“Well, it’s a funny thing, your Majesty,” Joe says. “We came here, polite as can be, hoping to get some help on tracking down a missing friend of ours, and what do we find out while we’re waiting? Turns out she’s not so missing after all. Turns out your people are involved. Turns out you just bought yourselves into a whole mess of grief.”

“I have only to say the word,” Tatiana says, “and the three of you will be dead.”

“Maybe. We’ll just have to see how that works out for you.”

I can see the queen studying him, expecting to read the bluff, but eyes like he’s got tell her that he’s pretty much capable of anything. So she turns her attention to Joe’s captive.

“What do you know about this?” she asks.

“What I have to tell is for your ears,” Mother Crone says.

Joe just shakes his head. “Well, isn’t that a shame. Guess none of us are going to know.”

The queen sighs. “I thought better of you, Joseph. Haven’t you always been the one preaching calm mediation rather than threats of violence?”

“Everybody makes mistakes, your Majesty. Guess I was just too damn trusting.”

I’ve got to give it to him. Those eyes of his are crying for some old-time blood and fury, but his voice is just as polite as can be.

The queen looks away from him, her gaze moving from Jack to me.

“Will someone please tell me what this is all about?” she finally says.

Interesting. She’s asking, not commanding.

“You shouldn’t have let your people go after my family,” Joe tells her. “And if you didn’t let them, but any of you knew something about it, you really shouldn’t have been trying to stonewall me. That makes for bad neighbours, your Majesty.”

Jack grins at that play on how the humans used to refer to fairy as the Good Neighbours. Tatiana doesn’t miss it either.

“If you know something about this,” she tells Mother Crone, “you will inform us of it now.”

Oh, she doesn’t want to talk. Not in front of us. And we soon find out why.

“Big Dan Cockle is responsible,” Mother Crone says.

“And you couldn’t tell Joseph this?”

Mother Crone shakes her head. “It’s not just his friend Jilly. They’ve kidnapped another woman, a fiddler named Lizzie Mahone, and pushed her cousin Siobhan down a flight of stairs. But worse that that, they’ve apparently been going into the wild and the green, hunting cousins.”

“This is the same damn bunch we’re tracking,” Jack says before I can. “There’s no ‘apparent’ about it. They killed Walker’s daughter a couple of nights ago and would have had themselves a roasted cerva feed if Lizzie and Grey hadn’t stopped them.”

Joe gives Jack a look.