Death by Chocolate (9 page)

So far, over six hundred pounds of carob-tainted chocolate had been detected. A large
percentage of that came from the same cut-rate factory that advertised itself as a gourmet
chocolate supplier. It claimed to ship from Switzerland, Austria and France, but the chocolate
actually originated in a building that straddled the border of Texas and Mexico. The packages
were falsely labeled, not even using FDA double-talk hidden coding for carob.

Guber gleefully reported to Epsi that the factory had been reported to the FDA and the
truth-in-food-labeling authorities. Everyone who had purchased the gifts from that tainted factory
was clearly innocent.

The amounts of carob present in any of the chocolate was so minimal that even a highly
allergic Fae would only have hives and shortness of breath. It seemed that even carob was too
expensive for those particular manufacturers to use, so they had adulterated their chocolate even
further with materials that were nowhere near chocolate or carob. In this particular instance, the
presence of carob was a harmless and unavoidable mistake, on the part of the Fae.

Epsi spared a moment to wonder if that factory would soon go out of business, since no
more Fae would be going there to purchase truckloads of chocolate at a time. Even if that didn't
harm them, the FDA and other Human authorities would soon be breathing down their
necks.

The second message dealt with her present in particular to Mellisande. The cargo in her
boat was all pure, high quality chocolate. The boat itself, however, was laced with carob. It was
necessary, according to the manufacturers themselves, to introduce it into the chocolate to help
with the structural integrity and weight-bearing members.

The interesting part of the report was that the queen's friends, secretaries and assistants
had all been interviewed to find out who had shared what delicacies with the queen. More than a
dozen people corroborated the same story: several of the ministers of the queen's cabinet had
helped themselves to the anchor and part of the top rail of the boat.

Mellisande had been so furious, everyone assumed the resulting illness of the ministers
had been an overflow of her anger, an unintentional punishment. They had all recovered, but
now that the medical authorities knew what to look for, the symptoms could all be traced to
carob poisoning.

Epsi had been proven utterly innocent. The infusion of carob into the boat was the
Human designer's choice. She didn't even know carob existed until she inhaled the aroma from
Lori's carefully preserved stash, and nearly blinded herself and scorched her lungs.

So the question remained--who poisoned the queen, and was it intentional or accidental?
Laziness and cheating on the part of the human chocolatier, or obliviousness and ignorance on
the part of the Fae who bought it?

Epsi promised herself she would be part of the process of finding that answer. She was
getting out of the holding dimension, after all. Guber's message had contained an invitation to
join the team that was making adjustments and additions to the testing gizmo and the procedure.
Epsi didn't know what she could do to add to the process, but it was the fact that Guber
wanted
her there that made her heart pitter-pat until she was nearly breathless.

She hadn't felt this way about a male of the Fae species in decades. Maybe not ever. It
was exciting. What amused her was that Guber was not the sort of Fae male she would have
chosen to get pitter-pat excited over, and her aunties and uncles and matchmaking relatives
would be infuriated.

Which made him even more attractive. Which meant she had to be careful not to fall for
Guber for the wrong reasons.

Epsi suspected the question of right and wrong reasons for falling for someone was
moot, because she might have already tripped for Guber, at the very least, if not fallen altogether.
What was it about the man that just made her feel lighter than air and put blue and yellow
sparkles in the air?

Then she read the third message globe, which included several reports from different
sources on the Eraser attack while Guber was alone in the warehouse. He apologized for
frightening her, but he wanted her to be warned and on the alert--and he strongly urged her to
come work with him because security had been quadrupled around the warehouse, so Guber
knew she would be safe.

Epsi tossed aside everything but two thoughts, and even those were nearly drowned in
the floodwaters of emotion that crashed through her.

Guber was worried about her. That made her giddy.

Someone had tried to kill Guber because of his high concentration of purple blood. That
infuriated and terrified her. Those blue and yellow sparkles turned into angry red neon flashes on
the order of a nuclear blast on the horizon.

