driveway and in my flower bed, and there was still his torso remaining. “I don’t mean to be pushy, but
Amelia might come home anytime. I don’t get a lot of other visitors, but there’s the odd UPS delivery
person and the meter reader.”
Dillon looked at my great-grandfather as if I’d suddenly begun speaking Japanese. Niall said, “Sookie
shares her house with another woman, and this woman may return at any moment.”
“Is anyone else going to come after me?” I asked, diverted from my question.
“Possibly,” Niall said. “Fintan did a better job of protecting you than I am doing, Sookie. He even
protected you from me, and I only want to love you. But he wouldn’t tell me where you were.” Niall
looked sad, and harried, and tired for the first time since I’d met him. “I’ve tried to keep you out of it. I
imagined I only wanted to meet you before they succeeded in killing me, and I arranged it through the
vampire to make my movements less noticeable, but in arranging that meeting I’ve drawn you into
danger. You can trust my son Dillon.” He put his hand on the younger fairy’s shoulder. “If he brings you
a message, it’s really from me.” Dillon smiled charmingly, displaying super-naturally white and sharp
teeth. Okay, he was scary, even if he was Claude and Claudine’s dad.
“I’ll talk to you soon,” Niall said, bending over to give me a kiss. The fine, gleaming pale hair fell
against my cheek. He smelled so good; fairies do. “I’m sorry, Sookie,” he said. “I thought I could force
them all to accept . . . Well, I couldn’t.” His green eyes glowed with intensity and regret. “Do you have—
yes, a garden hose! We could gather up most of the dust, but I think it more practical if you simply . . .
distribute it.”
He put his arms around me and hugged me, and Dillon gave me a mocking salute. The two took a few
steps to the trees, and then they simply vanished into the undergrowth as deer do when you encounter
them in the woods.
So that was that. I was left in my sunny yard, all by myself, with a sizeable pile of glittering powdery
dust in a body-shaped heap on the gravel.
I added to my mental list of the odd things I’d done that day. I’d entertained the police, sunbathed,
visited at a mall with some fairies, weeded, and killed someone. Now it was powdered corpse removal
time. And the day wasn’t over yet.
I turned on the faucet, unwound the hose enough so the flow would reach the right area, and compressed
the spray head to aim the water at the fairy dust.
I had a weird, out-of-body feeling. “You’d think I’d be getting used to it,” I said out loud, startling
myself even more. I didn’t want to add up the people I’d killed, though technically most of them weren’t
people. Before the past two years (maybe even less if I counted down the months), I’d never laid a finger
on another person in anger, aside from hitting Jason in the stomach with my plastic baseball bat when he
tore my Barbie’s hair out.
I pulled myself up sharply. The deed was done now. No going back.
I released the spray head and turned the hose off at the faucet.
In the fading sunlight, it was a little hard to tell, but I thought I’d dispersed the dust pretty thoroughly.
“But not from my memory,” I said seriously. Then I had to laugh, and it sounded a little crazy. I was
standing out in my backyard hosing down fairy blood and making melodramatic statements all to
myself. Next I’d be doing the Hamlet soliloquy that I’d had to memorize in high school.
This afternoon had brought me down hard, to a real bad place.
I bit down on my bottom lip. Now that I was definitely over the intoxication of having a living relative, I
had to face the fact that Niall’s behavior was charming (mostly) but unpredictable. By his own
admission, he’d inadvertently put me at great risk. Maybe I should have wondered before this what my
grandfather Fintan had been like. Niall had told me he’d watched over me without ever making himself
known, an image that seemed creepy but touching. Niall was creepy and touching, too. Great-uncle
Dillon just seemed creepy.
The temperature was dropping with the creeping darkness, and I was shivering by the time I went in the
house. The hose might freeze tonight, but I couldn’t bring myself to care. There were clothes in the
dryer, and I had to eat since I’d missed eating lunch at the mall. It was getting closer to suppertime. I had
