A Killing Frost

by Seanan McGuire

  “We don’t even know what it might be, which is why we’re going to Luna first,” I said. “Karen’s vision implied that the Rose Roads would be the way to get to him, and Luna’s tied to the Rose Roads. She can get us there. The worst she can say is ‘no.’”

  “And if she refuses to help?”

  “Then we’ll think of something else,” I said. “We’re good at that. Will you help me?”

  “Of course,” said May. “Just let me call Jazz while you change into your work clothes, unless you were planning to wear your nice shoes to Shadowed Hills.”

  “Not tonight,” I said, and smiled, before leaving her room and heading to my own. She would have said something if Quentin was home already; we’d have to stop at Saltmist and pick him up before we crossed the Bay, unless I wanted to spend the next year being yelled at for leaving him out of a quest.

  Spike was still asleep on my pillow when I stepped into the room. I paused to tap it on the head and say, “Hey, get up. I have to go to Shadowed Hills. You want to come?”

  It opened its vibrantly yellow eyes and blinked before clambering to its feet and shaking vigorously, resulting in a sound like someone rolling a barrel of maracas down a hill. Then it chirped, the sound interrogative and sharp.

  “Yes, I know Luna’s mad at me,” I said, heading for my dresser. “It doesn’t matter. This has to be done, and she can be mad at me while I’m there just as easily as she can be mad at me from a distance.” More easily, maybe. I’ve been told I’m an irritation that lingers, but everyone who said that was mad at me at the time, so I don’t know if I can call them objective observers.

  Spike rattled at me again as I pulled off my dress and dug a tank top out of the drawer. I glanced over my shoulder at it. “Are you willing to come or not?”

  I’ve never been sure how intelligent rose goblins are or aren’t. Not human-smart, I don’t think, but closer than the cats. Spike—the rose goblin I interact with the most—seems to understand speech, or at least, responds as if it does, and that’s generally been good enough for me. It doesn’t always come when called, but neither do I. If we’re going to measure intelligence based on obedience, we’re all going to be very disappointed.

  It rattled its thorns a third time before jumping off the bed and trotting over to sit next to my ankles. I smiled at it.

  “Awesome. I appreciate it, buddy.” Technically, the prohibition on saying “thank you” doesn’t apply to fae animals. Technically, pixies are considered animals, but they have their own magic, customs, and society. It seems safer to assume everything in Faerie is fully capable of understanding me and holding a grudge if it decides it wants to.

  Getting dressed didn’t take long. It never does, since my taste in clothing is more practical than decorative. I like interchangeable jeans, tank tops, and sensible shoes. Everything I own is going to get bled on at least once, so why not make it easy to replace things when necessary? I had to remove my knife long enough to refasten the belt over my jeans, but apart from that, it was remarkably easy to reach the point where I was ready to leave the house. I paused for a long moment before opening my nightstand and removing a braided metal key. The last thing I did before heading for the door was grab the leather jacket hanging off the chair beside my bed. It settled across my shoulders like the armor it represented, well-worn and comfortable and conforming to the shape of my body more accurately than any other piece of clothing I owned.

  It wasn’t always mine. Unless something is custom-made for you, nothing can ever be said to have “always” belonged to anyone, but this jacket’s provenance is a little more specific than “I bought it from Sears.” Once upon a time, before I was even willing to admit we were friends, this jacket belonged to Tybalt. He’d handed it to me because I was cold, and somehow I’d just never quite gotten around to giving it back.

  It was mine now, no question. With as much as I’d bled on the leather, it was probably technically a member of the family. I shoved the key into my front pocket, pushing it down until there was no chance it would fall out. This was one thing I really didn’t want to lose.

  May was in the hall when Spike and I emerged. She’d changed her own clothes, going for jeans with brightly colored cotton patches on the knees and a neon-green peasant blouse that looked like it had been stolen directly from the 1980s. I stopped, blinking. She beamed.

  “Like my new shirt?” she asked. “I dyed it myself.”

