Free Divine Misdemeanors by Laurell K. Hamilton

but there was no physical materialization of Deity.”
    He waved it away. “You’re splitting hairs, Merry, if it’s still all right to call you that, or do you prefer Meredith?”
    “Merry is fine.”
    He grinned up at my two men, who were intent on the far door and its opening. “The last time I saw these two they were the queen’s guard dogs.” He looked at me with those shrewd brown eyes. “Some men are drawn to power, Merry, and some women are more queen without a crown than others are with one.”
    As if on cue the door opened and Gilda, Fairy Godmother of Los Angeles, swept into the room.

CHAPTER NINE
    GILDA WAS A VISION OF LIGHT, LACE, AND SPARKLES. HER FLOOR-LENGTH dress seemed to have been scattered with diamonds that caught the light so that she moved in a circle of bright white sparkles. The dress itself was pale blue, but the diamond flashes were so numerous they almost made an overdress that covered the pale blue lace, so the illusion was that there was a dress made of light and movement over the actual dress. It seemed a little flashy to me, but it matched the rest of her, from her crystal-and-glass crown towering over her blond ringlets to the two-foot-long wand complete with a starred tip.
    She was like a magical version of a movie fairy godmother, but then she’d been a wardrobe mistress in the movies in the 1940s, so when the wild magic found her and offered her a wish, clothes were important to her. No one knew the truth about how she’d been offered the magic. She’d told more than one version over the years. Every version made her look more heroic. The last story was something about rescuing children from a burning car, I think.
    She waved the wand around the room like a queen waving her scepter at her subjects. But there was a prickling of power as the wand moved past us. Whatever else was illusion about Gilda, the wand was real. It was faerie workmanship, but beyond that no one had beenable to say what the wand was, and where it had come from. Magic wands were very rare among us, because we didn’t need them.
    When Gilda had made her wish, she hadn’t realized that almost everything she wanted marked her as fake. Her magic was real enough, but the way she did it, everything about her was more fairy tale than faery.
    “Come here, little one,” she said, and just like that Bittersweet flew to her. Whatever sort of compulsion spell she had in her voice, it was strong. Bittersweet nestled into those golden ringlets, lost in the dazzle of light. Gilda turned as if to leave the room.
    Lucy called, “Excuse me, Gilda, but you can’t take our witness just yet.”
    “I am her queen. I have to protect her.”
    “Protect her from what?” Lucy asked.
    The light show made Gilda’s face hard to read. I thought she looked annoyed. Her perfectly bowed mouth made an unhappy moue. Her perfectly blue eyes narrowed a little around her long diamond-sparkled lashes. When I’d last seen her, she’d been covered in gold dust, from her eyelashes to a more formfitting formal dress. Gilda was always gilded, but it changed substance with her clothes.
    “Police harassment,” she said. Again she turned as if to leave.
    “We aren’t done with our witness,” Lucy said.
    Robert said, “You seem in a hurry to leave, Godmother, almost as if you don’t want Bittersweet to speak with the police.”
    She turned back then, and even through all the silly lights and sparkles she was angry. “You have never had a civil tongue in your head, brownie.”
    “You liked my tongue well enough once, Gilda,” he said.
    She blushed in that way that some blonds and redheads do, all the way into her hairline. “The police wouldn’t let me bring all my people inside here. If Oberon were here you wouldn’t dare say such things.”
    Frost said, “Oberon? Who’s Oberon?”
    She frowned at him. “He is my king, my consort.” Her eyes narrowed again, but more like she was squinting. I wondered if the diamondlights were