Somebody was trying to hurt Guber? Her Guber? The guy she had just realized was a
thousand times cooler and smarter and more fun than she had thought when they had to endure
those horrific family parties together as children?

Ain't no way, honey!
As soon as she got out of this detention dimension, she
was attaching herself to Guber's side, and anybody who tried to hurt him was going to have to go
through her, first!

* * * *

Epsi was the coolest chick Guber had ever spent time with. And not just because she
wasn't laying traps for him right and left, prompted by the growing insanity of impending Need
that smashed the brains of far too many cool Fae chicks--at least, in his opinion.

She understood
Star Trek
. She liked old movies--especially ones starring Errol
Flynn, Tyrone Powers and James Cagney. She wasn't afraid to admit she didn't know padiddly
about tech, and she liked to listen to him talk about it.

In the four weeks--Human time--since she had been released from the holding
dimension, they had spent nearly all their days together, studying and throwing ideas back and
forth about how to track down the carob that the testing teams kept finding in the gift chocolate.
She didn't mind when he sat her down at a table and presented her with a pile of books to get a
general understanding of the principles of Human tech that he was trying to adapt to Fae
magic.

Even more important, in his book, she could understand and explain all the legalese that
Kevyn kept bringing up, whenever he reported on the progress the other advocates were making
in debriefing their many and varied clients. Epsi not only understood, she could explain it to him
in terms he understood, and she didn't make him feel like a slow child or a particularly dense
foreigner. Even better, she seemed to find great delight in translating into the
tech-fandom-Human speak he enjoyed, so that Kevyn, standing right there in the room with them, got the
craziest look on his face, as if he couldn't understand half the words she said.

Which made it even funnier, because Kevyn was his pal in all things fandom, especially
when it came to
Trek, Galactica, Galaxy Quest, Dr. Who,
and
Discworld
. With
a heavy dose of
Highlander,
Stargate,
and
Harry Potter
on the side.
After a few seconds of thought, Kevyn always caught up and agreed that Epsi had explained it
better, faster than he could. Guber enjoyed teasing Kevyn that his time studying to become an
advocate had petrified some of the cooler parts of his brain. Kevyn usually agreed, laughing.

The time Guber and Epsi spent together wasn't all work, though. She was learning to
enjoy baseball with him. Today, they were at Lanie Zephyr's house, relaxing in front of the TV,
watching the latest chapter in the battle between the Indians and the Tigers. Lance and Glori
were with them, having come to Neighborlee for the weekend.

Guber liked Lanie. Especially since the chick didn't freak out knowing she was in a
room with four Fae. She didn't stare at their ears all the time, and didn't ask a lot of stupid
questions that were rooted in the efforts of the Ministry of Misinformation to make sure no
Humans could ever recognize a real Fae if they ever ran into one.

It still freaked Guber, a little, when Epsi made remarks about their current problem and
mission in front of Lanie. It just wasn't part of his programming to be that relaxed to take off his
mask in front of Humans. Sure, Lanie knew about the problem, and she had offered some
suggestions based on her own weirdness quotient. Still, it was like breaking deep conditioning to
talk about the business at hand in front of someone who didn't have ear points.

"Too bad we don't have instant replay for the last couple months of the queen's life,"
Epsi murmured, during a time out in the game.

"Say what?" Guber's internal radar went off so strongly, it physically manifested as
fireworks that shot up from the tips of his ears and exploded through the spectrum from red
through green-blue and then back to red.

"The commentators were just talking about it. They don't have instant replay in baseball,
like they do in other sports." She gestured at the TV, where the coaches of both teams were
going nose-to-nose with every referee on the field, "discussing" the recent play with visible
heat.

"We can backtrack someone through time," Glori offered, "but it takes up a lot of magic,
and it only focuses on one person at a time. The sheer bureaucratic mess of getting permission to
backtrack each person, using that much magic...and that's after identifying each and every person
who might even remotely be a suspect. The numbers alone make it impossible."

