And that was exactly what it turned out to be, because the trowel was iron and he was a fairy.

I leaped back and dropped into a half crouch, still gripping the bloody trowel, and waited to see what he’d do. He was looking down at the blood seeping through his fingers with an expression of absolute amazement, as if he couldn’t believe I’d ruined his ensemble. Then he looked at me, his eyes pale blue and huge, and there was a big question on his face, as if he were asking me if I’d really done that to him, if it wasn’t some kind of mistake.

I began backing up to the porch steps, never taking my eyes from him, but he wasn’t a threat any longer. As I reached behind me to open the screen door, my would-be murderer crumpled to the ground, still looking surprised.

I retreated into the house and locked the door. Then I walked on trembling legs over to the window above the kitchen sink and peered out, leaning as far over the sink as I could. From this angle I could see only a bit of the crumpled body. “Okay,” I said out loud.“Okay.” He was dead, looked like. It had been soquick .

I started to pick up the wall phone, noticed how my hands were shaking, and spotted my cell phone on the counter where I’d been charging it. Since this was a crisis that definitely called for the head honcho, I speed-dialed my great-grandfather’s big, secret emergency number. I thought the situation qualified. A male voice, not Niall’s, answered. “Yes?” the voice said with a cautious tone.

“Ah, is Niall there?”

“I can reach him. Can I help you?”

Steady, I told myself.Steady . “Would you please tell him I’ve killed a fairy and he’s laid out in my yard and I don’t know what to do with the body?”

There was a moment of silence.

“Yes, I’ll tell him that.”

“Pretty soon, you think? Because I’m alone and I’m kind of freaked out.”

“Yes. Quite soon.”

“And someone will come?” Geez Louise, I sounded whiny. I made my spine stiffen. “I mean, I can load him in my car trunk, I guess, or I could call the sheriff.” I wanted to impress this unknown with the fact that I wasn’t completely needy and helpless. “But there’s the whole thing with you guys being secret, and he didn’t seem to have a weapon, and obviously I can’t prove this guy said he’d enjoy killing me.”

“You . . . have killed a fairy.”

“Isaid that. Way back.” Mr. Slow-on-the-Uptake. I peered out the window again. “Yeah, he’s still not moving. Dead and gone.”

This time the silence lasted so long that I thought I must have blanked out and missed something. I said, “I’m sorry?”

“Are you really? We’ll be there very soon.” And he hung up.

I couldn’t not look, and I couldn’t bear to look. I’d seen the dead before, both human and nonhuman. And since the night I’d met Bill Compton in Merlotte’s, I’d seen more than my share of bodies. Not that that was Bill’s fault, of course.

I had goose pimples all over.

In about five minutes, Niall and another fairy walked out of the woods. There must be some kind of portal out there. Maybe Scotty had beamed them up. Or down. And maybe I wasn’t thinking too clearly.

The two fairies stopped when they saw the body and then exchanged a few words. They seemed astonished. But they weren’t scared, and they weren’t acting like they expected the guy to get up and fight, so I crept across the back porch and out the screen door.

They knew I was there, but they continued their eyeballing of the body.

My great-grandfather raised his arm and I crept under it. He held me to him, and I glanced up to see that he was smiling.

Okay,that was unexpected.

“You’re a credit to our family. You’ve killed my enemy,” he said. “I was so right about humans.” He looked proud as punch.

“This is a good thing?”

The other fairy laughed and looked at me for the first time. He had hair the color of butterscotch, and his eyes matched his hair, which to me was so weird that it was really off-putting—though like all the fairies I’d met, he was gorgeous. I had to suppress a sigh. Between the vampires and the fairies, I was doomed to be a plain Jane.

“I’m Dillon,” he said.

“Oh, Claudine’s dad. Nice to meet you. I guess your name means something, too?” I said.

“Lightning,” he said, and gave me a particularly winsome smile.

“Who is this?” I said, jerking my head at the body.

“He was Murry,” Niall said. “He was a close friend of my nephew Breandan.”

Murry looked very young; to the human eye, he’d been perhaps eighteen. “He said he was looking forward to killing me,” I told them.

“But instead, you killed him. How did you do it?” Dillon asked, as if he was asking how I rolled out a flaky piecrust.

“With my grandmother’s trowel,” I said. “Actually, it’s been in my family for a long time. Not like we make a fetish of gardening tools or anything; it just works and it’s there and there’s no need to buy another one.” Babbling.

They both looked at me. I couldn’t tell if they thought I was nuts or what.

“Could you show us this gardening tool?” Niall said.

“Sure. Do you-all want some tea or something? I think we’ve got some Pepsi and some lemonade.” No, no, not lemonade! They’d die! “Sorry, cancel the lemonade. Tea?”

“No,” said Niall quite gently. “I think not now.”

I’d dropped the bloody trowel in among the cannas. When I picked it up and approached them, Dillon flinched. “Iron!” he said.

“You don’t have the gloves on,” Niall said to his son chid ingly, and took the trowel from me. His hands were covered with the clear flexible coating developed in fairy-owned chemical factories. Coated with this substance, fairies were able to go out in the human world with some degree of assurance that they wouldn’t get poisoned in the process.

Dillon looked chastened. “No, sorry, Father.”

Niall shook his head as if he were disappointed in Dillon, but his attention was really on the trowel. He might have been prepared to handle something poisonous to him, but I noticed he still handled it very carefully.

“It went into him really easily,” I said, and had to repress a sudden wave of nausea. “I don’t know why. It’s sharp, but it’s not that sharp.”

“Iron can part our flesh like a hot knife in butter,” Niall said.

“Ugh.” Well, at least I knew I hadn’t suddenly gotten superstrong.

“He surprised you?” Dillon asked. Though he didn’t have the fine, fine wrinkles that made my great-grandfather even more beautiful, Dillon looked only a little younger than Niall, which made their relationship all the more disorienting. But when I looked down at the corpse once more, I was completely back in the present.

“He sure did surprise me. I was just working away weeding the flower bed, and the next thing you know, he was standing right there telling me how much he was looking forward to killing me. I’d never done a thing to him. And he scared me, so I kind of came up in a rush with the trowel, and I got him in the stomach.” Again, I wrestled with my own stomach’s tendency to heave.

“Did he speak any more?” My great-grandfather was trying to ask me casually, but he seemed pretty interested in my answer.

“No, sir,” I said. “He kind of looked surprised, and then he . . . he died.” I walked over to the steps and sat down rather suddenly and heavily.

“It’s not exactly like I feel guilty,” I said in a rush of words. “It’s just that he was trying to kill me and he was happy about it and I never did a thing to him. I didn’t know anything about him, and now he’s dead.”

Dillon knelt in front of me. He looked into my face. He didn’t exactly look kind, but he looked less detached. “He was your enemy, and now he is dead,” he said. “This is cause for rejoicing.”

“Not exactly,” I said. I didn’t know how to explain.

“You’re aChristian ,” he said, as if he’d discovered I was a hermaphrodite or a fruitarian.