Unlike the rest of the house, this room had been immaculate before the resident had been murdered. Underneath the rust-colored stains of the fae's blood, the tile floor gleamed. Cracked leather-bound tomes with the authentic lumpiness of preprinting press books sat intermingled with battered paperbacks and college math and biology texts in bookcases that lined the walls.
This room was the bloodiest I'd seen so farand given the first murder, that was saying something. Even dried and old, the blood was overwhelming. It had pooled, stained, and sprayed as the fae had fought with his attacker. The lower shelves of three bookcases were dotted with it. Tables had been knocked over and a lamp was broken on the floor.
Maybe I wouldn't have realized it if I hadn't just been thinking about them, but the fae here had been a selkie. I had never met one before that I knew, but I'd been to zoos and I knew what seals smelled like.
I didn't want to walk into the room. I wasn't usually squeamish, but lately I'd been walking in enough blood. Where the blood had pooledin the grout between tiles, on a book lying open, and against the base of one of the bookcases where the floor wasn't quite levelit had rotted instead of dried. The room smelled of blood, seal, and decaying fish.
I avoided the worst of the mess where I could and tried not to think too much about what I couldn't avoid. Gradually what my nose told me distracted me from the unpleasantness of my task. I quartered the room, while Zee waited just outside it.
As I started for the door, I caught something. Most of the blood here belonged to the fae, but on the floor, just in front of the door, were a few drops of blood that did not.
If Zee had been a police officer, I'd have shifted then and there to tell him what I'd found. But if I pointed my finger toward a suspect, I was pretty sure I knew what would happen to the person I pointed it at.
Werewolves dealt with their criminals the same way. I don't have any quarrel with killing murderers, but if I'm the one doing the accusing, I'd like to be absolutely certain, given the consequences. And the person I'd be accusing was an unlikely choice for killing this many fae.
Zee followed me up the stairs, turning off lights and closing doors as we went. I didn't bother looking further. There had only been two scents in the basement room besides Uncle Mike's. Either the selkie didn't bring guests into his library, or he had cleaned since the last time. Most damning of all was the blood.
Zee opened the front door and I stepped out into full night where the silvered moon had fully risen. How long had I sat staring at the impossible sea?
A shadow stirred on the porch and became Uncle Mike. He smelled of malt and hot wings, and I could see that he was still dressed in his tavern-keeper clothes: loose ivory-colored khakis and green T-shirt with his own name in the possessive across his chest in sparkling white letters. It wasn't egocentrism; Uncle Mike's was the name of his tavern.
"She's wet," he said, his Irish thicker than Zee's German.
"Seawater," Zee told him. "She'll be all right."
Uncle Mike's handsome face tightened. "Seawater."
"I thought you were working tonight?" There was a warning in Zee's voice as he changed the topic. I wasn't sure whether he didn't want to talk about my encounter with the sea fae, or if he was protecting meor both.
"BFA was out patrolling looking for you two. Cobweb called me because she was worried they'd interfere. I sent the BFA off with a flea in their earthey have no authority to tell you how long you can keep a visitorbut I'm afraid we've drawn their attention to you, Mercy. They might cause you trouble."
His words were nothing out of the ordinary, but there was something darker about his voice that had nothing to do with the night and everything to do with power.
He looked back at Zee. "Any luck?"
Zee shrugged. "We'll have to wait until she changes back." He looked at me. "I think it is time to bring this to an end. You see too much, Mercy, when it isn't safe."
The hair on the back of my neck told me something was watching us from the shadows. I drew the wind in my nose and knew it was more than two or three. I looked around and growled, letting my nose wrinkle up to display my fangs.