Uncle Mike returned, escorting Beauclaire and the bald man whom Margaret had forced to her will. Goreu. The discrepancy between what I would have expected from a knight of the round table, fictional though it was, and Goreu left me bitterly and irrationally disappointed. They’d brought the good fairy and the bad fairy. I looked at Beauclaire and frowned at him. He looked cool and composed, as he had every time I’d seen him. Maybe we were meeting the bad fairy and the worse fairy. I had expected to be facing more. We apparently weren’t, Adam and I, as important as Margaret. I might have been offended, except the fewer Gray Lords we sat down with, the more likely we would be to walk away alive.

We all went to the scarred table and sat down, virtually at the same time. Adam was slower because he held my chair out.

“Are there any other fae in the building or adjacent lot?” asked Adam as he settled.

“No,” said Uncle Mike. “Just the three of us—and I don’t count.”

“What do you want?” asked Adam.

“There are nine fae dead,” said Beauclaire, very softly. Yep, I thought, my stomach clenched, bad fairy and worse fairy.

“They attacked us,” Adam told them. “That makes their deaths their own fault.”

“Point,” agreed Beauclaire, and he glanced at Goreu. “They were on their own,” he told us, “as, I understand, Uncle Mike informed you.”

“How often,” said Adam dangerously, “are we going to be discussing how many of your people have been killed by their own stupidity before you stop them instead of making me do it?”

“We have discussed this very thing,” said Beauclaire grimly.

Goreu pushed back his chair and sighed. “As well as a whole rotting cesspool of other things.”

He sat in silence a moment, examining Adam without meeting his eyes—and avoiding any kind of dominance game. Finally, he leaned forward, and it was as if he peeled off a glamour without changing his form at all. When he spoke, his voice was still tenor, but it had softened and lost the squeak. Instead of a parody, he became . . . someone who might once have ridden beside Arthur. “Some old king,” Goreu said, “some old time or other proclaimed that if the Welsh had all started fighting one enemy instead of each other, they would have conquered the world—that goes double for the fae. Still, we did passably well for the past couple of hundred years, protecting the weak and reining in the strong and vicious.” He flashed a humorless smile. “Coexisting, you could call it. Then Underhill opened unexpectedly—on one of the reservations, then on all of the reservations, thousands if not tens of thousands of miles from the nearest old door.”

“Unexpected by some,” murmured Beauclaire.