A Caress Of Twilight   ::   Гамильтон Лорел

She's dead. We could stage a Wagnerian opera on top of her and she wouldn't care."

I touched his arm. "Rhys, it's not the dead you should try to placate; it's the living."

He frowned at me.

"Be less happy in front of the humans when you are looking at their dead," Frost said.

"Very well, but I don't understand why I should pretend."

"Pretend that Detective Tate is Queen Andais," I said, "and it bothers her that you go around chortling over the dead."

I watched some thought slip over his face, then he shrugged. "I can seem less happy around the detective, but I still don't understand why."

I sighed, and looked at Frost. "Do you understand why?"

"If it were my kinswoman on the gurney, I would feel something for her death."

I turned back to Rhys. "See."

He shrugged. "I'll be sad around Detective Tate."

"Just somber will do, Rhys." I'd had this sudden image of him falling on the next corpse with weeping and wailing. "Don't overdo it."

He grinned at me, and I knew that he'd been thinking of exactly what I'd feared. "I mean it, Rhys. If you don't behave yourself, Tate could get you barred from crime scenes."

He suddenly looked somber; that mattered to him. "Okay, okay, I'll be good. Sheesh."

Detective Tate yelled back at us, her voice riding the wind like seagulls overhead. She was halfway up the stairs, and it was impressive that her voice carried back to us so clearly. "Hurry it up. We don't have all day here."

"Actually, we do," Rhys said.

I was already walking through the soft sand toward the stairs. I was very sorry that I'd worn high heels today, and I didn't protest when Frost offered me his arm. "Actually we do what?" I asked.

"We have all day. We have all eternity. The dead aren't going anywhere."

I glanced at him. He was watching the tall detective with a sort of faraway, almost dreamy look on his face. "You know what, Rhys?"

He looked at me, raising one eyebrow.

"Lucy's right. You're creepy at a murder scene."

He grinned again. "Not nearly as creepy as I could be."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

Rhys wouldn't answer. He just started walking ahead of us in his lower-heeled shoes. I looked up at Frost. "What did he mean by that?"

"Rhys was once called the Lord of Relics."

"And that means what?" I asked, nearly stumbling in the heels, holding tighter to his arm.

"Relics is an old poetic word. It means corpse.