“I’ll talk to you soon,” Niall said, bending over to give me a kiss. The fine, gleaming pale hair fell against my cheek. He smelled so good; fairies do. “I’m sorry, Sookie,” he said. “I thought I could force them all to accept . . . Well, I couldn’t.” His green eyes glowed with intensity and regret. “Do you have—yes, a garden hose! We could gather up most of the dust, but I think it more practical if you simply . . . distribute it.”

He put his arms around me and hugged me, and Dillon gave me a mocking salute. The two took a few steps to the trees, and then they simply vanished into the undergrowth as deer do when you encounter them in the woods.

So that was that. I was left in my sunny yard, all by myself, with a sizeable pile of glittering powdery dust in a body-shaped heap on the gravel.

I added to my mental list of the odd things I’d done that day. I’d entertained the police, sunbathed, visited at a mall with some fairies, weeded, and killed someone. Now it was powdered corpse removal time. And the day wasn’t over yet.

I turned on the faucet, unwound the hose enough so the flow would reach the right area, and compressed the spray head to aim the water at the fairy dust.

I had a weird, out-of-body feeling. “You’d think I’d be getting used to it,” I said out loud, startling myself even more. I didn’t want to add up the people I’d killed, though technically most of them weren’t people. Before the past two years (maybe even less if I counted down the months), I’d never laid a finger on another person in anger, aside from hitting Jason in the stomach with my plastic baseball bat when he tore my Barbie’s hair out.

I pulled myself up sharply. The deed was done now. No going back.

I released the spray head and turned the hose off at the faucet.

In the fading sunlight, it was a little hard to tell, but I thought I’d dispersed the dust pretty thoroughly.

“But not from my memory,” I said seriously. Then I had to laugh, and it sounded a little crazy. I was standing out in my backyard hosing down fairy blood and making melodramatic statements all to myself. Next I’d be doing the Hamlet soliloquy that I’d had to memorize in high school.

This afternoon had brought me down hard, to a real bad place.