lucky; it had to have been strong, too, or it wouldn’t have scared her that way. That meant I needed some power of my own, or I wouldn’t stand a chance.
Asking the Queen for help after she’d all but thrown me out of her knowe might be rude enough to get me killed. Dying wasn’t part of my plan for solving the case—it was bad enough that it might be the price of failure— and that meant our Lady of the Mists was actually a hindrance, because if I got in her way, I wouldn’t have time to run. There were other Courts and nobles I could go to, but only a few had the resources I’d need, and of the choices I had, only two didn’t leave me cold. I wanted to get out alive, and that ruled out both Blind Michael and the Tarans of the Berkeley Hills. I considered the Luidaeg, but cast that thought aside as quickly as it had come. Some things are worse than dying.
I couldn’t go to Lily. I just couldn’t. That wasn’t as self-involved as it sounds; Lily’s an Undine, and she’s tied to her knowe. Unless Evening’s killers sat in the Tea Gardens discussing what they were about to do, she wouldn’t be able to help me anyway.
Sylvester would help me if I went to him.Sylvester would
If I couldn’t trust the Queen, and I couldn’t turn to Sylvester, there was really only one place left that I could go. Devin. Devin, and Home.
Lips thinned with new resolve, I pulled out of the alley, heading away from the water and into the part of the city that smart people do their best to avoid after the sun goes down. I try to be smart when I can, and careful when I can’t, but at the moment, neither of those was going to work for me, because I was doing something I’d sworn I’d never do. Oberon help me, I was going Home.
A lot of changelings have fled the Summerlands over the centuries, building an entire society on the border between Faerie and the mortal world. The purebloods know—of course they do—but they don’t know what to do with their precious half-blood children when they turn into angry adults, and so they’ve never done anything to stop it. It’s a vicious, cutthroat place, where the strong feed on the weak, and it’s where changeling runaways always seem to end up.
I was twenty-five when I ran away from my mother’s household. I could barely pass for a young sixteen. I starved in alleyways, fled from Kelpies, and ran from the human police, and was on the verge of giving up and going back when I found what looked like an answer. Devin.
He took me in, fed me, and said I’d never have to go back there if I didn’t want to. I believed him. Maeve help me, I believed him. Even when I realized what he was doing—what the “little favors” and the increasingly bigger assignments would lead up to, even when he came to my room at night and said I was beautiful, that my eyes were just like my mother’s—I still believed him. He was all I had. I knew I couldn’t trust him, that he’d use me, and that he’d break me if I let him. I also knew he wouldn’t turn me away, because his place was Home, and Home was where everyone stopped. Home was where they didn’t care what color your eyes were, or that you cried when the sun came up, or that your hair was brown like your father’s when the Daoine Sidhe are supposed to be brightly colored and fair. Home was willing to have me, and I knew I could earn myself a life there, if I was fast, clever, and heartless. I could earn my own way.
If Devin had just wanted me for my body, he would have used me up and thrown me away, and no one would have been able to stop him. I’ve seen changelings better than me get destroyed by the border world. Mortal drugs don’t have anything on their fae equivalents, and Faerie offers a lot of ways for the innocent to get themselves killed. I was lucky; Devin wanted me for the cachet of having me. My mother wasn’t nobility, but she was a celebrity of sorts, the strongest blood-worker in the Kingdom, a friend to Dukes and more. No one ever thought she would bear a changeling. And Devin was the one who took me away from her.
I was his lover and his pet and his favorite toy, and he let me have my temperamental little ways, because it was all paid for when he got to walk into a pureblood party he’d bartered an invitation to attend with me on his arm. He gave me what I needed to survive on the outskirts of the mortal world; a birth certificate, lessons in mortal manners, a place to stay. I paid my keep with the shame I let him bring to the people who loved me, and I tried to tell myself it was worth it.
Maybe I was addicted to him; to the way he looked at me, and the way he touched me, and the way he made me feel like I was something more than just another half-breed. He hurt me, but everything I knew told me I deserved it. I never told him no. I never wanted to. Everything I let him do, everything I did, was of my own free will.
When Sylvester got me knighted, leaving Home was part of the price. I agreed without hesitation, and I only saw Devin twice after that. Once on the day I told him I was leaving, and once . . .
I yanked my attention back to the road. The streets were getting worse as I drove, squalor giving way to decay. My destination was at the heart of the rot, in a place where only the people with nowhere else to go ever went. It wasn’t a place for children—it was never a place for children—and maybe that’s why we flocked there, gathering in a dying Neverland ruled by a man who was more Captain Hook than Peter Pan. “You’ll be back,” Devin said on the day I left him, with my wrists still scraped and my lips stinging, and he was right, because here I was. Coming Home.
The building I parked in front of looked abandoned, but was probably home to twenty people after the sun went down. The air seemed even colder now that I was inland. I gathered my damp skirts around myself, shivering as I locked the car door. Nothing had really changed. The wrappers in the gutter had different logos and the music thumping in the background had a different tone, but the eyes of the people who watched from doorways and windows, taking my measure as I passed, were just what they’d always been: hungry, angry, and hopeful. They all needed something, and every one of them was hoping I’d be the one to provide it.
Catcalls and insults followed me down the block to a tiny, nondescript storefront wedged between a crumbling motel and an all-night massage parlor. I paused, feeling like I was falling backward through time. It was all exactly the same, even down to the old miasma of pleasure, pain, and promises, as falsely alluring as a call girl’s perfume. There were no tricks required to get inside, because Devin wanted you to come in. It was getting out that would be the hard part.
The big front window was blocked off with graffiti-covered plywood, and a simple brass sign was mounted over the door. HOME: WHERE YOU STOP. That sign never tarnished or got dirty, and it served as the focus for a misdirection spell so powerful that I’d never seen a human glance toward the building, much less the door. Devin said he bought it from a Coblynau pureblood, trading the sign and its enchantment for nothing but an hour in his arms. I called him a liar the first time he told me that. Coblynau are ugly, lonely people who love metal more than they love air, and the promises you have to make to get a blade or bracelet of their crafting are dear enough that I couldn’t see him winning so much as a ring.
It didn’t take long for me to realize he hadn’t been lying. Casually turning someone else’s needs to his own advantage was exactly the sort of thing Devin did best. He stole whatever he wanted, sharing his ill-gotten gains with his children, the empty-eyed girls and damp-palmed boys who came to him praying he’d have the answers. Now here I was again, praying for the same thing.
I opened the door and stepped inside.
The main room at Home was large and square, littered with ancient furniture and lit by a scavenged electrical generator that powered two refrigerators and an antique jukebox as well as the overhead lights. Heavy metal blared from the jukebox at a volume high enough to almost vibrate the floor. The air smelled like smoke, vomit, stale beer, and yesterday’s desires; all the things I left behind when I went off to live in a different, cleaner world.
A handful of teens lounged around the otherwise deserted room like the casual ornamentation they were. I didn’t know any of them, but I recognized them on sight because they were Devin’s kids, and so was I. Our fellowship went deeper than our faces. It went all the way down to our bones.
These new kids could so easily have been the ones I remembered, only changed by updates in teenage