  “It’s clashing with your hair,” I said. “How is it clashing with your hair? Blue and green are supposed to be friends.”

  “I’m very good at color theory,” she said.

  I shook off the stunning color mismatch in front of me, turning toward the stairs. “Come on. We need to go ruin Quentin’s date.”

  “He won’t thank us for that.”

  “His manners are too good for him to thank us for anything,” I said. “But if I don’t get to have a nice time with my boyfriend, neither does he.”

  “See, this is why I don’t have a boyfriend,” chirped May, following me down the stairs. Spike stuck to my ankles the whole way, like a very well-trained dog. He only paused occasionally to rattle. “You don’t feel the need to crash my dates.”

  “I don’t understand your dates. ‘Let’s visit every thrift store in San Francisco’ doesn’t feel like high romance to me.”

  “It works for us,” said May. She brightened as we stepped into the kitchen and she spotted Tybalt. “Hey, kitty-cat! You clean up good.”

  “I could say the same of you, sweet Lady Fetch,” said Tybalt.

  May looks like me, but she’s old enough that she finds Tybalt’s occasionally archaic manners and patterns of speech charming, not confusing. She dimpled at him, miming a shallow curtsy, before asking, “What do you think of the blue? It’s a new brand of dye that’s supposed to be more resistant to being stripped out by saltwater.”

  “It’s lovely,” he said. “Are you planning a trip to the beach?”

  “No. I live with Toby, and blood and saltwater are basically the same thing.” May shrugged. “She plans for her clothing; I plan for my hair.”

  “Indeed,” said Tybalt, with a flicker of amusement. He turned his attention on me. “Do you have everything you need?”

  “We’re going to head over to Goldengreen and get Quentin, and then we’re on the road,” I said. “We’re heading for Shadowed Hills first. After that, we go wherever the trail takes us. I promise to call if there’s anything you can do to help.”

  “Or if you find yourself in danger of a type you cannot navigate on your own.”

  “Oh, come on,” I protested. “I call for help when I need it! I’ve gotten so much better about that over the last few years. I hardly wind up ambushed and alone at all these days.”

  May slung a companionable arm around my shoulders, beaming at Tybalt. “Trust the lady, kitty. You’re about to be stuck with her forever, and she’s a lot more stabby than you are.”

  “I do trust her,” said Tybalt, and sighed, stepping forward and brushing his fingers against my cheeks, leaving them lingering there, barely touching me. “I trust her to be wild and impulsive and bold and self-destructive when it means someone else might be saved. I trust her to be the month she was named for, cold and kind by turns, endlessly storming, so that nothing can stand in her path but risk being blown away. I trust her to be October, and what I’ve learned, what’s done nothing to stop my heart being given to her care, is that to be October is to be constantly in the path of destruction and not always to have the sense to step aside. I’m uncomfortable not because I don’t trust her, but because I trust her too well.”

  “I love you, too, you ridiculous man,” I said, turning to kiss the palm of his hand. Then I stepped away, out of reach. “We’ll be back as soon as we can. Feed the cats, please.”

  Tybalt actually laughed at that. He was still laughing when we ste
pped out of the kitchen and into the cool darkness of the San Francisco evening. It’s never truly dark here, not the way it is in Muir Woods, or even in Pleasant Hill, where Shadowed Hills is anchored. The glow of the city lights forbids true darkness from slipping past its defenses, turning the world into eternal twilight.

  Is it any wonder that the fae flock toward human cities, even with their iron and their dangers, when they turn the mortal world into such a lovely reflection of our forever twilit Summerlands? I unlocked the car, checking the backseat for intruders before sliding behind the wheel. May did the same on the passenger side.

  “You know, anyone who watches the two of us get into a car has got to think our parents did a number on us,” she commented.

  “Didn’t they?” I asked, jamming the key into the ignition and snagging a handful of shadows from the air, working them between my fingers like bread dough, until they turned stiff and crumbly. “Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall, which was clearly suicide, since the man was a goddamn egg.”

