“Open roads,” he replied.
I closed the door and waved before following Quentin toward the house. The kitchen door was shut to keep the cats from getting out. I let myself in, stepping out of the cool night air and into warmth and light and the smell of sugar cookies. Quentin was already gone. My Fetch, sitting at the kitchen table with a plate of cookies and a mug of cocoa, lifted her head and offered me a wan smile.
“Do you know what time it is, young lady?” she asked.
“About twenty years past curfew, and thank Titania for that,” I said.
She laughed.
Fetches are rare, terrifying things, omens of impending death that flicker into the world and fade out of it again almost as quickly, leaving nothing behind to mark their passing.
And then there’s May.
She came into existence when the universe decided that all signs pointed toward my inevitable demise, conjured by magic older than anything else I can name, made from my blood and from a night-haunt named Mai, who remembered me being her hero. It was a complicated mixture, and it made a complicated, confusing, wonderful person, my sister in every way that mattered. Ask me to choose between August—sister by blood and birth—and May—sister by magic and adoption—and there wouldn’t be any contest. May would win. May would always win.
She wore the face I’d had when she was summoned, more human than the one I have now, round where I’ve grown pointy, soft where I’ve grown hard. Looking at her was like looking at a mirror that had somehow been permanently trained on my own past. Her hair, still more mousy brown than golden-blonde, was cropped short and streaked with purple and green, like some sort of fabulous bird. The weariness in her fog-colored eyes was familiar enough to be uncomfortable. I wasn’t the only one whose life Amandine had turned upside-down.
“How’s Jazz?” I asked.
“Asleep.” She shrugged, the gesture barely more than a shiver. “She’ll be up in a few hours.”
Most fae are nocturnal. As a Raven-maid, Jazz is one of the few exceptions. Her relationship with May had been based on compromises from the beginning, the two of them stealing hours where they could be awake and together. But she’d been sleeping more and flying less since the incident, and sometimes it felt like she was avoiding the rest of us. Even May.
“Do you want to join her?” I asked. “I can put myself to bed. I promise, I remember the way.”
“Quentin said you caught the arkan sonney?”
“We did. They’re at Muir Woods now. Arden and Nolan prepared a cage for them.”
“We’re building quite the local bestiary,” said May. She stood. “Soon, we’ll have people from all over the Summerlands coming to look at creatures they’d almost forgotten existed.”
“And they can all buy tickets and we’ll be able to renovate the upstairs bathroom.” I made a small shooing gesture. “Go. Sleep with your girlfriend.”
May’s lips drew down. “She won’t even know I’m there.”
“She will. Even if she can’t show it, she will.”
“Okay.” She picked up her tea. “Sleep well when you get there.” Then she was gone, and I was finally, blessedly, alone.
I sat down in the chair she had so recently vacated, looking at the cookies for a moment. I didn’t reach for them. I knew they would only taste of ashes. Finally, I put my head in my hands and my elbows on the table and cried. When did things get so damn complicated? And why, for the love of Oberon, couldn’t I make them go back to the way they were?
THREE
UNFORTUNATELY, IT’S IMPOSSIBLE to cry forever, no matter how appealing the idea seems sometimes—not that it stays appealing once the dehydration headache sets in. My tears eventually ran out, and I made it to bed with almost five minutes to spare before dawn slammed down on the world and all the magic burned away. The air filled with the phantom scent of ashes, chalky and tasteless on my tongue. I couldn’t stop myself from breathing it in and coughed as I rolled over and closed my eyes, drifting into a fitful sleep.
As was almost always the case these days, I dreamt of Tybalt, smirking and flirting and arrogant and mine. He was wearing the brown leather pants he always wore when he wanted to get under my skin, and when he offered me his hands, I took them, and we waltzed together across a giant chessboard, the sky glittering bright with stars above us. We were alone, and everything was the way it was supposed to be. No curses, no quests, no Firstborn ruining our chances to be happy. Just him and me and the whole world keeping its distance until we wanted to let it back in.
Until the scene changed.
Until it was him and me in my bedroom, a week after I’d faced my mother’s wrath in order to bring him home, and he was standing as far away as he could without actually leaving, his hair disheveled, his shirt untucked. He looked at me across the suddenly vast expanse of my bed—our bed—and the gulf of my mother’s cruelty, and the only reason my heart didn’t break on the spot was because there was still love in his eyes. It was veiled in fear and misery, but it was still there.
It wasn’t enough.
