My mother hopped off the couch, tugging Cal’s hand. “Come see what I brought you,” she said. Cal let her lead him away. The Clure followed, throwing us an amused smile as they disappeared into the bedroom.
I poured my father a glass of whiskey and joined him by the window. The hotel overlooked Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market. The two buildings had always been major components of Boston commercial businesses, from a sheep auction house to today’s restaurants and shops. “She seems in fine form.”
He didn’t answer right away, caught by some activity in the street below. An elf in Consortium livery was standing in the plaza. He had a falcon on his hand. “She’s had a difficult year.”
I hadn’t heard about anything wrong from them in the few phone conversations we had had. “What happened?”
He pursed his lips. “No matter how I answer that, it will hurt your feelings.”
“Me?”
He smiled into his glass as he sipped. “See?”
I clenched my jaw. “What has Maeve done?”
“Nothing overt, per se. We are members of the Seelie Court, Con. You know that the winds of preference are fickle. You saw what happened to you when the Guild kicked you out. This last year, a chill spread, invitations declined or not offered, whispers behind closed doors, ranks closed. The Seelie Court is all about privilege. I’ve shielded your mother from the more vile things, but she’s no fool. Her receiving room has been quite empty of late, and now we are banished.”
The elf removed the bird’s hood and released it. The falcon wheeled above an appreciative crowd, swooping back down to the elf’s proffered glove.
I gripped my glass to keep from trembling. I had issues with the Guild and the Seelie Court. I had been vocal with my opinions about High Queen Maeve. I stood by everything I had said and done, but, dammit, this was my mom. She had done nothing to deserve being dragged into Maeve’s manipulations. “I’m sorry,” I said.
My father glanced at my reflection in the window. “You have nothing to be sorry for. Regula’s a big girl. No one goes to Court thinking it’s all fun and dances. She has never once blamed you. No matter what, you are our son.”
“I’m still sorry. If I can figure out a way to get Maeve off my back, I will. I hope she pays for all the damage she’s created,” I said.
My father finished off his drink. “There are no angels wearing crowns, son. Donor’s hands are no cleaner.”
“Were,” I said.
He narrowed his eyes at me. “Then the rumor is true? The Elven King is dead?”
I nodded. “I tried to stop him from destroying the Guildhouse. It would be nice to say I didn’t mean to kill him, but I kinda threw a spear at him.”
I tried to make light of it, but my father didn’t laugh. “I don’t know what you faced that day. There is a difference between murder and causing death, and the line between them can be difficult. All deaths have ramifications. All births do, too. It makes me sad that you have to live with that.”
My father had killed people. He didn’t talk about it often, but he had been a Guild agent himself once upon a time. Pressure bore down on my chest. I had caused the death of another living thing. I had also murdered in my life. Those things could not be waved away as learning experiences, despite what I had learned. The best thing I could do—had been trying to do for years now—was make amends for it. Some people believed that there was no way to atone for the taking of a life. I didn’t know if that was true, but I also didn’t know it wasn’t. Until I did know either way, I was going to do the best I could to achieve forgiveness, if only from myself.
“I hope I stopped him from doing worse than he did,” I said.
“We all do,” he said.
A crow wheeled against the sallow light of the city night sky. It landed on the weather vane of Faneuil, a giant gold-leafed grasshopper. The bird hunched forward and made a jerking motion with its beak. The thick glass made it impossible to tell if it had called to its fellows for the night, but no others joined it. Instead, the elf’s falcon swept up and knocked the crow from its perch. My father gestured with his glass. “Did you see that?”
The falcon settled on the vane while the crow wheeled around it. Below, the elf raised his glove, but the falcon remained perched, indifferent to the call of its falconer. The crow dove, and the falcon leaped to meet it. They rose higher in the sky, diving and dodging until we couldn’t see them.
A laugh from the other room drew my attention away.
5
On my way back to the Tangle later in the afternoon, Murdock’s reminder about the elf murder prompted me to stop at the Rowes Wharf Hotel. The place had seen better days. Once one of the city’s most luxurious hotels, in a few short months, it had become a battered shadow of its former glory. Eorla Elvendottir had taken over the building as the headquarters for her renegade court. Some people called her the Queen of the Unseelie Court because she opposed both High Queen Maeve and Donor Elfenkonig. I liked to call her friend.
I picked my way through the mess in front of the building. Sandbags and sawhorses lined the sidewalk and blocked the street. Every floor had chunks of masonry missing. The fallen brick and cement was piled into hills around the front entrance.
The day the Guildhouse fell, Donor had staged an attack against Eorla. He had wanted to make it seem like she was attacking the Guild, and he had been helping defend it. The ruse worked for the most part. The human government had sent in the National Guard. Together with the Consortium, they had pounded the hotel with elf-shot and mortar fire. Eorla held them off, but the building looked like it belonged in the Weird now instead of the financial district.
Consortium agents across the street took occasional shots at the building. They were careful not to hit anyone but tried to provoke an armed response. Eorla’s people restrained themselves. They knew the Consortium was looking for a legitimate excuse to move on them in force. Guards surrounded me as soon as I neared the entrance. My presence tended to invite notice. As if on cue, three or four arrows landed in the masonry over my head, raining dust down on us. Our body shields kept most of it off, but I wasn’t going to pretend getting shot at wasn’t unnerving.
The lobby of the hotel was a marked contrast to the street. The level of tension dropped as people went about their business regardless of the barricades out front. Despite filling her ranks with a local mix of other estranged Celtic and Teutonic fey, Eorla still ran her business with an elven efficiency.
My escorts took me to the crowded ballroom where Eorla met with administrators and the public. She worked the volume of paperwork on her desk table like an orchestra, noting my entrance with a brief flick of her dark eyes. Her black hair coiled about the back of her head, accentuating her long neck and narrow face. She still wore mourning green for her husband, who had been murdered last year.
To her right, Rand acknowledged me with a nod. He rarely left her side, acting as both bodyguard and confidante. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he slept in his red uniform. Despite his formal manner and unreadable elven face, he had let me see flashes of the person inside him. He seemed like a good guy.
After a few moments, Eorla dismissed the other people in the room with a firm gesture to the guards. They ushered everyone out and closed the three of us behind the doors. Eorla stood, took my hands, and kissed my cheek. “You look well.”
“I avoided getting shot on the way in,” I said.
She gazed up at me. “Ah, you arrived through the front door, then. My apologies for the sniper fire. I do hope someone held the door for you.”
I chuckled. “Several, in fact. You treat me too well.”
“And how might I treat you today?” she asked.
I pulled out a small snapshot of the dead elf. Murdock had sent it to me with a short note that the apartment had been devoid of any evidence. As expected, his identity didn’t match anything in the usual databases. In fact, the victim didn’t have any legal history at all, which reinforced my belief that he was a spy. “I’m helping Murdock with another murder. We think the victim might have been an undercover Consortium agent, and I was wondering if you
