Iron Kissed Read Free Page A

out of the old gremlin until he was ready to talk, so I let him alone until he decided to speak—at least after the first ten or fifteen questions he hadn’t answered.
    â€œHave you been to the reservation before?” he asked abruptly as we crossed the river just outside Pasco on the highway to Walla Walla.
    â€œNo.” The fae reservation in Nevada welcomed visitors. They had built a casino and small theme park to attract tourists. The Walla Walla reservation, however, actively discouraged anyone who wasn’t fae from entering. I wasn’t quite certain if it was the Feds or the fae themselves responsible for the unfriendly reputation.
    Zee tapped unhappily on his steering wheel with hands that belonged to a man who’d spent his lifetime repairing cars, tough and scarred with oil so ingrained not even pumice soap would remove it.
    They were the right hands for the human that Zee had pretended to be. When the Gray Lords, the powerful and ruthless beings who ruled the fae in secret, forced him to admit what he was to the public a few years ago, a decade or more after the first fae had come out, Zee hadn’t bothered to change his outward appearance at all.
    I’d known him for a little over ten years, and the sour old man face was the only one I’d ever seen. He had another; I knew that. Most fae lived among humans under their glamour, even if they admitted what they were. People are just not ready to deal with the fae’s true appearance. Sure, some of them looked human enough, but they also don’t age. The thinning hair and the wrinkled, age-spotted skin were sure signs that Zee wasn’t wearing his true face. His sour expression, though, was no disguise.
    â€œDon’t eat or drink anything,” he said abruptly.
    â€œI’ve read all the fairy tales,” I reminded him. “No food, no drink. No favors. No thanking anyone.”
    He grunted. “Fairy tales. Damned children’s stories.”
    â€œI’ve read Katherine Briggs, too,” I offered. “And the original Grimm’s.” Mostly looking for some mention of a fae who could have been Zee. He wouldn’t talk about it, though I think he’d been Someone. So finding out who he’d been had become something of a hobby of mine.
    â€œBetter. Better, but not much.” He tapped his fingers on the wheel. “Briggs was an archivist. Her books are only as correct as her sources and mostly they are dangerously incomplete. The stories of the Brothers Grimm are more concerned with entertainment than reality. Both of them are nur Schatten …only shadows of reality.” He looked at me, a quick searching glance. “Uncle Mike suggested you might be useful here. I thought it was a better repayment than might otherwise come your way.”
    To kill the sorcerer vampire, who was gradually being taken over by the demon that made him a sorcerer, Zee’d risked the wrath of the Gray Lords to loan me a couple of the treasures of the fae. I’d killed that vampire all right, and then I’d killed the one who’d made him. As in the stories, if you use a fairy gift once more than you have permission for, there are consequences.
    If I’d known this was going to be repayment for favors rendered, I’d have been more apprehensive from the start: the last time I’d had to repay a favor hadn’t ended well.
    â€œI’ll be all right,” I told him despite the cold knot of dread in my stomach.
    He gave me a sour look. “I had not thought about what it might mean to bring you into the reservation after dark.”
    â€œPeople do go to the reservation,” I said, though I wasn’t really sure of it.
    â€œNot people like you, and no visitors after dark.” He shook his head. “A human comes in and sees what he should, especially by daylight, when their eyes are easier to fool. But you…The Gray Lords have forbidden hunting humans, but we