“Please,” I begged. “Talk to me. I just need you to talk to me. We can—”
“There’s nothing to discuss,” he snapped. “I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine, Tybalt. None of this is fine. Raj—”
“Raj is not King!” He didn’t shout. He roared, hands curling as claws emerged from his fingertips, pupils narrowing to slits.
I’m virtually impossible to injure for more than a few minutes. Nothing Tybalt could do to me would stick. In the moment, that didn’t matter. I flinched, taking a step backward, and saw the moment when the anger in his expression flickered out, replaced by shame and horror.
“Raj is not King, but I am, and I have a duty to my people,” he said, voice gone dull. “A King must be strong. A King must be capable of protecting what is his. A King has responsibilities. I do not fulfill my responsibilities by standing here with you, talking about my feelings. What I feel does not matter.”
“It matters to me.”
“Then perhaps you don’t matter.”
I swallowed, forcing myself not to take another step back. If I did that, if I rejected him, it would be over. I knew him well enough to know that. “We both know that’s not true. I matter to you.” My fear of abandonment was screaming, telling me this had been inevitable, that he’d been preparing to leave me since our first kiss. He was older than me, King of a Court I could never belong to or fully understand; he was pure fae, while I clung stubbornly to the scraps of my human heritage. Of course, he was going to leave me. How could he do anything else?
His voice dropped to a whisper. “Maybe you shouldn’t.”
I looked at him, my lover, my friend, and said the only thing I could think of, the only rope I had to throw.
“I love you.”
He didn’t say anything. He just stepped into the shadows and was gone, leaving me alone.
I woke with tears on my cheeks, blinking blearily at my ceiling. Light slanted around the edges of my blackout curtains, confirming that it was daytime, but it didn’t feel like afternoon. My head pounded from a toxic combination of grief and the shock of waking too early. I glanced at the bedside clock. Nine am. Why the hell was I awake before noon?
As if in answer to the question, the sound of someone hammering on my front door drifted up the stairs. It wasn’t gentle knocking. It was the kind of pounding that comes from panic or urgency, and it traveled straight up my spine, leaving me on my feet before I had fully committed to the idea of getting out of bed.
My current nightgown was an oversized T-shirt with the logo from a recent production of The Tempest on the front. Decent enough. I grabbed a pair of yoga pants from the laundry hamper and yanked them on, pulling my silver knife from under the pillow and tucking it into the waistband where my shirt would hide it. I’d have to be careful not to sta
b myself, but finding the sheath would take too long and would involve putting on more complicated clothing. This would do for right now, until I knew what was going on.
What was going on was the person at my door still hammering away. They’d wake Quentin and May soon, if they hadn’t already. Jazz was probably already gone, off to work in the antique store where she spent most of the time that wasn’t in the house. I sent a silent thanks for that as I made for the stairs. She wasn’t as fragile as Tybalt, but she wasn’t in a place where having someone invade her home was going to do her any good at all.
I wove a rough human disguise from lingering shadows as I took the stairs two and three at a time, hitting the bottom with a thump and practically running down the hall. There was a pause in the knocking. I wrenched the door open just as the man on the porch raised his hand to start again. For a moment, it looked like he was getting ready to punch me. I tensed. The blow never came.
“Cliff?” I asked blankly.
My ex-fiancé—the father of my only biological child, no matter how many stray teenagers I brought home—lowered his hand. His face was pale and drawn. Given his Italian complexion, the pallor made him look sick, verging on collapse. The thick, dark hair I used to love so much was thinning. That was natural, given his age. Less natural was the fact that it didn’t appear to have been combed. His shirt was unbuttoned, and one of his shoes was unlaced.
The woman behind him didn’t look much better. Her buttercup-blonde hair was pulled into a thick braid, frizzy breakaway strands radiating in all directions. She was wearing a green sweater that needed to have its cuffs darned, and jeans with a hole just below the knee. Somehow, that hole was the most distressing part of the whole thing. I’d never seen my replacement—Cliff’s first wife, Gillian’s stepmother—looking anything other than perfectly groomed. To be fair, I hadn’t seen Miranda more than a few times: our mutual dislike was one of the only things we had in common. But something about this was just wrong.
“Is she here?” rasped Cliff.
The world snapped into terrible, crystalline focus. I grabbed the doorway with one hand to keep from falling over. “Gillian’s missing?” I managed to squeak. There was no air. Where had all the air gone? “When? What happened?”