"Yeah." Epsi's ear points drooped for a few seconds. "It could take years, identifying
everybody who might have come in contact with Mellisande who might have had an opportunity
to poison her and might have had motivation."

"Do you have the equivalent of security cameras in your government buildings?" Lanie
popped a wheelie and pivoted around to face Guber.

He was standing at the snack table, which was situated behind the couch and easy chairs
where the five of them were relaxing, watching the game.

"If you can narrow it down to just the ones who actually went anywhere near the
warehouse, and anyone who went through the dimensional gates to Earth to get chocolate,
wouldn't that cut the numbers? And you'd have proof to bring up in front of all your bureaucrats
and the paper-pushers who make the decisions. That ought to help."

"Not recorded, but..." Epsi knelt on the sofa to look over the back of it at Guber. "But
there are trace impressions that are left, enough to backtrack them, right?"

"Trace impressions, like radio signals. Yeah." He nodded, his mind churning through a
dozen different mental images that merged and created a dozen more, creating a geometric
progression that soon had his head full and buzzing with energy. "The trick is recording them so
you can sort through them ..." He grinned, and sparks shot out of his ears to zoom around the
room with fizzing sounds. "Epsi, baby, you are a genius!"

"Well, I wouldn't say--" Then she couldn't say anything, because Guber leaped over to
the sofa, grabbed her shoulders, and planted a long, loud, fireworks-encrusted kiss on her.

The other three in the room had the courtesy to focus on the baseball game on television.
Lanie turned up the volume with a flicker of her telekinetic power. She had to, because Guber
had left the remote on the table with his plate full of food.

Despite the volume being loud enough to make the lamps on the end tables vibrate,
Guber could still hear the hammering of his heart. Or maybe that was Epsi's heart? She stared at
him, real sparks swirling in her eyes, gold and green, and the goofiest crooked grin on her
face.

It almost physically hurt when he had to let her go. She must have felt the same way,
because she held his hand when they sat down to talk with the others and start hammering out the
details of what they wanted and needed, and how to get it.

Guber wondered if maybe the really lucky Fae males went through their own version of
Need. Whatever was happening to him, it was pointing at Epsi and shouting, "Her! Gimme her!
Now! Forever! No substitutions allowed!"

* * * *

Will and Phill had the resources to obtain the equipment. Lori and Brick provided the
workspace in the unused basement of a Willis-Brooks College building. Kevyn and Sophie
explained the theory behind the device Guber planned to build, and obtained permission from the
judiciary as well as the Ministry of Temporal Observation and Privacy.

Sophie camped out with Epsi and Guber. Alexi and Megan took a short break from their
Las Vegas work and brought Bethany and Harry with them, thereby providing all the hands they
needed to get the massive job done. Or so Guber hoped. He couldn't be sure this would work
until they actually got it all assembled and tried what they envisioned. They worked together to
assemble more than ten dozen VCR and DVD recorders, and then hooked them into the temporal
bandwidth of the ether surrounding the Fae Enclaves, focusing on the entrance gates that
monitored traffic between the Fae and Human realms.

Using the list of all those who had given the queen suspect, tainted chocolate, they
focused the temporal tracing spells on them. The machines then recorded their lives and actions
from the present, backwards to five Human months before Mellisande was chosen to replace
Theodosius. The judiciary had decreed they had to go that far back, just in case the first rumors
that led to Theodosius being de-crowned and de-throned were the trigger for all that had
happened.

A panel of advocates, made up almost entirely of Kevyn's relatives, came to oversee the
spells that would filter through the recordings, to safeguard the privacy of the innocent. And it
was agreed that anyone who actually spoke the word, "Carob," would be arrested immediately
and considered guilty until proven otherwise.

"Cosmic," Lanie murmured, when she and Angela from Divine's Emporium brought
dinner for the team. "So in a sense, time travel really is possible."