monarch, and a trip Home all inside of six hours will do that to me.
Once I was far enough from Home to feel like I could stop the car without Devin’s kids coming knocking at the window, I pulled over to the side of the road and threw the cell phone onto the passenger seat. It landed without a sound. Putting my forehead down against the wheel, I closed my eyes. I only needed a few seconds. Just long enough for me to collect my thoughts and swallow the taste of roses before it could rise up and overwhelm me. Then I could start moving again.
Something knocked on the window.
I raised my head. Either the fog had rolled in with phenomenal speed or there was something strange going on; the world outside the windshield was solid gray, making it an interesting but useless watercolor study. The knocking came again as I scanned for signs of movement. This time it was coming from the back of the car. I whipped around, catching a blurred glimpse of something roughly the size of my cats before it vanished again. Great. I was cold, exhausted, and cursed, and now I was being harassed by something that moved too fast to see. That’s always how I like to spend my time.
Moving slowly to keep from startling whatever it was, I opened the door and slid out of the car. Almost immediately, I wished the queen hadn’t seen fit to turn my coat into a thin silk ball gown, and that I hadn’t abandoned the habit of keeping an emergency change of clothes in the trunk when I decided to retire from my previous line of work. Shivering, I scanned the area. There was no one there. The dim streetlights barely made a dent in the fog.
“Hello?” The air caught my voice, echoing it back to me. That was strange. Most street corners don’t have the sort of acoustics that echo. “Hello?” I called again. The echo was stronger this time—something was bouncing my voice back at me. Oh, that was
Of course, it could also be something that just really liked fog. Either way, it wasn’t the only one that could use the stuff. Reaching out with both hands, I dug my fingers into the gray, pulling it toward me. I’ve never been good at shadow-weaving or fire-work, but give me a thick veil of water vapor and I can manage the basics. This time my aim was clarity: water’s excellent for scrying, and fog is just water that’s forgotten its beginnings.
My head started to pound as I yanked, gathering fog between my hands until I had a sphere the size of a basketball. That was a good sign. If my headache was getting worse, the spell was probably working. I pressed the sphere into a disk, muttering, “Please do not adjust the horizontal. Please do not adjust the vertical. We have control of what you see ...” The air on the other side of my captive fog began to clear, until I was holding what had effectively become a portable window through the gray. My headache flared before dimming to a slow, grinding ache. It wasn’t comfortable, but I’d had worse. I could deal.
Holding the disk at arm’s length, I began turning in a slow circle. I spotted my quarry on the second turn: a creature the size and shape of a small cat crouching on the roof of my car, covered in short, soft-looking pink and gray thorns. Shorter thorns ran down its ears and muzzle, making it look like the bastard child of a house-cat and a rosebush. It looked small, harmless, and completely out of place. Rose goblin. Not one of Faerie’s bigger or badder inhabitants. You don’t usually see them in an urban setting.
It rattled its thorns as it saw me looking at it, and it whined in the back of its throat; a grating, almost subsonic sound. The fog swirling around it smelled like dust and cobwebs. That was another oddity. Rose goblins normally smell like peat moss and roses, and while they have a few parlor tricks, fog-throwing isn’t one of them. Whatever spell had created this fog was attached to the goblin, but the goblin wasn’t casting it.
“What are
“Hey, little guy,” I said, letting go of the disk of fog and stepping toward the car. The goblin wouldn’t be able to disappear as long as I didn’t take my eyes off it. Rose goblins are purebloods, but they’re not strong ones, and even a changeling has a good chance of keeping hold of them. It whined again, flattening itself against my car until it was basically a doormat made of spines. I stopped, raising my hands. “I won’t hurt you. I’m a friend of Luna’s. You know Luna, don’t you? Of course you know Luna, all the roses know her . . .”
The rose goblin stopped whining, watching me with wide, gleaming eyes. Good. Some flower spirits are more closely tied to their origins than others, and rose goblins tend to cling to the plants that birth them. I meant what I said: I’ve never met a rose that didn’t know Luna Torquill. Being a legend to the flowers must be interesting. It certainly keeps her busy during pruning season. I took another step forward. “Are you okay?”
The goblin sat up, whining in the back of its throat again. Rose goblins can’t talk. That makes getting information out of them an adventure all its own.
“You don’t look hurt.” I leaned forward, offering my hand. The whining stopped, replaced by something like a purr as it arched its back against my fingers. Rose goblins are built like porcupines—if you rub them the right way, you don’t have to worry about the spines. They’re sort of like people in that regard, too. “Aren’t you a friendly little guy?” It was kind of cute, really.
Opening its mouth, it displayed a fine set of needle-sharp teeth. “Nice.” It hissed. “Not so nice. What’s up?” It crouched away from my hand, rattling its spines, and arched its neck. Something red was wound around its throat. “Hey—what’ve you got there?”
Purring again, it tilted its head to show me the red velvet ribbon tied around its neck. Something silver was hanging from it. I reached down and twisted the ribbon carefully free, slipping it over the rose goblin’s head. The goblin stayed still, purring encouragingly the whole time, but even with this token assistance I pricked myself five times before I pulled away, clutching the ribbon in my hand.
I knew the key before I saw it: my hand remembered the weight of it, even though I’d never held it before. The image of a sprite with wings like autumn leaves darting out of Evening’s window, paid for its service in blood, flashed across my mind. I hadn’t been there, but I remembered. Blood has power in Faerie, and that power is greater when the blood is given freely. Only the Daoine Sidhe can ride its memories, but other races can use it in other ways—everyone needs a little bit of death. That sprite would have been able to mimic Evening’s magic for at least a night, and maybe longer. Long enough to make some smaller bargains of its own.
Faerie’s smaller citizens have their own culture and their own customs. Most of us are almost human one way or another: almost human-sized and almost human-minded. The smaller folks never acquired that “almost” and they scorn and resent the rest of us for having it. They don’t wear suits, get mortgages, or attend PTA meetings. They haunt the garden pathways, living in the space between what the eye sees and what it chooses to ignore, and they never pretend to be anything that they aren’t. I guess that makes it harder to forget what they really are, and what they are is inhuman . . . and greedy. I had no trouble believing that the sprite Evening paid would have commandeered a goblin to finish the deal without endangering itself.
The rose goblin started grooming itself as I pulled my hand away, washing the space between its front claws like a cat. I spent a moment watching it before looking down at the key. It was carved silver, covered in so many rings of ivy and roses that it was barely recognizable as a key, but it knew its nature: it knew what it was meant to do. The roses on the shaft never neared the teeth. They wouldn’t interfere. It was warm and heavy in my palm, and it gave off a pale light that colored the mist around it. I got the feeling that there were very few doors it couldn’t open. I just hoped it could handle the ones ahead.
The taste of roses was suddenly cloying on my tongue, surging back in tandem with the prickle of phantom thorns. If logic hadn’t already told me the key was important, the sudden strength of Evening’s curse would have. It was a clue, and her final gift to me. She gave me a job to do, one that might still involve the dubious privilege of dying in her service. She might also have given me the key to my own salvation.
“So where do we go now?” I asked, looking back to the car.
The rose goblin was gone, and the fog it brought with it was already thinning. I bit back a curse and bit my tongue at the same time, hissing to keep myself from shouting. The goblin was my one potential link to the lock that fit the key, and I’d been dumb enough to take my eyes off it. It was probably gone the second I looked away. Just great. Leaning against the car, I closed my eyes. The metal was freezing on my back and shoulders, but at
