Page 29 of Dead Ringer

“Darla, if you’re in some kind of trouble, you can tell me. You know I’ll help you.”

Taliyah was a good dame. She was smart, driven, and she really cared about people. Only she was quiet about it, so some people took it as her being cold, which wasn’t the deal at all. She’d been through a lot, and yet, there she was, asking after me.

Taliyah had blown into Haven Hollow in the wake of her only brother’s murder, and had taken over as Chief of Police, thinking to settle herself and her two sons into a small town and recover from her nasty divorce from some dime store cowboy.

And then she’d found out that she wasn’t a human, and that she was, in fact, Olwen, Princess of the Winter faeries. Furthermore, she was prophesized to regain her power, get married to some fella she’d never met before but had been betrothed to for fifty years, and take her throne as Queen. Nobody asked her, they just dumped it all on her and expected her to just go along with it like some little lamb.

Let me tell you, not one of them had ever met Taliyah, or they would have known from the get-go that such a plan didn’t have a snowball’s chance in you know where.

She’d told them all exactly where they could stuff it, and continued being the Chief of Police instead of running off to Faerie Land, and I say, more power to her.

Standing there on the side of the road, she looked pretty much like she had when we’d first met; shoulder length sandy hair streaked with gray, gray-blue eyes, a few lines on her face. But these days, she only looked like that when she was wearing something called a ‘glamour’. And I don’t mean the kind of things that starlets were said to have when they batted their lashes at the cameras. It was real magic, not the movie kind.

Lately, when she was tired, or there were just no people around who’d known her from before, Taliyah didn’t bother with that glamour, but let her inner faerie show. Then she’d have moonlight pale hair all the way down to her hips. And no matter how many times she tried to cut it, it would always grow back in a few seconds. As Olwen, her eyes were ice-colored, and her face was flawless: all cheekbones and big eyes, without a single wrinkle or line. She had it all, a real Sheba of a dame. If she could have bottled it, she’d have celebrities beating her door down.

But all in all, she was still Taliyah. No amount of abracadabra could change that.

“I’m okay,” I assured her. “I do appreciate you scaring off whatever torpedo was following us, but it’s just part of the job of being a gumshoe.”

“Darla,” she said, in that overly patient tone that meant she was trying not to yell at me, but having a hard time of it. “You aren’t a private investigator. You’re a medium.”

“I can do both! And anyways, it’s not like I ain’t got backup.”

At the reminder of Cain’s presence, Taliyah’s face did the complicated thing it always did. There was grief, but also relief, and something else I didn’t even think I knew the name of. Whatever it was, it was there and gone in a blink as Taliyah strapped on the blank face she wore like a mask while she was being a copper.

I gave Cain a mental nudge, trying to convince him to say something to his sister. But he just clammed up, the big dope. He’d really struggled with talking to people he was close to when he was alive, and finding out that he and Taliyah weren’t actually blood related had thrown him for a while. These days, it was mostly that he was just bad at talking to people, unless he had a case to discuss. And Taliyah was almost as bad, for Pete’s sake. Fingers crossed there was never a doomsday clock that could only be disarmed by the two of them talking about an emotion, cause we’d all be dead.

Case in point, Taliyah shifted awkwardly, put off her game by the mention of a feelings kind of situation.

She cleared her throat. “Well. You should both come to dinner.”

I blinked at her, feeling like I’d been reading lines from the wrong script. “Beg pardon?”

“I said, come to dinner.” Taliyah scowled. “The boys have been asking after you.”

Adorable. She couldn’t just say she wanted us there, she had to use her kids as an excuse. That worked for me, because they were pretty adorable, as kids went. And I was in the mood for any meal I didn’t have to put together with my own hands.

Cain shifted in the back of my head, uncomfortable.We have a case to follow up on.

Oh, now you have an opinion? Now you want to speak up?I just barely managed to avoid shaking my head. It always looked weird to people not in on our silent chit chats.The auction isn’t until tomorrow, we don’t know where it’s even going to be yet, and I’m hungry.

So?

So, that means we’re going to dinner.

He retreated, off to have a manly sulk in my subconscious.

I turned to Taliyah, grinning. “We’d love to.”

Even if the food was terrible, the way Taliyah’s shoulders relaxed and a smile flickered around the edges of her lips, made it all worthwhile.

That, and it seemed like she’d forgotten to give me that ticket I probably deserved.

The night was looking up.

***

As it turned out, the grub was pretty good. Not Libby level of good, but at least Taliyah didn’t break out ham and macaroni suspended in gelatin, so I was thinking we were still on the winning side. The kids were sweet, and it was always flattering when people were happy to see you. All in all, it was a pretty nice evening. Except for one little thing.

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