Dead Reckoning - Charlaine Harris [40]
“Like priming a pump?” I said doubtfully. “I don’t get it.”
“Like—like—washing a new red garment with the whites,” said Dermot triumphantly, who had done that very thing the week before. Everyone in our house had pink socks now.
“But wouldn’t that mean Claude was getting less red? I mean, less fae? If we’re absorbing some of his?”
“No,” Claude said, with some complacence. “I am redder than I was.”
Dermot nodded. “Me, too.”
“I haven’t really noticed any difference,” I said.
“Are you not stronger than you were?”
“Well . . . yeah. Some days.” It wasn’t like ingesting vampire blood, which would give you increased strength for an indeterminate period, if it didn’t make you batshit crazy. It was more like I felt increased vigor. I felt, in fact . . . younger. And since I was only in my twenties, that was just unnerving.
“Don’t you long to see Niall again?” Claude asked.
“Sometimes.” Every day.
“Are you not happy when we sleep in the bed with you?”
“Yeah. But just so you know, I think it’s kind of creepy, too.”
“Humans,” Claude said to Dermot, with a blend of exasperation and patronage in his voice. Dermot shrugged. After all, he was half-human.
“And yet you chose to stay here,” I said.
“I wonder every day if I made a mistake.”
“Why are you two still here, if you’re so nuts about Niall and your life in Faery? How did you get the letter from Niall that you gave me a month ago, the one where he told me he’d used all his influence to make the FBI leave me alone?” I glared at them suspiciously. “Was that letter a forgery?”
“No, it was genuine,” Dermot said. “And we’re here because we both love and fear our prince.”
“Okay,” I said, ready to change subjects because I couldn’t get into a debate about their feelings. “What’s a portal, exactly?”
“It’s a thin place in the membrane,” Claude said. I looked at Claude blankly, and he elaborated. “There’s a sort of magical membrane between our world—the supernatural world—and yours. At a thin place, that membrane is permeable. The fae world is accessible. As are the parts of your world that are normally invisible to you.”
“Huh?”
Claude was on a roll. “Portals usually stay in the same vicinity, though they may shift a little. We use them to get from your world to ours. At the site of the portal in your woods, Niall left an aperture. The slit isn’t big enough for one of us to pass through standing up, but objects can be transferred.”
Like a mail slot in a door. “See? Was that so hard?” I said. “Can you think of some more honest things to tell me?”
“Like what?”
“Like why all those fae are at Hooligans, acting as strippers and bouncers and whatnot. They’re not all fairies. I don’t even know what they are. Why would they end up with you two?”
“Because they have nowhere else to go,” Dermot said simply. “They were all shut out. Some on purpose, like Claude, and some not . . . like me.”
“So Niall closed off access to Faery and left some of his people outside?”
“Yes. He was trying to keep all those fairies who still wanted to kill humans inside, and he was too hasty,” Claude said. I noticed that Dermot, whom Niall had bespelled in a cruel way, looked dubious at this explanation.
“I understood that Niall had good reasons for closing the fae off,” I said slowly. “He said experience had taught him that there’s always trouble when fairies and humans mix. He didn’t want the fairies to crossbreed with humans anymore because so many of the fae hate the consequence—half-breeds.” I looked apologetically at Dermot, who shrugged. He was used to it. “Niall never intended to see me again. Are you two really so anxious to go into the world of the fae and stay there?”
There was a pause that might be called “pregnant.” It was clear that Dermot and Claude weren’t going to respond. At least they weren’t going to lie. “So explain why you’re living with me and what you want from me,” I said, hoping they’d answer that one.
“We’re living with you because it seemed