"Are you here to help or just eat?" I said.

Joe threw his hands in the air. "You said find her. You said nothing about liking her."

"Okay, fine. Ask her if she knew Gamelyn Danann Sidhe." At the mention of the third victim's name, Tansy straightened up and looked at me.

"I think she understood that one," said Joe dryly.

"Ask her if she was with him last Tuesday," I said.

"A wrussta gweles Gamelyn war Tuesday?" Joe said.

Tansy stared intently at her hand, counting on her fingers. After a long pause, she nodded vigorously. "Me a wrug gweles."

"Did she see the man Gamelyn left with?" I asked.

"A wrussta gweles an den gans GamelynT' asked Joe.

"Me a wrug gweles," she said again.

"What did he look like?"

She paused after listening to Joe, screwing her face up in thought. "Bras ha ska ew den," she said, then in halting English, "He… sick me… yes?.. ef a wrug ow clafvy."

"She says he was a big man that made her sick," Joe said.

"Was he fey?"

"Ska," Tansy spat.

Joe fluttered off the counter in surprise, then settled back down. "She says he was just wrong," said Joe.

"Wrong? How?"

For a few moments, they argued, Joe seeming to insist on something and Tansy repeating herself. She began flailing her arms and shouting in angry frustration. Ska! Ska na ew an den. Ska ew an pysky! Ska ew an aelfl Ska! Me na wra gothvosP'

Joe and I backed away from her. Her rapid-fire speech was indecipherable to me. Joe shook his head in confusion. "She says he was wrong like a fey, not human, I think. She's an idiot, Connor. All she keeps saying is that he's bad."

"Did she see him kill Gamelyn?"

Tansy covered her face when Joe asked her. She began to cry as she spoke, her words garbled by sobs. Joe leaned in to listen, straining to make out what she was saying. "She says Gamelyn asked her to wait for him outside the bar, but she followed him anyway. When she found them in the alley, Gamelyn was on the ground and the man had a knife. He saw her and sent her away."

It took me a moment for that to sink in. "Sent her away? You mean he spelled her away?" I said. Joe nodded. "Well, that definitely rules out human." I went into my study and retrieved Shay's artist sketch from the folder. Coming back to the kitchen, I held it up for Tansy. "Is this the man?"

She hissed at the paper and backed away, muttering and waving her hands. Joe's eyes went wide. "Stop! Stop!" he yelled at her. The sketch burst into flames in my hands. I dropped it and stamped out the fire on the floor. When I looked up they were both gone. Joe came back almost instantly.

"She's upset," he said. He took another cookie.

I fell into a chair in the living room and stared at the ceiling. "I guess we know Shay's sketch is accurate."

"Either that or she's afraid of paper," Joe said.

I didn't rise to his bait. "Would you be able to find her again?"

Joe dropped his jaw. "Whatever for? She's got a head like a bubble."

"She's a witness, Joe. She might be a better witness than Shay." I told him what the bartender had said about him.

Joe shrugged. "So — he didn't lie. He just didn't tell you everything. That's a crime?"

"No," I conceded. "But it undermines his credibility. He's already got one strike against him as a prostitute."

"Oh, I see. Mud brain will be much better in a court. It's no wonder the fey find this country so amusing."

I closed my eyes and rubbed them. "I am not about to debate the American judicial system with you, Joe. If Murdock needs her, can you find her again?"

"Sure. I found her when I didn't know her, didn't I? She won't be hard to keep track of."

I looked at him in thought for a moment. "You don't happen to know how someone might use a fairy heart for its essence, do you?"

He looked down at the floor, idly swinging his feet. If there's one thing flits like less than being around people larger than they are, it's talking about dead fey. As near immortals, it's not a subject they find captivating. "There is no honor in such a thing, Connor. No fey would do it, not even the sad brothers of Unseelie would break such a rule. Destroying someone in the nobility of battle is just. Enslaving their spirit is outside the turning of the Wheel. It would destroy everything."

A light shiver ran across my skin. Joe was rarely so serious. "Are you saying it can be done?" I asked quietly.

He hovered up from the counter. "No. The world is still here, isn't it? I have to go." He vanished. A moment later, he popped back in again. "By the way, you need more cookies." And then he was gone.

I cleaned up the white flaky residue from the fire and wandered back into the study, perusing the bookshelves. Most of the titles on essence were philosophical discussions or medical theories. The books on rituals were on process. I could not recall a single book on using someone else's essence. Employing the essence of animals, stones, or plants abounded in rituals, were even the point of rituals in general. In all my years of training, I had never come across any discussion of using fey in rituals. Even the old druid sacrifice stories always talked about human children, usually males, as the sacrifice. But the essences of children were weak, and in humans almost negligible.

I felt a thrill of excitement. Druidic lore had always been an oral tradition dependent on teaching and self-discovery. You moved up in rank only when you were judged ready or had enough intuitive knowledge to discover the next level of mystery on your own. It was a way of managing powerful knowledge so that it could only be used with the wisdom of experience. If everything were simply written down, the temptation to run before you could walk would be enormous. The silence over fey sacrifices had to be secret knowledge, never to be spoken to the unready or written down for the unwary.

Which meant I had no easy way to learn the reasons for the silence. Such knowledge was passed on in a chain of trust, from teacher to student. It wasn't likely that I could walk up to someone and ask. My old mentors were gone, journeying in their own paths. I could track them down, but that would take time I didn't have. I had to see if I could convince Briallen to tell me.

I turned toward the living room a moment before I heard the knock on my door. Anxiety clenched my chest, like it did whenever something unexpected happened. I had made a lot of enemies when I worked for the Guild, people who would have been only too happy to find me in my current more vulnerable condition. The Guild had given me some wards to guard the house, mostly warning beacons. The ones around the windows made them less susceptible to breakage or long-range casting. I had felt none of them go off. And nobody had rung the building buzzer downstairs.

I moved quietly into the living room, listening. The only sound was the distant drone of a plane taking off from the airport. The knock came again, no different than the first time, no more urgent. Maybe it was a neighbor. "Who is it?" I finally said.

"Keeva," came the muffled reply.

Chagrined, I shook my head and opened the door. Keeva macNeve lounged against the opposite wall, the barest hint of a smile on her face. The wards hadn't gone off because she had set them up for me before I moved in. The lock on the building front door certainly wouldn't have deterred her.

Keeva was tall for a fairy woman, almost my height, with lush red hair that cascaded over her shoulders. A touch of haughtiness kept her finely drawn features from being truly beautiful; her green eyes were a bit too cool, her dark lips a bit too thin. We had had a modest flirtation when we first met, nothing serious. But then we got to know each other better, or that is to say, I got to know her better, and the attraction dimmed. She was smart enough to detect the change and didn't pursue. When I'm being kind, I describe her as carnivorous. I take no responsibility for what I might say if she comes up in conversation when I'm drunk.