Dead and Gone

examined the wounds. Of course, Sam had known right away that wasn’t the truth. I had ended up telling him what had happened the first time he came to see me. The patrons of Merlotte’s were very sympathetic, he reported when he came the second time. He had brought me daisies and a chicken basket from Dairy Queen. When he’d thought I wasn’t watching, Sam had looked at me with grim eyes.
    After Niall pulled a chair close to the bed, he took my hand. Maybe the events of the past few days had made the fine wrinkles in his skin a fraction deeper. Maybe he looked a little sad. But my royal great-grandfather was still beautiful, still regal, still strange, and now that I knew what his race could do . . . he looked frightening.
    “Did you know Lochlan and Neave killed my parents?” I asked.
    Niall nodded after a perceptible pause. “I suspected,” he said. “When you told me your parents had drowned, I had to consider it possible. They all had an affinity to water, Breandan’s people.”
    “I’m glad they’re dead,” I said.
    “Yes, I am, too,” he said simply. “And most of Breandan’s followers are dead, as well. I spared two females, since we need them so much, and though one of them was the mother of Breandan’s child, I let her live.”
    He seemed to want my praise for that. “What about the child?” I asked.
    Niall shook his head, and the sheet of pale hair moved with the gesture.
    He loved me, but he was from a world even more savage than mine.
    As if he had heard my thoughts, Niall said, “I’m going to finish blocking the passage to our land.”
    “But that’s what the war was over,” I said, bewildered. “That was what Breandan wanted.”
    “I have come to think that he was right, though for the wrong reason. It isn’t the fae who need to be protected from the human world. It’s the humans who need to be protected from us.”
    “What will that mean? What are the consequences?”
    “Those of us who’ve been living among the humans will have to choose.”
    “Like Claude.”
    “Yes. He’ll have to cut his ties with our secret land, if he wants to live out here.”
    “And the rest? The ones who live there already?”
    “We won’t be coming out anymore.” His face was luminous with grief.
    “I won’t get to see you?”
    “No, dear heart. It’s better not.”
    I tried to summon up a protest, to tell him that it was not better, it was awful, since I had so few relatives, that I would not talk to him again. But I just couldn’t make the words come out of my mouth. “What about Dermot?” I said instead.
    “We can’t find him,” Niall said. “If he’s dead, he went to ash somewhere we haven’t discovered. If he’s here, he’s being very clever and very quiet. We’ll keep trying until the door closes.”
    I hoped devoutly that Dermot was on the fairy side of that door.
    At that moment, Jason came in.
    My great-grandfather— our great-grandfather—leaped to his feet. But after a moment, he relaxed. “You must be Jason,” he said.
    My brother stared at him blankly. Jason had not been himself since the death of Mel. The same edition of our local paper that had carried the story about the awful discovery of the body of Tray Dawson had carried another story about the disappearance of Mel Hart. There was wide conjecture that maybe the two events were connected somehow.
    I didn’t know how the werepanthers had covered up the scene in back of Jason’s house, and I didn’t want to know. I didn’t know where Mel’s body was, either. Maybe it had been eaten. Maybe it was at the bottom of Jason’s pond. Maybe it lay in the woods somewhere.
    The last was what I suspected. Jason and Calvin had told the police that Mel had said he was going hunting by himself, and Mel’s truck was found parked at a hunting preserve where he had a share. There were some bloodstains discovered in the back of the truck that made police suspect Mel might know something about Crystal Stackhouse’s awful death, and now Andy Bellefleur had been heard to say he wouldn’t be surprised if old Mel hadn’t killed himself out in the woods.
    “Yeah, I’m Jason,” my brother said heavily. “You must be . . . my great-grandfather?”
    Niall inclined his head. “I am. I’ve come to bid your sister good-bye.”
    “But not me, huh? I’m not good enough.”
    “You are too much like Dermot.”
    “Well, crap.” Jason threw himself down on the foot of the bed. “Dermot didn’t seem too bad to