The question startled me. I’d been expecting another request to talk about what happened in the alley. We’d have to talk about it eventually, since it was clear that Tybalt wasn’t going to let the matter drop until we did, but I wasn’t ready. “Etienne asked for my help.”
“It’s true that retrieval of lost things—children, kittens, trinkets—has become a specialty of yours. But are you sure you’re prepared for this particular mission?”
“Tybalt…”
He sighed. “I don’t want to make you angry. I merely fear for your safety.”
“I can do my job.”
“Really. You can follow a teenage changeling, stolen from her mortal parent, kept from her fae parent, and feel no personal connection that might cloud your judgment?”
I took a sharp breath, forcing myself to count to ten. Finally, when I was sure I could speak without screaming, I said, “This is nothing like what happened with Gillian.”
“Isn’t it?” Tybalt asked. I wanted to read his tone as mocking, needling me about what happened when Gillian was taken. I couldn’t do it. Maybe I’d have been able to do it once, but now, after all we’d been through— after all the times he’d been there when I needed him—I couldn’t see his words as anything but what they were: concerned.
“Maybe a little,” I said, relenting. “But I have to do this. You know that. I can’t just hand this off to someone else and trust that they’ll take care of it. I have to bring her
“Sometimes I wonder if it’s because you spent so long lost that you must insist on bringing every lost thing home.” Tybalt pushed away from the counter, covering the distance between us in a single fluid motion. He was still wearing his human disguise. I hadn’t noticed it before, not with everything else going on. The smell of pennyroyal radiated from his skin. “You can’t save everyone and leave yourself lost, October. It isn’t fair. Not to you and not to the people who care about you.”
“I’m not lost, Tybalt,” I said. It was oddly hard to meet his eyes now that they registered as human. His irises were supposed to be malachite green, not muddy hazel, and his pupils were supposed to be oval, not round. “I know exactly where I am.”
A smile crossed his face. “If I believed that, I would walk away and never darken your door again. I can forgive you your foolishness only because I know how lost you are. But one day, you’ll have to come back home. When you do, I hope you’ll find me waiting.”
He stepped back abruptly, turning and walking out of the kitchen before I could answer. I stayed frozen where I was, the scent of hot pennyroyal teasing my nostrils.
“What the hell just happened?” I asked.
The empty kitchen didn’t answer.
I scowled, for lack of any more definite reaction, and followed Tybalt’s path out of the room. Somehow, it wasn’t a surprise when he wasn’t in the living room. May and Quentin were, both of them watching me approach. Quentin looked confused. May looked oddly disappointed, as though she’d been hoping for some other outcome.
“Don’t start,” I told her, before turning to Quentin. “You have everything you need?”
“Coat, cell phone, emergency cab fare, knife,” recited Quentin.
“Good. Now make yourself presentable.”
Quentin nodded, the scent of steel and heather rising as he gathered the magic to weave himself a human disguise. I did the same, pulling strands of air toward me until all I could taste was copper, and the tingling itch of false humanity lay light across my skin.
May was still watching me with disappointed eyes when I finished. I sighed. “Call me if there’s any word, okay? Walther’s trying to get us a picture of Chelsea.”
“Be careful out there.” May paused, disappointment turning rueful as she added, “Not that you will be. I just have to say it, you know?”
“I know. Come on, Quentin.” My squire followed me out of the house. I paused only to retrieve my leather jacket from the rack by the door. Chelsea needed us. We needed to move.
Our house was huge compared to the San Francisco norm, since it was never reconstructed to suit modern standards. It also had something that elevated it from “nice” to “people would kill to live here”: a covered two-car parking area at the end of a short but private driveway. The neighbor to our right had been parking there for years while the house stood empty. He’d been offering me increasingly large sums of money to use the carport since we moved in. So far, I’d been able to keep rebuffing him—although I had a strong suspicion he was behind the noise complaints someone had phoned in to the local police. As if we’d be making inappropriately loud noises at seven o’clock in the morning? We were all in bed by then. Yes, I needed the money. But I needed not to have a random human in my garage even more.
Quentin waited patiently as I performed my customary check for intruders in the back seat—fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, not in this lifetime—before unlocking the doors. “Where are we going?” he asked.
“Berkeley,” I replied. “We’re going to walk to Chelsea’s high school.”
“Do we know which one it is?”
“No. But we know where she lives. If she’s being allowed to walk alone or with friends, she must be going to school within a mile of her house.”
“I don’t go to school within a mile of my house,” Quentin said, getting into the car.
I did the same on the driver’s side. “One, you don’t go to school at all, unless you count your lessons with Etienne. And if you’re counting those, you don’t walk to Shadowed Hills. Either I drive you or we put you on BART and make you get there on your own. Two, I don’t even know where your house is, beyond ‘somewhere in Canada,’ so I’m pretty sure you’re playing by a different set of rules.”
Quentin frowned. “I used to go to school.”
I paused. For a while, Quentin had attended College Park High School in Pleasant Hill, playing human and learning about the mortal world at the same time. That stopped when Blind Michael stole Quentin’s human girlfriend and brought his masquerade to a forced end. “True,” I admitted. “And when you did, you were going to a school within a mile of the knowe.”
“It still might not be universal. Some people came from farther away. They’d transferred from other schools in the district, or their parents moved after they started and didn’t want to make them switch schools.”
He had a point. “Okay. You’re right. It’s just…the rules are different for humans. Human parents like to know where their children are all the time, especially when they’re school age. Chelsea’s sixteen. That means her mother isn’t going to want her walking very far.”
“Katie’s mom was like that,” allowed Quentin. “Humans are weird.”
“You have no idea,” I said, and started the engine.
Quentin was sent to Shadowed Hills by his parents around four years ago. To be honest, every time something went wrong, I expected his parents to summon him home. The fact that they didn’t meant one of two things. Either they were incredibly determined to stick by whatever principles caused them to have him fostered in the first place…or they didn’t care. I honestly hoped it was the first. I couldn’t imagine sending my child to live with strangers the way they had, but that’s because so much of my upbringing was human. Fostering is common among the fae. It’s what keeps us from stagnating—and hell, when you and your children can reasonably expect to live forever, what’s wrong with missing a few years of teenage rebellion? Quentin mostly seemed to be doing his rebelling by refusing to be left behind when I charged into danger. That was hazardous to his health but probably easier on his parents’ nerves than his constantly slamming doors and shouting about how much he hated them.
My teenage years were spent in my mother’s shadow, a half-human wraith haunting the Summerlands and praying for a way out. There are worse things than a blind fosterage. If Chelsea’s mother wanted to be protective, let her. More parents should get to have that choice.
I realized my thoughts were trending toward Gillian and tried to pull them back, to no avail. Thinking about my daughter was too easy these days, especially after what had been done to her—what
