[Merry Gentry 04] - A Stroke of Midnight by Laurell K. Hamilton Read Free Book Online Page A

will be missed, Amatheon,” I said. “We can’t just hide his body and hope this will all go away.”
    â€œWhy can we not? Why can we not simply say we don’t know where he has gone? Or that one of the lesser fey saw him leave the sithen.”
    â€œThose are all lies,” Rhys said. “The sidhe don’t lie, or did you forget that in all those years you hung around with Cel?”
    Amatheon’s face clouded with the beginnings of anger, but he fought it off. “What I did, or did not do, with Prince Cel is not your business. But I know that the queen would want to hide this from the press. To have a human reporter killed in our court will ruin all the good publicity she has managed to acquire for us in the last few decades.”
    He was probably right on that last part. The queen would not want to admit what had happened. If she even suspected that I suspected that one of Cel’s people was responsible, she’d want to hide it even deeper. She loved Cel too much, and always had.
    The fact that Amatheon had suggested disposing of the body made me wonder even more if Cel’s interests were somehow behind this. Amatheon had always been one of Cel’s supporters. Cel was the last pure-blood sidhe of a house that had ruled this court for three thousand years. Amatheon was one of the sidhe who thought me a mongrel and a disgrace to the throne. So why was he here to compete to bed me and make me queen? Because Queen Andais had ordered it. When he refused the honor, she made certain that he got her point, her painful point, that she was ruler here, not Cel, and Amatheon would do as he was told or else. Part of the “or else” had been to cut his knee-length hair to his shoulders, still long by human standards, but a mark of great shame for him. She’d done other things to him, things more painful to his body than to his pride, but he hadn’t shared details and I didn’t really want to know.
    â€œIf Beatrice were the only one dead, then I might agree,” I said. “But a human is dead in our land. We can’t hide that.”
    â€œYes,” he said, “we can.”
    â€œYou haven’t dealt with the press as directly as I have, Amatheon. Was this reporter alone when he came here to the sithen? Or was he part of a group that will miss him right away? Even if he came alone, he will be known to other members of the press. If one of us had killed him out in the human world, we might be able to hide who did it, and let it be just another unsolved crime. But he was killed here on our land, and that we cannot hide.”
    â€œYou sound as if you are going to tell the press of his death.”
    I looked away from his confusing eyes.
    He reached out to touch my arm, but Frost simply moved in the way, and he never completed the gesture. “You will announce it to the press?” He sounded astonished.
    â€œNo, but we have to contact the police.”
    â€œMeredith,” Doyle started to say.
    I cut him off. “No, Doyle, he was stabbed with a knife. We’ll never figure out whose blade did it. But a good forensics team might.”
    â€œThere are spells for tracing a wound to the weapon that made it,” Doyle said.
    â€œYes, and you tried those spells when you found my father’s body in the meadow. You did your spells, yet you never found the weapons that killed him.” I did my best to make those words empty, to have nothing in my head with them. My father’s death, like the capital of Spain. Just a fact, nothing more.
    Doyle drew a deep breath. “I failed Prince Essus that day, Princess Meredith, and you.”
    â€œYou failed because it was sidhe that killed him. It was someone who had enough magic to thwart your spells. Don’t you see, Doyle, whoever did this is as good at magic as we are. But they won’t know modern forensics. They won’t be able to protect themselves against