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NAOMI PHELPS DID MOST OF THE TALKING WHILE FRANCES SAT THERE AND shivered Our secretary got her hot coffee and an afghan Her hands shook so badly that she spilled coffee on the afghan, but she got some of it down Whether it was the warmth or the caffeine, she looked a little better

Jeremy had called Teresa in to listen to the women Teresa was our resident psychic She o inches shy of six feet, slender, with high sculpted cheekbones, long silky black hair, skin the color of pale coffee The first time I’d seen her, I’d known she had sidhe blood in her, along with African Ah court The last hat gave her the slight points to the tops of her ears A lot of faerie wanna-bes get cartilage irow their hair down to their ankles and try to pretend to be sidhe But no pure-blooded sidhe has ever had pointed ears It’s a mark of mixed blood, less than pure But some bits of folklore die harder than others To a vast majority of people if you were truly sidhe, you had to have pointed ears

Teresa had that same delicacy of bone that Naomi did, but I’d never been tempted to hold Teresa’s hand She was one of the most powerful touch clairvoyants that I’d eversure she didn’t touch er us all She sat in a chair to one side, dark eyes watching the tomen She hadn’t offered to shake their hands In fact she’d walked wide around them so that she didn’t accidentally touch either of the, but she’d felt the spell, the danger, when she walked into the room

"I don’t kno , "a dozen, two dozen, hundreds" She shrugged "All I know for sure is that I’ line of them"

"Mrs Norton," Jeremy said

Frances turned her eyes up to him, startled, as if she hadn’t expected to be asked to contribute to the story

"Do you have any proof of all these women?"

She sed, and said in a voice that was almost a whisper, "Polaroids, he keeps Polaroids" She stared down into her lap, , "He calls them his trophies"

I had to ask "Did he show these pictures to you, or did you find them?"

She looked up, and her eyes were eer, no shame, empty "He showed them to me He likeshe likes to tell ood at, better at than me"

I opened le helpful thing to say I was outraged for her sake, but it was Francis Norton that needed to be angry on behalf of Francis Norton My anger ht help us solve the iain If we could take the husband out of the picture, that wouldn’t heal all the da with Francis than just a spell

Nao her "That’s how she met me She saw my picture, and then we just ran into each other one day I caught her staring at ot home and told her what he’d done to me" It was Naoht and e" She looked up, met my eyes "Frances came over to my table She rolled back her sleeve and showed me her bruises Then she just said, ’I’ave a shy sive when you’ve explained how you ave her blank eyes, but I wondered if the bond between them was more than just the abuse and the husband If they were lovers, it could change how the healing was done So often in s the emotions have to be taken into account Because love and hate have different energies, you ith them differently We’d need to know exactly what the bond between the toun, but not today Today we’d listen to what they wanted to tell us

"That was very brave of you," Teresa said Her voice, like everything about her, was soth, like steel covered by silk I’d always thought Teresa, though she’d never traveled farther south than Mexico, would have made an excellent Southern belle

Frances’s eyes flicked to her, then back to her lap, then up, and her mouth moved It was almost a smile That one small in to sth she’d shown, then ht with tiave her sot the impression that they were very close "It was my salvation Fro to break away from him I don’t kno I allowed him to hurt me I’m not like that I mean, I’ve never, ever let a man abuse me" Her face showed the shame she felt, as if she should have saved herself

Frances put her hand over the other wo it

Naomi smiled at her, then turned puzzled eyes to us "He’s like a drug Once he’s touched you, you crave his touch Not just him either It’s like he wakens you sexually, until your body aches to be touched" She looked down again "I’ve never been so sexually aware of other people It was e, at first Then he started to hurt" She made herself look up, forced herself tous to think the worst of her There was a great deal of strength here How had this man tamed her? "Heworse things Things that just hurt I tried to get him to stop the kinky stuff, and that’s when he started beatingthat it was part of sex" Herme did excite him The fact that it didn’t excite me, that it scared me, he liked that, too"

"Rape fantasies," I said

She nodded, her eyes wide as she tried to keep the tears glistening in her eyes fro to hold it all inside "Not just fantasies at the end"

"He likes to take you by force" This froe to shake my head I’d spent the years from sixteen to thirty in the Unseelie Court, the years ofpleasure with pain But the pain was shared, and it was never done against anyone’s will If the other person didn’t think pain was pleasurable, it wasn’t sex It was torture There is a vast difference between torture and a little hard sex But for sexual sadists, there is no difference In the extreme forms they are incapable of sex without the violence, or at least the terror of their victim But most sadists are capable of more normal sex They can use that to fool you, but in the end they can’t keep up a normal relationship In the end what they truly desire must come out, and they must have it

Hoas I such an expert? Like I said, I spent etThe Seelie Court has its own brand of unusual activities, but they do share the more mainstream human view of dominance and sub of such things or maybe just more open about it It could also be that the Queen of Air and Darkness, my aunt, the overall ruler of the court for the last thousand years, give or a take a century, is very into do a sexual sadist She has shaped the court in her iht and Illusion of the Seelie Court, has shaped his court in his iely, you can scheme and lie more easily in the Seelie Court They’re into illusion If everything looks good on the outside, then it ood The Unseelie Court is more honest, most of the time

Teresa said, "Naomi, was this your first abusive relationship?"