  My magic rose and crashed down in a wave of cut grass and copper, leaving us unchanged. May raised an eyebrow.

  “Don’t-look-here?” she asked.

  I nodded. “Better to hide the car than the passengers. Means I don’t have to recast when we pick up Quentin.”

  “Smart. Try not to have an accident.”

  “I always try not to have an accident, and I’ll thank you not to lecture me about driving safety.” May doesn’t drive, mostly because she remembers learning how, but doesn’t have the muscle memory necessary to turn any of her memories into reality. Her few attempts to reconcile the two have ended . . . poorly.

  Everyone is safer if May stays off the streets.

  I pulled onto the street, paying closer attention than usual to the cars cutting through our residential neighborhood. With the don’t-look-here on the car, no one would pay much attention to us. We weren’t truly invisible—no one was going to casually drive into us, either—but we were hard to see, disinteresting and obscure. That was how we needed things to be.

  Goldengreen used to be held by Eira Rosynhwyr, back when she was pretending to be Evening Winterrose, the intimidating but ordinary Daoine Sidhe. She lost control with her “death,” and didn’t take it back when she revealed she’d been alive and hiding the whole time, like the terrible person she was. As one of San Francisco’s original nobles, she had established her own holdings solidly within the city, and it wasn’t a far drive from my apartment to the San Francisco Art Museum, the low, modern building that served as the mortal side of the knowe. There were no charity events going on tonight; the parking lot was empty, save for the cars belonging to the night watchman and the janitorial staff. At this point, there was no way they didn’t think the place was haunted or something, with as long as they’d been surrounded by the fae.

  Oh, well. It’s not like anyone was tormenting them on purpose. Goldengreen was mine for a while, before I passed it on to Dean, and as I parked the car and got out, breathing in the salty, eucalyptus-scented air, I couldn’t help feeling a little like I was coming home. I’d passed the knowe on voluntarily and as quickly as I could; I wasn’t ready for the responsibility when I’d been handed it. That doesn’t mean I didn’t miss the place sometimes.

  I don’t miss the title that came with it. If there was one thing I didn’t need, it was to be called “Countess.”

  May got out of the car, shooting me a look of wordless understanding, and together we started across the parking lot, swerving to avoid the front as we approached and tromping into the weeds and brush growing around the back, tangling around an old maintenance shed that had never been used by the human maintenance crew in all the years I’d been visiting the knowe. It was flanked by two massive oak trees that shouldn’t have been able to thrive so near the edge of the cliff. The fact that they were was a testament to the woman who had planted them, damn her eyes.

  Strange whispers rose out of the grass as we approached the shed, accompanied by rustling in the nearby bushes. Under normal circumstances, the warding spells intended to keep the unwary from stumbling into the knowe would have long since faded or been replaced by Dean’s own defenses, but these were the work of a Firstborn, and they were lingering.

  I reached the shed before May did, and reached for the doorknob, grimacing as a bolt of static lanced through my palm to warn me off. Pain is never going to be my favorite thing. The door swung smoothly open, silent despite the rust caking its hinges.

  “Still better than jumping off a cliff,” I said, and stepped into the dark inside. May followed close behind me, pulling the door shut with a soft click.

  FIVE

  THE QUALITY OF AIR changed the instant the door closed, turning sweeter, cleaner, untouched by pollutants. The room seemed to spin, a dizzying dip and whirl like a carnival ride on the edge of breaking down, and the darkness disappeared, replaced by a dimly lit hallway lined with small tables and bookshelves, the walls softened by hanging tapestries.

  Goldengreen hadn’t always looked like that. When Eira had held it, it had been cold, unwelcoming, and virtually unlived-in. It had looked more like a showroom or a theater set than a place where people were allowed to be. Dean had changed that.

  Dean had changed a lot of things. I let my fingertips trail against the wall as I gestured for May to follow me down the hall toward the kitchen. The stone was warm and the air was sweet, and it was good to be back, even if this wasn’t home for me anymore.

