Dead Ever After

always would, no matter how well I’d recovered. Worst of all, I knew what was coming. I just wanted the whole thing to be over, even if I died . . . and I knew they intended to kill me. Death would be easier than going through that again. I was very clear on that. But I tried to rally. The only thing I could do was talk.
    “I feel sorry for you, Claude,” I said. “I’m sorry Niall did that to you.” His face was an especially cruel target, since Claude had been outstandingly handsome and very proud. If he’d wanted women, he could have had them by the dozens, instead of sampling one now and then. As it happened, Claude liked men, men rough around the edges, and they’d responded to him with enthusiasm. Niall had found a perfectly devastating punishment for Claude’s treachery.
    “Don’t feel sorry for me,” Claude said. “Wait to see what we’re going to do to you.”
    “Cutting me will make you well again?”
    “That’s not what I’m after.”
    “What are you after?”
    “Vengeance,” he said.
    “What did I do to you, Claude?” I asked, genuinely curious. “I let you live in my house. I cooked for you. I let you sleep in my bed when you were lonely.” Of course, all the time he was scouring my house looking for the cluviel dor, but I hadn’t known that. I’d been genuinely glad to have him there. I also hadn’t known anything about the plot against Niall, the rebellion Claude was fomenting among the other fae who hadn’t made it into Faery when Niall closed the portals.
    “You were the cause of Niall’s wanting to close Faery off,” Claude said, surprised at my even having to ask.
    “Wasn’t he going to do that, anyway?” Geez Louise.
    Steve Newlin leaned forward to bitch-slap me. “Shut up, you godforsaken whore,” he said.
    “Don’t hit her again unless I tell you to,” Claude said. And he must have given them great cause to fear him earlier in their partnership, because Glassport put his knife away and Newlin settled back against the wall of the van. They hadn’t tied me; I guessed that was the weak point of an impromptu kidnapping, nothing to bind the victim with.
    “You think I am unfounded in hating you,” Claude said, and we made a hard left turn. I rolled over on my side, and only when the van straightened out was I able to make some cautious moves to sit up myself. To avoid the two men, I had to stay in the middle, so any turn or bump in the road was going to knock me over. Well, great. Then I spied a grip on the back of the passenger seat, and I grabbed it.
    “I do think so,” I said. “There’s no reason for you to hate me. I never hated you.”
    “You didn’t want to sleep with me,” Claude pointed out.
    “Well, damn, Claude, you’re gay! Why would I want to have sex with someone who’s fantasizing about beard stubble?”
    Neither Claude nor I considered what I’d said anything extraordinary, but you’d have thought I’d stuck a cattle prod where the sun didn’t shine on the two humans.
    “Is this true, Claude? You’re a fairy who’s a fairy?” Steve Newlin’s voice had gone super-ugly, and Johan Glassport had pulled his knife out again.
    “Uh-oh,” I said, just to alert Claude—since, after all, he was driving the vehicle —that there was dissension in his ranks. “Claude, your buddies are homophobes.”
    “What does that mean?” he asked me.
    “They hate men who like men.”
    Claude appeared perplexed, but I could see the distortion and hatred in the brains of the two men, and I knew that completely without intending to, I’d hit the perk button on their ethical coffeemaker.
    Ordinarily, in the interest of making trouble in the ranks, I’d be glad they had such a huge issue with Claude’s orientation. But then again, he was driving and I was the instantly available victim.
    “He seemed like a tough man to me,” Glassport said to Steve Newlin. “He would have killed that young man if the lawyer hadn’t interfered.”
    I finally had a clue about what had happened to Barry. I hoped the “lawyer” reference meant Mr. Cataliades had rescued him.
    Claude said in a puzzled way, “Johan, are you calling me less than a strong man because I like other men in bed?”
    Glassport winced, and his mouth compressed with disgust. “I am saying that I think less of you,” he replied. “I do not like contact with you.”
    “And I think you’re going straight to hell with the imps of Satan,” Steve Newlin said. “You’re an