The woman nodded "I still don’t understand how I let it set so bad"

I looked at Teresa, and she gave a very small nod It meant that she’d listened to the answer and that the wo the truth Like I said, Teresa is one of the most powerful psychics in the country It’s not just her hands you have to watch out for Most of the ti or not I’ve had to be very careful around her these three years we’ve worked together

"How did you meet him?" I asked I didn’t use his name or say Mr Norton because both women had been very careful to say only him or he, as if there was no otherabout We did

"I answered a personal ad"

"What did the ad say?" I asked

She shrugged "The usual stuff, except for the end At the end of the ad it said he was looking for a ical relationship I don’t knohat it was about the ad, but after I read it, I had to meet him"

"A compulsion spell," Jeremy said

She looked at hih, you can put a spell on an ad so that the ad brings to you what you truly desire, not necessarily what the ad says you want It’s the way I ran the ad that Ms Gentry answered Only people with ical ability would have noticed the spell on the ad, and only people with exceptional gifts would have been able to see through to the true writing underneath The true writing listed a different phone number than the ad I knew that anyone who called that number was capable of the job"

"I didn’t know you could do that with a newspaper," Naomi said "I mean, it’s printed, and he couldn’t have touched every paper" Just by knowing that not touching the paper physically ic theory than I thought she did But she was right

"You have to be powerful enough that the ad, the words that you read into it, carry the spell It is very difficult, and that he was capable of it lets us know the kind of skill we’ll be up against"

"So the ad called me to him?" she asked

"Maybe not you specifically," Jere about you was exactly what he wanted or needed"

"Most of the women look fey," Frances said

We all looked at her She blinked at us "Pointed ears One wolow out of the picture Skin colors that no hureen, blue Three of them had more parts than a human would have, but not like it was a deformity, like it was just part of the way they looked"

I was iether in her head If we could save her, get her away from him, she’d make it "What did he say about Naoot off on that, if the women were part sidhe He called them his royal whores"

"Why fey women?" Jeremy asked

"He never said," Frances answered

"I think it had so to do with the ritual," Naomi said

We all turned to her Jereht he took me to the apartment he’s rented The bedrooe circular bed The floor was this beautiful glea see, like I’d walked through a ghost I didn’t knohat it was that first night, but one night I slipped on the rug, and underneath was a double circle set into the wood of the floor with symbols in a band around the circle I realized the bed was the center of the circle I didn’t recognize the syh to knoas a circle of power, a place to workin the bed that seenized We just had sex, lots of it"

"Was there anything that was the same every time?" Jeremy asked

She shook her head "No"

"Was the sex always in this apartment?" Jeremy asked

"No, sometimes wehe does in the apartment inside the circle that he doesn’t do anywhere else?"

She blushed bright red "It’s the only place he brings other men"

"Other men to have sex with him?" I asked

She shook her head "No, withfor the cry of horror, or maybe whore Whatever she saw reassured her We all kne to give good blank face e needed it Besides, a little group sex see that he showed pictures of his lovers to his wife, with details That was a new one Group sex had been around a lot longer than Polaroids

"Was it always the same men?" Jeremy asked

She shook her head" No, but they knew each other I ers off the street" She sounded defensive, as if that would have been so much worse, and it wasn’t as bad as all that

"Were there any repeats?" Jeremy asked

"There were three men that I saw more than once"

"Do you know their names?"

"Just their first names Liam, Donald, and Brendan"

She seemed very sure of the names "How many times did you see these three men?"

She wouldn’t meet our eyes" I don’t know Many times"

"Five times," Jeremy asked, "six, twenty-six?"

She looked up startled "Not twenty tiht, maybe ten, but no more than that" It seemed important to her that it hadn’t been ical cutoff? More than ten tiroup sex, how ain "Why do you need to know?"

"You called it a ritual, not us," Jeremy said "So far there doesn’t seenificance The number of men inside the circle The number of times you were inside the circle with et ain "I didn’t mean to imply"

"Yes, you did," Jeremy said, "but I understand why you’d be suspicious of any male, human or not" I saw the idea float over his face "Were all the men human?"

"Donald and Liam both had pointed ears, but other than that they all seemed human"