“Pretty sure this belongs to one of the giants who arrived this morning. Part of the prewedding contingent.”
Mal laughed, then stopped as she realized he was serious. “The hand is smaller than mine,” she pointed out. “Itcan’tbelong to a giant.”
“You’d think,” he began, then broke off as Merrow appeared.
“Did you find the attack scene?” Mal asked.
The elf nodded. “It’s ugly.”
“Law! Why haven’t you been answering your phone?” LeeAnne’s furious voice cut across the island-style courtyard. It was like a knife chopping through stone. She waspissed.
The housekeeper’s heels on the decking sounded like gunshots. That was impressive.
“I have been calling you for the past ten minutes,” she said, then stopped, taking in the blood covering Mal, the stained towel, and the severed hand. She scowled. “What the hell is going on?”
“Working on it,” Law said in a remarkably calm voice, even though the waves of animosity coming off LeeAnne made Mal want to slink into a hole.
Not for the first time did she wonder just what the hell the other womanwas. Definitely not human and definitely scary. Didn’t stop Mal from antagonizing her at every opportunity, but just at the moment, her instincts were battling with her worse nature to keep her from saying something stupid.
Unfortunately, the Force was strong with her worse nature. “What’s up, LeeAnne? Did Timmy fall down the well? Or did zombie cockroaches get into the kitchens again?”
LeeAnne gave Mal an icy glare, her gaze more purple than her usual blue, a sign that she was way passed pissed and Mal was teetering on the precipice of Really Bad Things™ happening.
Mal, being sassy but not crazy, chose to keep her mouth shut.
“What. Is. Going. On?” LeeAnne demanded of Law. “And why aren’t you answering your phone?”
“To answer your first question, I don’t know yet. It appears to be the hand of one of the giants from the wedding advance team.”
“Weddingadvance team?” Mal echoed. “Is it a wedding or a state visit?”
“It’s a political wedding,” Law explained. “Between the giants and pixies.”
“Giants? And pixies?” Mal echoed.
Neither Law nor LeeAnne paid any attention to her, which was just as well because she didn’t need anybody noticing her little panic attack.
It’s not that pixies were particularly scary, though they had some serious teeth and claws. It’s that there was never just one, they had no fear, and they thrived on pranks. Only, what they called “pranks,” others called mayhem, destruction, world war, apocalypse, and so on.
Pixies were the definition of insanity made corporeal.
And they were going to have a wedding at Effrayant. Which meant a whole lot of them. All together. Here. A freaking natural disaster’s worth of pixies.
What the hell was LeeAnne even thinking?
Before Mal could ask, the woman in question let out a short string of words that Mal didn’t understand but which literally turned the air red.
Maybe “pissed” was too mild a word for what LeeAnne was.
“We can’t worry about that right now,” she said finally, talking to Law. “We’ve got a bigger problem.”
He only raised one eyebrow as he waited for her to explain.
“There are two missing Leshiy children. They’ve been gone at least two hours, likely longer. The parents believed them asleep in their bower but found they were gone. They searched, thinking the kids had snuck away to play, but when they couldn’t find them, they came to me.”
Missing kids clearly took precedence over a probable corpse with a missing hand, who could obviously wait. Mal took the hand from Law.
“I’ll work on this. Go find the children.”
