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“Six and seven.”
Okay.
Confused now.
But then the giant head bent down, and the tiny eyes were serious. And angry, but not at me. I stared into their depths, and saw a banked fury, a quiet outrage that was somehow more compelling than any physical thing I’d seen him do.
“They destroy. They dishonor. They pay.”
“The slavers?”
A nod.
“So, one, two, and three . . . are dead?”
It seemed a fair guess.
Another nod.
“So that leaves four . . .” But he hadn’t spoken of them that way, had he? “Two groups of two?”
Another nod.
Okay, getting the hang of this now.
“So you’re after two more groups of slavers. You know where they are?”
“Not know. Not yet.”
“It’s just . . . there’s a lot of slavers in New York. We’re trying to shut them down, but they’re good at hiding—”
“They blaspheme. They disgrace!”
“Yeah. They, uh, they’re bad people.”
“They destroy. They kill and kill again!”
“Okay. Okay.” I held out my hands, in the universal “see, I have no weapons, please don’t kill me” gesture, because he was suddenly furious.
And bending over me in a way that would have been intimidating, even if my weapons hadn’t still been in the car, except for the pain in his eyes. “They take fey, make fight, make die. And after die, they dishonor. They steal—”
He broke off with what I could only assume was a fey curse.
“They steal . . . what?”
But I didn’t get an answer this time. “So many lost. So many forgotten. Cannot go back. Cannot go home.”
“We’ll help them get home. We’ll help you.”
He’d turned his head to look out over the water, but now he turned it back. His eyes were suddenly tired and sad, which was somehow worse than the anger. “No. They never go back. Bones lost now.”
And I suddenly remembered something Caedmon had said. Something about the bones of a dead fey needing to be sent back to Faerie. But that wasn’t anything a slaver would care about, was it? If someone died in the fights, or any other way, what would they do?
Probably just bury them, and leave them to rot. Why risk opening a portal when, every time you did, it had a chance of being detected? Why bring the Circle down on your head just to honor an old tradition?
An old tradition that was sacred to a certain portion of Faerie, who believed that if the bones weren’t returned a fey soul was lost forever.
They kill and kill again.