  I’ve always believed knowes were alive. They just don’t exist at the same speed people do, probably because there’s no need when you’re an immortal faerie building existing partially outside the rules of normal geometry. With that in mind, it made sense that Goldengreen would be glad to see me. I’d always tried my best to do right by it, and that’s more than I can say of a lot of landholders.

  “You don’t look as off-balance as you used to when you made that transition,” said May. “You feeling okay?”

  “I’m not as human as I used to be, either,” I pointed out. Moving between the human world and the Summerlands is disorienting for humans, which means it’s also hard on changelings. Harder when they’re using a door that isn’t opened all that often, which used to apply to literally every door into Goldengreen. “I feel fine. I just want to get this over with so I can go home and reassure Tybalt that I’m not going to throw myself willy-nilly into the first woodchipper I see.”

  “You’d probably get better,” said May.

  “I don’t think ‘probably’ is going to make him less tense about the whole situation,” I countered. As we got closer to the kitchen, the light got brighter, until the hall was almost at what I would consider normal levels of illumination. I didn’t hear anyone. I frowned and raised my voice, calling, “Marcia? Are you here?”

  She didn’t answer. Instead, there was a sound like someone ringing a hundred jingle bells, and what looked like an entire flock of pixies burst through the kitchen door, multicolored wings chiming with every motion. They swarmed around us, wings tickling our cheeks, and settled on our arms and shoulders, or tangled themselves contentedly in our hair.

  “Hello to you, too,” I said. They could understand me, even if they were too small and their voices too high-pitched for us to understand them. “We’re looking for Marcia. Do you know where she is?”

  One of the pixies—male, about six inches tall, glowing a deep cherry red, like cough syrup in sunlight—launched himself off my shoulder and hung in front of my nose, an imperious look on his face. He snapped his wings together with such force that the sound was more like a thundercrack than a bell, something I hadn’t known pixies could do, and shook his head.

  “Oh,” I said. “Are you saying you don’t know where she is, or that you won’t take us to her?”

  He scowled at me and shook his head again, harder this time. I sighed.

 
“I’m sorry,” I said. “You’re too small for me to understand, and I’m too big to understand you. We’re really here for Dean and Quentin, so if you’d lead me to them . . . ?”

  The pixie shook his head again. This was getting annoying. May put a hand over her mouth, visibly concealing a grin.

  “Don’t help,” I snapped at her.

  She laughed. “I’m sorry, but you should see the look on your face,” she said. “They’re pissed because you haven’t come to see them. They feel abandoned. You should be able to understand that, even if you can’t understand what they’re saying. You start to feel abandoned when one of us goes to the store for too long.”

  I focused on the pixie, rather than giving in to the urge to yell at my Fetch for knowing me too well. “Is she right? Are you messing with me because you’re mad?” I asked. “I’m sorry. This isn’t my knowe anymore, and you know how it is with the big folk. We get territorial and weird sometimes.”

  “That doesn’t mean you’re unwelcome,” said a voice. The pixies scattered as I turned. Marcia was standing in the hall behind me, arms folded, looking at me with bland amusement.

  Marcia. A thin-blooded changeling, barely a quarter—and that was if I was being generous—with bottle blonde hair that was nonetheless completely natural so far as I could tell. She was casually dressed in jeans and a long tunic-style sweatshirt, the arms of Goldengreen pinned to her collar like a badge of honor, which technically I suppose they were. Marcia is the only thin-blooded changeling in the Mists to stand as seneschal to a noble court, even if many people would argue that Goldengreen only counts as a noble court on a technicality.

  She was my seneschal before she was Dean’s, and she was my friend Lily’s handmaid before she worked for me. She has always been, unfailingly, kind. If there’s a person in Faerie who personifies doing their best, it’s Marcia.

  “I know,” I said, and smiled at her. “I’m here for Quentin.”