“Thomas?” I asked.
“He doesn’t need it,” she said. “He can do it without magic. When he doesn’t want people to notice him, they just don’t.”
I rubbed my pleasantly tingling skin, and said, “You’re just going in to tell them ‘no,’ right? Which you could do with just Thomas. The glamour is to help us?”
She smiled. “It’s fun. I don’t like them. Don’t like the games they are playing. I’m happy to help. Now hush, someone could be listening.”
“Probably not,” I said. “I would smell anyone close enough to listen.”
Thomas looked at me as though I were interesting. “Better than a werewolf?”
“For fae and magic, yes,” I told him. “To be fair, there is a lot of ambient noise right now. Someone would have to be very close to overhear us.” I didn’t tell them that fae glamour might be awesomely powerful, but it seldom worked on scent. Let them think I was special.
We walked into the hotel, following Margaret. She didn’t travel fast, but no one evinced even the slightest impatience. Adam took the left-rear position. I don’t know if he did it for the reasons he’d told me in the car, or if that was just where he happened to be. Zee took the right rear. Thomas walked in front of Adam, and I took the leftover spot next to Thomas.
Inside, the lobby was overflowing with beige tuxes and unflattering teal gowns. They were most densely clustered near the bride, recognizable as such by her thirties-style off-white lace gown. She was patting the back of a middle-aged woman in a bright green sparkly suit who was sobbing on the bride’s shoulder. The whole lobby was trying not to watch—and so no one noticed us at all.
As if she’d been in the hotel a hundred times, Margaret headed for one of the banks of elevators. We waited in silence for the doors to slide open. When they did, we stepped inside—it was a tight squeeze. The elevators weren’t built for a fairy princess and her guards. Fortunately, it was a fast elevator, and we got off on the second floor. Margaret headed down the hallway, and we spread out behind her like a wedding train.
She passed a couple of doors on her left before opening the door on her right, discreetly marked WALLA WALLA. She waited while we flowed around her to precede her into the room. There was a conference table and someone, maybe the hotel, had put bright bouquets of carnations in shades of red on either end of the long table. Five people were already seated on the side of the table that faced the entry door, two more stood against the far wall in parade rest. All of the fae were wearing their human glamour.
I knew some of them. Beauclaire, the handsome former lawyer who’d declared fae independence, was seated on the far left. Next to him was a dark-haired woman whose sunglasses concealed her blind eyes—Nemane, the Morrigan, who’d once been the Irish goddess of battle. I didn’t know the man next to her. He was pale-skinned, bald, and fine-boned, with bulging eyes and broken blood vessels on the sides of his nose that were so bad it was almost hard to focus on anything else. Next to him was an extraordinarily beautiful woman with childlike features, porcelain skin, and deep red lips. The final seated person was a middle-aged woman who was comfortably plump and clothed in a badly fitting, three-piece business suit in salmon pink. Her hair was gray and brown, and her features were absolutely unremarkable.
The two people who stood before the wall were Uncle Mike and Edythe, who I still thought of as Yo-yo Girl because the first time I’d seen her, she’d been playing with a yo-yo. Edythe looked like a young girl—like Aiden, she appeared to be somewhere between nine and eleven. Unlike Aiden, she chose that guise because she enjoyed looking like a victim. Which she very much wasn’t. I’d seen her do some scary stuff and watched other fae skittle out of her path. She met my eyes and gave me an ironic lift of an eyebrow. Apparently, Margaret’s magic wasn’t working for her. The two Gray Lords who knew me looked past me without the hesitation that they’d have given if they’d really seen me, and so did Uncle Mike. I filed Edythe’s immunity in the mental file I kept marked Why Edythe/Yo-yo Girl Is Scary. It was a big file.
Margaret looked at the five people seated on the opposite side of the table, letting her gaze linger meaningfully on the last two. “You told me there would be three of you,” Margaret said coolly. “Do the fae negotiate in falsehoods now?”
“It’s my fault, Margaret,” said the beautiful woman in a husky voice that I’d last heard coming out of Adam’s phone a few hours earlier. “I was visiting this reservation and heard that you were expected. My associate”—she touched the middle-aged woman’s arm lightly—“and I asked to be included for old times’ sake. I once knew your father very well, and I couldn’t resist the chance to see his daughter.”
Margaret spread her hands, as if to display herself. “As you now do.”
“You look bad,” said the man who sat in the middle seat. His voice, high and fussy, fit his outwardly meek appearance. “You need to come home with us, and we will see you restored to your proper self. It’s been several years since the incident, hasn’t it? So it is obvious that you need help to recover from your ordeal.”
Margaret directed her attention at him even as she waved a hand over her shoulder at us, and we four spread out on the wall behind her. The door was on the far left-hand side of the wall, so we didn’t have to worry about anyone’s coming in from outside between us.
She walked with painful slowness—more slowly than I’d seen her move before, in fact. When she reached the table, she pulled out a chair left of the middle, directly in front of Nemane. I couldn’t tell if it was deliberate, or if the chair was closer to the door so she didn’t have to walk so far.