Dead and Gone

winsome smile.
    “Who is this?” I said, jerking my head at the body.
    “He was Murry,” Niall said. “He was a close friend of my nephew Breandan.”
    Murry looked very young; to the human eye, he’d been perhaps eighteen. “He said he was looking forward to killing me,” I told them.
    “But instead, you killed him. How did you do it?” Dillon asked, as if he was asking how I rolled out a flaky piecrust.
    “With my grandmother’s trowel,” I said. “Actually, it’s been in my family for a long time. Not like we make a fetish of gardening tools or anything; it just works and it’s there and there’s no need to buy another one.” Babbling.
    They both looked at me. I couldn’t tell if they thought I was nuts or what.
    “Could you show us this gardening tool?” Niall said.
    “Sure. Do you-all want some tea or something? I think we’ve got some Pepsi and some lemonade.” No, no, not lemonade! They’d die! “Sorry, cancel the lemonade. Tea?”
    “No,” said Niall quite gently. “I think not now.”
    I’d dropped the bloody trowel in among the cannas. When I picked it up and approached them, Dillon flinched. “Iron!” he said.
    “You don’t have the gloves on,” Niall said to his son chid ingly, and took the trowel from me. His hands were covered with the clear flexible coating developed in fairy-owned chemical factories. Coated with this substance, fairies were able to go out in the human world with some degree of assurance that they wouldn’t get poisoned in the process.
    Dillon looked chastened. “No, sorry, Father.”
    Niall shook his head as if he were disappointed in Dillon, but his attention was really on the trowel. He might have been prepared to handle something poisonous to him, but I noticed he still handled it very carefully.
    “It went into him really easily,” I said, and had to repress a sudden wave of nausea. “I don’t know why. It’s sharp, but it’s not that sharp.”
    “Iron can part our flesh like a hot knife in butter,” Niall said.
    “Ugh.” Well, at least I knew I hadn’t suddenly gotten superstrong.
    “He surprised you?” Dillon asked. Though he didn’t have the fine, fine wrinkles that made my great-grandfather even more beautiful, Dillon looked only a little younger than Niall, which made their relationship all the more disorienting. But when I looked down at the corpse once more, I was completely back in the present.
    “He sure did surprise me. I was just working away weeding the flower bed, and the next thing you know, he was standing right there telling me how much he was looking forward to killing me. I’d never done a thing to him. And he scared me, so I kind of came up in a rush with the trowel, and I got him in the stomach.” Again, I wrestled with my own stomach’s tendency to heave.
    “Did he speak any more?” My great-grandfather was trying to ask me casually, but he seemed pretty interested in my answer.
    “No, sir,” I said. “He kind of looked surprised, and then he . . . he died.” I walked over to the steps and sat down rather suddenly and heavily.
    “It’s not exactly like I feel guilty,” I said in a rush of words. “It’s just that he was trying to kill me and he was happy about it and I never did a thing to him. I didn’t know anything about him, and now he’s dead.”
    Dillon knelt in front of me. He looked into my face. He didn’t exactly look kind, but he looked less detached. “He was your enemy, and now he is dead,” he said. “This is cause for rejoicing.”
    “Not exactly,” I said. I didn’t know how to explain.
    “You’re a Christian ,” he said, as if he’d discovered I was a hermaphrodite or a fruitarian.
    “I’m a real bad one,” I said hurriedly. His lips compressed, and I could see he was trying hard not to laugh. I’d never felt less like mirth, with the man I’d killed lying a few feet away. I wondered how many years Murry had walked this earth, and now he was crumpled in a lifeless heap, his blood staining my gravel. Wait a minute! He wasn’t anymore. He was turning to . . . dust. It wasn’t anything like the gradual flaking away of a vampire; it was more like someone was erasing Murry.
    “Are you cold?” Niall asked. He didn’t seem to think the disappearance of bits of the body was anything unusual.
    “No, sir. I’m just all upset. I mean, I was sunbathing and then I went to see Claude and Claudine, and now here I am.” I couldn’t take my eyes off the body’s