Full dark fell outside as we did our best to avoid thinking about anything except physical pleasure, and by the time I eventually slipped into sleep, I was as warm and sated as I could ever remember being.
EPILOGUE
WHEN I WOKE UP the following morning, there was a cat perched on the chair across from the bed.
I blinked, rubbed my eyes, and looked again. The cat was still there, its slanted green eyes and silky black coat worryingly familiar. The angle of the sun outside made me think it was still pretty early, in the ‘not a good time of day for vampires’ sense of being early. I nudged Rans with my elbow anyway, because I was fucking well not going to deal with an intelligent Fae cat burglar on my own.
Especially not while I was naked, and presumably reeked like the morning after a hot vampire sex marathon.
“Rans,” I hissed.
“Huh?” Rans rolled into a sitting position next to me. His eyes narrowed, and he glared at the four-legged intruder with an expression that said he was less than happy about being poked awake to deal with something like this first thing in the morning. “Oh, for...”
He grabbed a pillow, as if to throw at the sleek animal.
In a flash, the cat morphed into a pretty, rather androgynous humanoid figure sitting cross-legged in the chair. Short black hair framed a pixie-like face lit by forest-green eyes.
“... what the actual hell?” I asked faintly, too shocked to even think of dragging the sheet over my exposed boobs to cover them.
“Leave now,” Rans ground out, “before I forget that I usually like cats.”
The pixie-like intruder ignored him, focusing on me instead. “Why did you visit the Fae-kept human in Dhuinne, demonkin?”
I stared back, trying to get my brain in gear. “The... Fae-kept...?” Then, it clicked into place. “Wait. You mean my father?”
The pixie leaned forward, nostrils flaring as though to smell me. “Ah, I see. The human is your sire. Your language is still strange to me, and I didn’t notice the resemblance between you beneath the stench of demon.”
I leaned back, attempting to get out of sniffing range. The effort only caused my shoulder to bump into Rans’ chest.
“I’m about to find something harder and with much sharper edges to throw at you than a pillow,” Rans warned our nosy visitor.
I put a quelling hand on his chest. “Hang on. What do you know about my dad?” I asked. “Why were you with him inside that house in Dhuinne? And, uh... what are you, exactly?”
Yeah, so that last question might not have been the height of diplomacy. But, then again, neither was torturing someone and sentencing her to execution because of who her grandfather was, so I think I was owed a couple of free passes for manners, at the very least.
“Our friendly neighborhood peeping tom is a cat-sidhe,” Rans said, still sounding irritated. “A Fae shape-shifter, in other words.”
O-kay, then.
I still couldn’t make a gender determination. Since it appeared we weren’t going to be standing on politeness this morning, I decided to ask rather than keep wondering about it. “Sorry, but are you male or female?”
“No,” said the cat person.
Cat faerie.
Whatever.
Either way, I supposed that answered that. “Non-binary. Gotcha. So... about my dad?”
The Fae tilted their head. “Your sire was exchanged for my old Mistress’ son when they were both infants. I helped care for him when he was brought to Dhuinne, so she would not risk becoming too attached to him before the Tithe.”
I was having difficulty untangling that statement, but Rans stiffened beside me.
“Darryl Bright was replaced with a Fae changeling?” he demanded.
The pixie-faced figure shrugged. “That is what I just said, vampire.”
Rans was frowning. “But he lived on Earth. He had a family in the human realm.”
“Yes, that is so. My Mistress died unexpectedly, not long after the exchange took place.” The Fae’s delicate features twitched into a matching frown. “The human titheling’s mother had some glimmering of the second sight. She knew the Fae infant was not her son, and she started using magic in an attempt to find out what had happened to her real child. I helped arrange for her son’s return to Earth, rather than risk a human learning too much about the Fae world. My Mistress’ baby was taken away from the woman and exchanged with a different Earth child, instead.”
I lifted my hands in a time-out gesture. “Whoa. Back up. Can someone explain this in words of one syllable for the clueless human, please?”
“You are not human, demonkin,” said the Fae.
“I was raised human,” I shot back. “So just treat me like I am one, for purposes of this conversation—all right?”
But the shape-shifter only looked confused. “If you were a human, we would not be having this conversation in the first place.”
I closed my eyes and counted silently backwards from ten. “Rans?” I prompted. “A little help here, please?”
Rans still sounded grim. “You’ve heard the old tales about fairy-folk stealing human babies, yes?”
“Probably,” I replied. “I mean, I was never big on the Brothers Grimm, but it rings a vague bell.”
“Well, like many legends about the Fae, there’s some truth in it,” he went on. “As far as I’ve been able to determine, the practice is part of their strategy to take control of the human realm from within. Caspian was a changeling, for instance.”
I tried to twist my brain around that, looking between Rans and the Fae. “You mean the Fae are planting their own babies in human families and somehow grooming them to become... what? State Auditors?”
Rans let out a huff. “Grooming them to become powerful people, certainly. I sincerely doubt that Golden Boy is on the Missouri Department of Revenue’s payroll as anything other than a high-paid consultant with connections in all the right places.”
I pondered that. “Still. That’s kind of horrifying.” I returned my attention to the waiflike shape-shifter. “What happens to the human babies, though? What would have happened to my father if
