Diantha blinked. This was a very long conversation for her. “Your great-grandfather’s enemy,” she
explained carefully, as if I were very dense. “The only other fairy prince.”
“Why did Mr. Cataliades send you?”
“Didyerbest,” she said in one breath. Her unblinking bright eyes latched onto mine, and she nodded and
very gently patted my hand.
I had done my best to get everyone out of the Pyramid alive. But it hadn’t worked. It was kind of
gratifying to know that the lawyer appreciated my efforts. I’d spent a week being angry at myself
because I hadn’t uncovered the whole bombing plot more quickly. If I’d paid more attention, hadn’t let
myself get so distracted by the other stuff going on around me . . .
“Also, yercheck’llcome.”
“Oh, good!” I could feel myself brighten, despite the worry caused by the rest of Diantha’s message.
“Did you bring a letter for me, or anything like that?” I asked, hoping for a little more enlightenment.
Diantha shook her head, and the gelled spikes of her bright platinum hair trembled all over her head,
making her look like an agitated porcupine. “Uncle has to stay neutral,” she said clearly.
“Nopapernophonecallsnoemails. That’s why he sent me.”
Cataliades had really stuck his neck out for me. No, he’d stuck Diantha’s neck out. “What if they
capture you, Diantha?” I said.
She shrugged a bony shoulder. “Godownfightin’,” she said. Her face grew sad. Though I can’t read
demon minds in the same way I can read human ones, any fool could tell Diantha was thinking about her
sister, Gladiola, who had died from the sweep of a vampire’s sword. But after a second, Diantha looked
simply lethal. “Burn’em,” Diantha said. I sat up and raised my eyebrows to show I didn’t understand.
Diantha turned her hand up and looked at the palm. A tiny flicker of flame hovered right above it.
“I didn’t know you could do that,” I said. I was not a little impressed. I reminded myself to always stay
on Diantha’s good side.
“Little,” she said, shrugging. I deduced from that that Diantha could make only a small flame, not a
large one. Gladiola must have been taken completely by surprise by the vampire who’d killed her,
because vampires were flammable, much more so than humans.
“Do fairies burn like vamps?”
She shook her head. “Buteverything’llburn,” she said, her voice certain and serious. “Sooner, later.”
I suppressed a shiver. “Do you want a drink or something to eat?” I asked.
“Naw.” She got up from the ground, dusted off her brilliant outfit. “Igottago.” She patted me on the head
and turned, and then she was gone, running faster than any deer.
I lay back down on the chaise to think about all this. Now Niall had warned me, Mr. Cataliades had
warned me, and I felt well and truly scared.
But the warnings, though timely, didn’t give me any practical information about how to guard against
this threat. It might materialize at any time or in any place, as far as I could tell. I could assume the
enemy fairies wouldn’t storm Merlotte’s and haul me out of there, since the fae were so secretive; but
other than that, I didn’t have a clue about what form the attack would take or how to defend myself.
Would locked doors keep fairies out? Did they have to be granted entry, like vampires? No, I couldn’t
recall having to tell Niall he could come in, and he’d been to the house.
I knew fairies weren’t limited to the night, as the vamps were. I knew they were very strong, as strong as
vampires. I knew the fae who were actual fairies (as opposed to the fae who were brownies or goblins or
elves) were beautiful and ruthless; that even vampires respected the ferocity of the fairies. The oldest
fairies didn’t always live in this world, as Claudine and Claude did; there was somewhere else they
could go, a shrinking and secret world they found vastly preferable to this one: a world without iron. If
they could limit their exposure to iron, fairies lived so long that they couldn’t keep track of the years.
Niall, for example, tossed around hundreds of years in his conversational chronology in a very
inconsistent way. He might describe some event as being five hundred years ago, when another event
that predated it was earmarked two hundred years ago. He simply couldn’t keep track of the passage of
time, maybe partly because he didn’t spend most of that time in our world.
