“Death trauma,” Linn said above me, his silver eyebrows drawn down in alarm. “In Faerie, if death comes in manner sudden or suspect, one summons an adept, who by such contact with the corpse, reads the final moments of the life that’s gone. If it was violent death, the mage may take the trauma on himself, and be much harmed.”

I stared at him. “Why the hell don’t you call somebody in and do that now?”

He looked sad. “No human corpse will give its secrets up, that we have found. And even fey flesh, in the Borderlands, is sometimes mute, or muted. Here it is not a tool that pays its use.”

“Offhand, I’d guess that in Faerie you don’t go to your grandmother’s funeral and give her a last kiss in the coffin.”

“Indeed not, if one’s grandmother died by murder or mischance.” He sounded as if he thought this was an inappropriate subject to discuss in a morgue. “Had illness or her great age sent her hence, one could bestow such strange salutes as that, and fear no consequence.”

To tell the truth, I didn’t think much of kissing dead people at funerals, either. I hung in Rico’s arms, shaking, sucking down air.

“Do you remember anything?” Rico asked.

“No. If I hadn’t been sitting on the floor, I wouldn’t have believed it happened.” She looked sour. “Sorry,” I added, as she helped me to stand. My cigarette was scorching the floor a few feet away. I started to pick it up, then decided I didn’t want to put it in my mouth. I stepped on it instead.

“What about his effects?” Rico said to Linn.

“It won’t help,” I told them.

Linn turned to a tall chest of little handleless drawers against one wall. He spoke softly in the language of the Elflands, and one drawer slid out. This he carried to Rico.

“It won’t,” I repeated. “Now if you wanted me to find his effects, maybe I’d put you on a show. But I can’t—”

Rico cut me off with one of her looks. “We’re going now. You wanna come, or are you sleeping in here tonight?”

I made a shoot-myself-in-the-head gesture and followed them.

We stopped in a tiny office. The walls were pale aqua at the bottom, shading slowly to turquoise at the top and across the high ceiling studded with wisps of painted cloud. The free-standing coatrack, I now noticed, was painted on the wall. So was the window with its blinds drawn, and a four-drawer file cabinet, and the pile of books on it. I wished I was close enough to see the titles. The way Rico stepped through the clutter to the desk chair told me the office was hers.