“Sorry,” I told him.
Dryden didn’t say anything. He just stood there and shook at me.
Pritkin handed him some paper towels. “How do you know?”
Dryden swallowed and dabbed at his crotch. “My . . . my great-grandmother was Fey,” he said shakily. “Somehow, it knew that. It tried to talk to me—”
“About what?”
“I’m . . . not sure. I—”
“You don’t know the language?”
“A little, but—”
“Then take a guess!”
“That’s what I’m trying to do, if you’ll give me a chance!” he snapped, tossing the wet paper towels in the trash. “I only caught maybe one word in ten, but I think . . . I think it was trying to apologize.”
“Apologize?” The redheaded vamp sneered. “For what?”
Dryden scowled and flailed a hand angrily. “For this? For almost getting me killed? For almost making me—” he broke off and glanced at me, and his lips tightened. “I don’t know. I didn’t get that much. Just something like ‘they made me do it,’ and that she was afraid of them—”
“She?” the vamp asked.
“Yes. It . . . She . . . I think it was female. It was using the female form of address, anyway. Like I told you, my grasp of the language isn’t good and that goes double for the High Court dialect—”
“High Court?” That was Pritkin.
“It’s the version of the language spoken at court—”
“I know what it is,” Pritkin snapped. “How did you recognize it?”
“Because my grandmother spoke it!”
“And your grandmother was?”
“A Selkie noblewoman.”
Pritkin cursed. “Dark Fey.”
The mage didn’t deign to respond to that. He looked at me and took a deep breath. “Before I left, I just wanted to say . . . thank you.” It came out a little strangled.
I thought about it for a moment. “You’re welcome?”
“Do you know what I’m thanking you for?”
Damn. I’d hoped he wouldn’t ask that. It couldn’t be for lunch, since we’d never had any.
And I guessed we wouldn’t now, what with a possessed fridge and all.
“No?” I said, figuring I had a fifty-fifty shot.
He knelt in front of my chair, or maybe his legs collapsed; I don’t know. He wasn’t looking so good. “I know what that is,” he said hoarsely, nodding at my wrist, where my bracelet of interlocking knives lay hard and cold against my skin. “It’s my job at the Corps to disenchant confiscated dark objects and . . . I’ve seen one like it before.”
His eyes searched my face. He seemed to be waiting on some kind of response. So I nodded.
“You could have killed me,” he said. And then he kissed my hand. “Thank you.”