One Salt Sea

Spike and the cats mobbed my ankles the second I got inside, meowing and chirping irritation over some perceived indignity. “Settle down, guys,” I said, laughing as I squirmed out of my jacket. “I’ll feed you in a second.”

“Actually, I think they’re upset because I’m here.” The Luidaeg stood, dropping May’s new Entertainment Weekly on the coffee table as she stepped away from the couch. “They don’t seem to like me.”

I froze and stared at her, my jacket slipping out of my suddenly nerveless fingers and falling to the floor with a thump. I’ve always known that my wards wouldn’t stop anything big, but I’d never seen proof before.

The Luidaeg watched me levelly, waiting for the shock to fade. Finally, unsteadily, I said, “Luidaeg. You’re . . . here.”

“Good catch. You should go into detective work.” Her amused tone was underscored with bleakness, like she was making jokes because it was easier than screaming. Somehow, that was even scarier than finding her in my apartment.

The Luidaeg isn’t scary on the surface—most days she looks more human than I do, like the sort of plainly pretty woman you probably pass on the street every day. She stands about five-six, tan verging into sunburned, with freckles on her nose and the ghosts of old acne scars on her cheeks. Today she was wearing battered khaki pants and a gas station employee’s shirt with a nametag that read “Annie,” and her curly, shoulder-length black hair was pulled into pigtails tied off with electrical tape.

Her eyes were brown. That was encouraging, anyway. The Luidaeg’s appearance is unnervingly variable. The more irritated she gets, the more her humanity slips, usually starting with her eyes. When the Luidaeg’s eyes go strange, I look for an escape route.

The Luidaeg raised an eyebrow. “Is there something you need to do before you can pay attention to me?”

That was my chance to take control of the situation. I pounced on it. “I need coffee,” I said, picking up my jacket and hanging it on the coat rack. “Can I get you anything?”

“Coffee’s fine. Do you have any sour cream?” The Luidaeg followed me to the kitchen and sat down at the table, pushing a pile of junk mail out of the way. Spike and the cats followed her.

“I think so.” I grabbed the half-full pot of coffee from the warmer and filled two mugs. I’ve always belonged to the school of thought that says coffee improves with age. Give me a pot of three-day-old diner coffee, and I’ll prove that sleep is an unnecessary luxury.

“I’ll take mine with salt and a spoonful of sour cream,” said the Luidaeg. She gave the cats a thoughtful look. They looked back, unblinking. She nodded. “I thought so. You can go. Nothing I have to say is yours to repeat.”

The cats didn’t move.

The Luidaeg raised an eyebrow, asking, “Do you really think your King will hurt you worse than I will?”

That got through. Cagney and Lacey bolted from the room, their ears pressed flat and their tails sticking straight up in the air.

Spike stayed where it was, eyeing her warily. The Luidaeg smiled. “You can stay. Your loyalties have shifted.” She glanced toward me. “You know the fleabags are spying for Tybalt, don’t you?”

“I’ve been assuming.” I opened the fridge, rummaging until I found a container of sour cream. May and Jazz both like to cook, and with Jazz spending more and more time at the apartment, our fridge has been acquiring actual food. I never knew there were so many kinds of bread. Or that you needed so many knives for purposes beyond stabbing people. “Is that why you made them leave?”

“He’ll get the details soon enough. I don’t feel any need to stroke the man’s ego by telling him things he doesn’t need to know yet.”

“Right.” I put the sour cream and one of the mugs in front of the Luidaeg, indicating the salt shaker with a wave of my hand, and turned to start fixing my own coffee. “So why are you here? You haven’t exactly been social lately.” That was putting it mildly. I’d seen the Luidaeg exactly once since Lily got sick, when I went to her and demanded to know what I really was. She’d put a name to my mother’s bloodline— Dóchas Sidhe—and then she’d kicked me out.

She wasn’t there when I was pardoned. She didn’t answer her phone, and when I went looking for her apartment, I couldn’t find it. Now she was in my kitchen, and maybe I’m paranoid, but I didn’t trust the situation one bit.

“Getting down to business already?” She poured salt into her coffee. “Are you going to ask how I’ve been?”

“Why should I?” I finished sugaring my own coffee and sat down in front of her. “It’s not like you’ve been terribly concerned with my well-being since Mom played with my genetic code.”

“So you’re being sulky, is that it?” The Luidaeg shook her head. “You didn’t need me, Toby. There was nothing I could have done that you weren’t already doing. I knew Sylvester would take care of you.”

“That makes it okay for you to just disappear?”

“You have no idea what I’ve been doing since you last saw me.”

“Should I care?” I realized the answer was probably “yes” as soon as the words left my mouth. They don’t come much bigger or badder than the Luidaeg. If she’d been too busy to deal with me, it wasn’t because she’d been vacationing at Disney World.

“About something nasty enough to keep me distracted? Yes, October, you should care, if only because you don’t like people breaking your toys.” The Luidaeg touched the surface of her coffee with the tip of one finger, watching the ripples spread through the liquid. “You owe me.”

I wasn’t expecting that. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting . . . but that wasn’t it. “What?”

“You owe me.” She raised her head. “I showed you the way to my brother’s lands, twice; I broke his Ride for you, and I helped you kill him, if only by getting you there. I did it because you asked, but I don’t work free. I don’t even work cheap. I told you that. You said you didn’t care.” The color was draining from her eyes, leaving them as pale and unforgiving as sea foam. “There are debts between us, October, daughter of Amandine, and it’s time for you to start paying your bill.”

I stiffened. “We were never friends, were we? You were just protecting your investment.”

“This isn’t the time. Believe me, I wish I could sit here and argue about your deluded ideals of friendship, but I can’t. The hour is far too late.” She picked up her coffee. “I’m sorry I haven’t been here. I had things to take care of that were a little more important than a few problems I knew you could handle without me.”

I stared at her. A few problems? Lily died. So did more than a dozen Cait Sidhe. I nearly died, and my survival meant giving up everything I’d believed I was. Unable to stop myself, I demanded, “What the fuck could you have been doing that was more important than being here?”

There was something satisfying about using human profanity on someone as inhuman as the Luidaeg—even if she wasn’t above using human profanity herself, from time to time. My brief flare of satisfaction died when she implacably answered, “I’ve been trying to prevent a war.”

It took a moment to find my voice again. Half-stammering, I asked, “Prevent a war? What war?”

Fae society divides itself along feudal lines—kings and queens, dukes and duchesses and knights and ladies and all the other things mortals romanticize and call “chivalry”—but we don’t go to war without a reason. As far as I knew, no one was currently invading anyone else. Even Dreamer’s Glass, with its paranoid, expansionistic Duchess, was quiet; they were too busy waiting for Tamed Lightning to explode to bother harassing the rest of us. There was always the possibility one of the other Kingdoms had decided to invade, but raising an army to threaten a throne is a tricky business that requires time, troops, and a lot of resources. We couldn’t have missed movement on that sort of scale.

“How much do you know about the Undersea?”

“What, we’re about to be attacked by mermaids?”

The Luidaeg looked at me flatly.

I realized she was serious.

Humans inhabit just one level of the world: the land. They can travel through the air and sea, but being unable to fly or breathe water puts a damper on long-term habitation. The fae don’t share their limitations. There