"Officer O'Brian, would you like to change your order?" I asked. I wiped my fingers on another napkin. I suddenly didn't even want the sticky residue of the icing.
She said, "I ... no, thank you, Princess Meredith."
Wright made a sound in his throat. She looked at him, confused. "You don't say that to the fey."
"Say what?" she asked.
"Thank you," I said. "Some of the older fey take thanks as a grave insult."
She blushed through her tan. "I'm sorry," she said, then she stopped in confusion and looked at Wright.
"It's okay," I said. "I'm not old enough to see 'thank you' as an insult, but it is a good general rule when dealing with us."
"I am old enough," Robert said, "but I've been running this place too long to be insulted about much of anything." He smiled, and it was a good smile, all white, perfect teeth and handsome face. I wondered how much all the work had cost. My grandmother had been half brownie, so I knew just how much he'd had changed.
Alice went to get our orders. The door shut behind her, and then there was a very firm, loud knock. It made Bittersweet jump and touch Robert's shirt with her icing-covered hands. Now that was the police. Lucy came through the door without waiting for an invitation.
Chapter Seven
"They ran down the hill," bittersweet said in a high, almost musical voice, but it was music that was off-key today. It was her stress showing through even as she tried to answer questions.
She was hiding between Robert's collar and his neck, peeking at the two plainclothes detectives like a scared toddler. Maybe she was that frightened, or maybe she was playing to her size. Most humans treat the demi-fey like children, and the tinier they are, the more childlike humans view them. I knew better.
The two uniforms, Wright and O'Brian, had taken up posts by the far door, where the detectives had told them to stand. The Fear Dearg had gone back into the outer room to help in the shop, though I had given a thought to how much help he would be with customers. He seemed more likely to frighten than to take orders.
"How many ran down the hill?" Lucy asked in a patient voice. Her partner had his notebook out writing things down. Lucy had once explained to me that some people got nervous watching their words being written down. It could help you intimidate suspects, but it could also intimidate witnesses when that was the last thing you wanted. The compromise was that Lucy let her partner write down when she interrogated. She did the same for him on occasion.
"Four, five. I'm not sure." She hid her face against Robert's neck. Her thin shoulders began to shake, and we realized she was crying again.
All we'd learned so far was that they'd been male elf wannabes complete with long hair and ear implants. There were anywhere between four and six of them, though there could have been more. Bittersweet was only certain of four, or more. She was very fuzzy on time, because most fey, especially ones who still do their original nature-oriented jobs, use light, not clocks, to judge time.
Robert got the demi-fey to eat a little more cake. We'd already explained to the detectives why the sweets were important. Oh, and why were we still here? When we'd gotten up to leave, Bittersweet had gotten hysterical again. She seemed convinced that without the princess and royal guards to make the human police behave, they would drag her off to the police station and all that metal and technology, and they would kill her by accident.
I'd tried to vouch for Lucy being one of the good guys, but Bittersweet had lost someone she loved to just such an accident decades ago when she and he first came out to Los Angeles. I guess if I'd lost one of my loves to police carelessness, I might have trouble trusting too.
Lucy tried again, "Can you describe the wannabes who ran down the hill?"
Bittersweet peeked out with frosting smeared on her tiny mouth. It was very innocent, very victim-looking, yet I knew that most demi-fey would take fresh blood over sweets.
"Everyone is tall to me, so they were tall," she said in that little piping voice. It was not the voice that had screamed at us. She was playing the humans. It might be suspicious, or it might simply be habit, camouflage so the big people didn't hurt her.
"What color was their hair?" Lucy asked.
"One was black as night, one was yellow like maple leaves before they fall, one was paler yellow like roses when they fade from the sun, one had hair like leaves when they've fallen and lost all color save brown, though it's the brown after a rain."
We all waited, but she went back to the cake that Robert held up for her.
"What were they wearing, Bittersweet?"
"Plastic," she said, at last.
"What do you mean, 'plastic'?" Lucy asked.
"Clear plastic like you wrap leftover food in."
"You mean they wore plastic wrap?"
She shook her head. "They had plastic over their hair and clothes, and their hands."
I watched Lucy and her partner both fight not to give away the fact that the news excited them. This bit of description must help explain something at the crime scene, which gave credence to Bittersweet's statement. "What color was the plastic?"
I sipped my tea and tried not to draw attention to myself. Frost, Doyle, and I were here because Bittersweet trusted us to keep her out of the clutches of the human police. She trusted as most of the lesser fey did that the nobles of her court would be noble. We would try. Lucy had insisted that Doyle sit on the couch with me rather than looming over them. So I sat on the couch between the two of them. Frost had even moved from the couch arm to the actual couch, so he wouldn't loom either.