Ashes of Honor

Daoine Sidhe when nothing could make me anything but Dóchas Sidhe—a direct descendant of Oberon, and a natural magnet for trouble. If Mom could pull off something like that with half of Faerie looking over her shoulder, it wasn’t hard to believe that Bridget could find a way to hide a changeling girl no one was looking for to begin with. It was harder to believe we were ever going to see that girl alive again.

“Wait—you said you watched Bridget ‘on campus.’ Does that mean she’s still at UC Berkeley?”

“Well, yes,” said Etienne. “I believe she’s currently the head of their Folklore Department.”

“Why am I not surprised to learn that Berkeley has a Folklore Department?” I picked up the paper where he’d written Bridget and Chelsea’s address. I glanced at it to be sure that I could read his handwriting, which was perfect enough to border on calligraphy, before folding it in half and tucking it into the pocket of my jeans. “Do you remember Walther?”

“Your friend the alchemist?” Etienne frowned. “Of course I remember him. He helped save the Duchess Torquill’s life. We owe him a debt of gratitude.”

Trust Etienne to see things in terms of obligations. “Walther teaches chemistry at UC Berkeley. I bet he’d be willing to check on Bridget if I asked. He might be able to get some pictures of Chelsea from her.” Which would neatly avoid the possibility of my getting arrested for breaking and entering on a high school campus. “Plus he can sound out her emotional state. She may have been able to hide a changeling from us for sixteen years, but mothers can be unpredictable when their children are in danger. The last thing we want is for Bridget to go to the media saying that the faeries stole her baby.”

Etienne’s frown melted into a look of sheer horror. “No one would believe her. They would think grief had driven her mad.”

“Do you want to bet your life on that?”

He didn’t answer me.

“I didn’t think so.” I stood, picking up my empty mug. “I’ll do this for you, Etienne. I’ll find her. But I have a few conditions, and if you’re not okay with them, you’re going to need to find somebody else.” I was bluffing. He’d know it, too, if he stopped to think about it. There are a lot of things that I’m capable of. Leaving children in danger isn’t one of them.

“Anything,” he said. “Whatever you ask for.”

Oak and ash, he really was desperate. In Faerie, that sort of promise can get you killed. “You have to pay my operating costs. I can’t take any other cases while I’m working on this.”

“Done,” he said.

I raised an eyebrow. “I haven’t even told you what I charge.”

Etienne half-smiled. “I’ve had a great deal of time to invest in the mortal world, October. Will two thousand dollars a day be sufficient to purchase your full attention?”

Two thousand dollars a day was nearly four times my normal rate. “Very sufficient,” I said. I almost felt bad about taking that much of his money, but if he was paying me, I wasn’t creating a debt between us. I liked Etienne treating me with respect because we were both in Sylvester’s service, not because I had a giant favor to hold over his head. That was how the purebloods did business. That kind of thing wasn’t for me.

“Good,” he said. “What else?”

“No secrets, no surprises. If Bridget calls again, I need to hear about it. If you remember something that doesn’t seem important, you need to tell me about it anyway, and you need to tell me immediately. I don’t care if it’s the middle of the day—call and wake me if you have to.” Privately, I didn’t think that was likely; if this case was like most, I wasn’t going to be sleeping much until it was over. “Right now, we don’t know what is or is not going to matter.”

Etienne frowned. “I don’t understand.”

“We’re hoping Chelsea disappeared because she figured out how to do that teleporting trick you’re so good at, and maybe she did. That’s our best case scenario, since it would just mean we needed to figure out where she teleported to, go there, and get her back.”

“And if it’s not the case…?” asked Etienne, slowly.

“If that’s not the case, then someone saw an unprotected teenage girl and grabbed her. Human kidnappers, we’re risking exposure. Fae kidnappers, who knows what they want her for?” A lot of things can be done with young, inexperienced changelings. I managed to find people who would spare me from the worst of them—and that’s saying something, considering Devin. That doesn’t mean I escaped knowing what they were.

Etienne blanched. “If you’re trying to frighten me, you’re doing an excellent job.”

“That’s good. I want you to be frightened, because I want you to understand that this is going to be hard. Maybe we’ll find her tonight, maybe she just ditched her friends because she’s upset over a boy, and she’s camped out at the Denny’s on Market Street, too pissed to go home and too scared to go anywhere more interesting. Maybe this will all seem like a bad dream tomorrow.”

“Then why—”

“But even if Chelsea is found safe and sound, Oberon willing, you’ll have to deal with the fact that she exists, and her mother—her human mother—knows about Faerie. You broke cover, Etienne. I mean, that’s…that’s something even I’ve never managed to do.”

“You’ve certainly tried hard enough,” he muttered, but the growing horror in his tone told me I was getting through. He’d come to me because he knew I had a track record of dealing with lost kids and because an undocumented changeling was a political hot potato no one higher in the food chain would dare to touch. Sylvester couldn’t get involved without punishing Etienne for his carelessness. The Queen would love an excuse to punish a knight in Sylvester’s service and, by extension, Sylvester himself. That left me.

What Etienne hadn’t done was stop and really think about what was about to happen. Because everything in his life, absolutely everything, was going to change. “When I find Chelsea—if I find Chelsea—you know what has to happen.” He looked away. I raised my voice, saying, “Etienne, you need to tell me you know what has to happen. This is the last thing you have to agree to.”

“She has to be given her Choice,” he said, in a voice that was suddenly very soft.

“Yeah.” I sighed. “She does.”

The Changeling’s Choice was established by Oberon as one of the ways for Faerie to protect itself. It’s supposed to be the defining moment in a changeling’s life. It’s the day their fae parent sits down with them and asks them to decide where they belong: Faerie or the mortal world. If they choose Faerie, they’re whisked away to the Summerlands. Their human parent will never see them again, and they’ll be raised the way I was, always an outsider, always held apart, but still a part of Faerie. If they choose the mortal world…

Everything mortal dies. That’s the main difference between humans and the fae. If our changeling children choose to live as humans, we have to kill them. That’s the price of playing faerie bride. At least, that used to be the price—my own daughter, Gillian, was able to choose humanity and walk away, but only because of what I am.

Dóchas Sidhe can’t just read blood: we can change it. I turned my own daughter mortal, and the Luidaeg wiped her memory, making her forget she’d ever had anything to do with Faerie. But Gillian was only a quarter-blood, if that. Maybe more importantly, she’d been raised in the human world by her human father, with no influence from me. Making her forget Faerie was easy. Chelsea, on the other hand…

Bridget had raised her daughter knowing that she wasn’t wholly mortal. Chelsea would have her fae nature woven throughout her memories. It might be too closely tied to her identity for even the Luidaeg to remove, no matter how much I changed her blood. If Chelsea chose human, there was a good chance she’d have to die. And either way, there was the matter of Bridget, who was mortal and aware of Faerie. Something would have to be done.

For a moment, Etienne simply sat there. Then he took a shaky breath and stood. “The Choice has always been given,” he said. “I have broken enough rules. It is unfair to expect that this rule, too, would be violated for my pleasure.”

“There’s a chance—” I began, then stopped, realizing what his expression meant. Sylvester never told him. Etienne wasn’t there when Gillian had her Choice; he knew I had a mostly mortal daughter, but that wasn’t the same as knowing she’d Chosen, or knowing she’d been changed. He still thought of the Changeling’s Choice as an absolute, one that ended with either death or temporary exile from the mortal world.

“A chance?” he asked suspiciously.

“Never mind.” I shook my head. Chelsea’s situation wasn’t like anyone else’s that I knew of…and it was kinder not to tell him. “There’s a chance she’ll choose Faerie, that’s all.”