Home Improvement: Undead Edition

think she’s dangerously insane. As soon as she had the opportunity to discharge that debt, she did . . . by giving me the title to Goldengreen. Yippee.

I never wanted to be a Countess, and I definitely didn’t want the responsibility of reclaiming an entire fallow knowe. Faerie hills get weird when they’re untended for too long, and Goldengreen had been empty since Evening died. Unfortunately, I also had a few dozen new subjects to worry about—the former denizens of the Japanese Tea Gardens, who were left homeless when their regent, my friend Lily, was murdered. They’d been camping in the entry hall, a huge, empty space that offered neither warmth nor comfort. It was the only place in the knowe close enough to the mortal world for us to access without actually prying a door open.

Reclaiming Goldengreen wasn’t something I could afford to put off. We just had to find a way to get inside.

May stopped at the edge of the cliff, teetering on her tiptoes as she looked down to the rocks far below. “Whoa. That first step’s a doozy, huh?”

“Something like that. Can you take a step to the left?”

“Huh? Oh, sure.” May took an exaggerated step sideways, offering me a bright smile at the same time. “How’s that?”

“Good. Good.” To the mortal world, May’s my sister. Faerie knows her for what she really is: my Fetch, a death omen summoned into existence by my impending demise.

That was several impending demises ago. May’s been living with me since the first time I failed to die, and she makes a pretty good roommate. Best of all, being a Fetch, she possesses one trait that was about to come in extremely handy.

Fetches are indestructible.

While she was peering down at the waves beating themselves against the base of the cliff, I positioned myself behind her, checked my footing, stepped forward, and shoved. May screamed as she fell—more with surprise than actual fear—but the sound was cut off after only a few feet, when she vanished into thin air.

“I thought this was the back entrance,” I said, and jumped after her.

MY FALL ONLY lasted a few seconds. Reality did a dizzying dip-and-whirl of transition as I passed from the mortal world into the Summerlands, and my feet hit the solid stone floor of Goldengreen’s main hall. May’s palm hit my cheek about five seconds later.

“A little warning next time?” she demanded.

I’m not fond of being slapped, but I had to allow that she’d been justified. “Would you have let me push you if I’d warned you?”

“What? No!”

“Well, that’s why you didn’t get a warning.” I waved a hand to indicate the hall around us. It was twilight- dim, saved from absolute darkness only by fae vision and the traces of a distant glow from somewhere up ahead. “We’re here. That was the goal. And what’s the worst that could have happened?”

“I could have been eaten by a giant shark swept out of its natural habitat by freak ocean currents caused by global warming.”

I let my hand drop back to my side, eyeing her. “That’s it. No more late-night horror movies for you. Come on. Let’s see if we can’t find the light switch.”

May fell into step beside me, sticking a little closer than was strictly necessary as we walked along the darkened hall. I couldn’t exactly blame her. The air had a sepulchral quality to it, like we were walking into a tomb that had been sealed since time began. Even our footsteps failed to echo, dampened and deadened by the shadows pressing in around us. In Faerie, the regent is the land. By leaving Goldengreen untended, the Queen had left the land without a regent . . . and that’s never good.

“It’s like we’re in a big zombie movie,” said May.

I glared. “I was trying really hard not to have that thought.”

Her smile was visible even through the gloom. “That’s what I’m here for.”

I started walking a little faster, making May hurry to keep up. She snickered as she quickened her pace.

“Oh, c’mon, Toby. If you just watched a few more horror movies—” The hall shifted around us.

It wasn’t a big shift—just enough to knock me off balance, sending me stumbling into May, who caught me easily. She looks like a changeling, but she’s a pureblooded Fetch, and her balance is much better than mine.

“What was that?” she demanded.

“Oh, now you’re not making jokes?” I straightened, tilting my head toward the join of wall and ceiling as I snapped, “Cut that out! I am the new Countess of Goldengreen, and I’m here by right of Crown and Claiming.”

Maybe that wasn’t such a good idea.

The hall shuddered, for all the world like a dog trying to shake something off its back. This time, May and I both staggered backward, stopping only when we hit the wall. Doors were slamming deeper in the knowe, and dust and cobwebs were beginning to rain down from the rafters. Unlike the first shift, this one showed no sign of stopping—although it did show signs of getting worse. If we didn’t move, the knowe was going to bring itself down around our ears.

Being buried alive didn’t sound like a great idea, and with Lily’s subjects camped in the entry hall, I couldn’t take the risk that the entire knowe would fall in. The Queen might approve—it would take out a lot of troublesome riffraff in one “regrettable accident”—but I certainly wouldn’t. I didn’t know why the knowe was objecting to us and not to them. That was something to worry about later.

I grabbed May’s arm. “I’ve learned something from horror movies, too.”

“What’s that?” she asked, raising her voice to be heard above the shaking.

“When the house tells you to get out, you get out!” I took off running, hauling her in my wake and banking on the exits being easier to find than the entrances were. The knowe continued to shake around us, more and more detritus showering down from the ceiling, the few remaining furnishings and ornaments toppling to the floor. Then a door was in front of us, and I hit it shoulder first, sending us both into the cool night air of the mortal world. We went sprawling, May in a patch of ornamental ground cover, me into a sign that identified our location as the San Francisco Art Museum garden.

The door swung shut behind us, but not before I saw the knowe stop shaking.

May sat up, beaming as she brushed her hair away from her face. “That was awesome! What now?”

I groaned, sagging backward against the sign. “I have no idea.”

MY ALLIES ARE a motley bunch, defined more by their stubborn refusal to stand back and let the professionals deal with things than any other characteristic. Danny showed up half an hour after I called, his cab roaring into the parking lot at a speed that would have been suicidal for most people. With Danny behind the wheel, it was just stupid.

He parked sideways across three parking spots before climbing out of the car, a process that took longer than would have been necessary for almost anybody else. Danny is a Bridge Troll—basically eight feet of mountain that walks like a man, with skin like concrete and hands large enough to wrap around a grown man’s head. He wasn’t bothering with a human disguise, probably because it was almost two o’clock in the morning, and stood revealed in all his craggy, gray-skinned glory. He would have looked right at home guarding the gate at a Renaissance faire, if not for the blue jeans and size 5X San Francisco Giants sweatshirt.

“Tobes!” he declared jubilantly, spreading his arms in greeting. “An’ May! How’s it going, girl?”

“Pretty good,” said May, walking over to hug him. “Jazz sends her love. She’s off with the flock this weekend. Something about the annual migration.”

“That’s, uh . . . that’s special.”

May grinned. “You get used to it once you’ve been dating a bird for a little while.”

The two of them continued exchanging pleasantries as I walked around Danny’s car and peered in the passenger-side window. The bronze-haired teenage Daoine Sidhe sitting in the front seat with a Barghest sprawled halfway across his lap offered me a timid smile. I knocked on the window.

Quentin obligingly rolled it down. “Hi, Toby.”

“Don’t you ‘Hi, Toby’ me. What are you doing here?”