“Don’t,” snarled Miranda. She pushed past me into the house. I didn’t stop her. I couldn’t stop her. All the good, logical reasons I needed to get in her way—Quentin and May were sleeping, none of us habitually wear human disguises when we’re in our own home, there were probably swords on the coffee table and strange tea canisters on the counters—were gone, replaced by the sudden, heart-stopping realization that my little girl was missing. My little girl was missing, again, and this wasn’t supposed to happen anymore. This was supposed to be over.
Once upon a time, I tried to live a human existence, to be part of the human world. Cliff was a part of that, the innocent mortal man who took a fairy bride without realizing it. Gillian, though . . . Gillian was the best part of that. She was my little girl, my beautiful daughter, and I would have done anything for her, anything at all.
Unfortunately, what I did for her was leave. I’d followed the wrong trail into the wrong place, and wound up spending fourteen years enchanted and transformed, unable to return to my family or tell them anything about what had happened to me. By the time I’d freed myself and tried to go home, they had given up on me. I couldn’t entirely blame them for that anymore—human lives are so short, and fourteen years is such a long time—but having my daughter grow up calling another woman “Mom” was the sort of pain I’d never expected to experience. I’d thought I’d known what suffering was.
Then Rayseline Torquill, daughter of my liege lord, had decided to kidnap Gillian to get to me, and had nearly killed her in the process. The only way to save my child had been to change her, to pull the fae blood from her veins and let the Luidaeg edit her memory to take all the impossible things away. That kind of magic is fragile. The best way to keep Gillian from being consumed by memories of the impossible was for me to stay away from her completely.
I hadn’t seen my daughter for more than two years, all for the sake of her well-being. And now she was missing.
“Her college called us last night,” said Cliff. He seemed to realize his wife was already inside, because he straightened and followed her past me into the hall.
This time, I had the presence of mind to stop him, if I wanted to. It would have been so easy. He looked like he had no strength left in him, like it had all been drained away by the situation. I didn’t move. Miranda had already breached my defenses, such as they were, and Gillian was missing. I wasn’t going to keep him away from his wife, not now.
“What . . . ?” I managed. I turned to face them, only remembering at the last second that I should probably shut the door. I didn’t even know where Gilly was going to college. That suddenly seemed like a grave oversight on my part. How could I not know where my own daughter was going to school?
“Her resident adviser said there was a break-in. Someone smashed every window in her residence building just after midnight, and when they took a headcount of the students, Gilly was missing. At first, they thought she might have been behind the vandalism. They were calling us to find out if she’d run home when the prank went wrong.” There was no life in Cliff’s voice. He was reciting facts because he had to, not because he felt any real connection to them. “We said we hadn’t seen her. We said she wouldn’t do that. And then . . .” He faltered, looking to Miranda for help.
Miranda turned from her narrow-eyed study of my hallway and said, “They found her car. All the windows smashed, blood on the seat, no Gillian. She’s gone. Someone’s taken her. Was it you? Is this how you get back at us, by kidnapping our daughter?”
There had never been any love lost between me and Miranda, but it still stung for her to jump straight to assuming I’d hurt my own child. I narrowed my eyes, reaching for every ounce of authority I possessed, and said, “Maybe it’s time for you to leave.”
“Maybe it’s time for you to tell us where Gillian is,” snapped Miranda. She wasn’t making any effort to keep her voice down.
I scowled. “People are sleeping. Please, be quiet, and get out.”
“Who?” Miranda demanded. “Who’s sleeping? You don’t have any family. Gillian?” She whirled, starting toward the stairs.
I moved without thinking, grabbing her arm and pulling her to a halt. She shot me a startled look, eyes gone wide. Apparently, the thought that I’d defend my home had never occurred to her.
“She isn’t here, and my housemates are none of your business,” I said, voice low. “You shouldn’t be here, either.”
“Toby, we’re not here to fight,” said Cliff. “We just want Gillian back. Please. If you don’t have her, can you help us? Can you find her?”
For a moment, the world seemed to spin as an overwhelming sense of déjà vu settled over me. This, too, had happened before, when Rayseline had Gillian, when Faerie had reached out and tried take my child, who should have been safe, who had been isolated from me for so long that she should never have become a target. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, chasing the vertigo away.
“Yes, I’ll find her,” I said, opening my eyes and leveling my best glare on Cliff as I let go of Miranda’s arm. “She’s my daughter, too. I didn’t take her, and you didn’t need to come here and accuse me like this, but there’s no way I am ever going to leave her in danger. You should have known that. How could you have been with me for as long as you were and not have known that?”
Cliff had the decency to look ashamed. I turned toward Miranda.
“You, on the other hand, you don’t know me at all. You’ve never liked me, and I guess that’s okay, because I’ve never really given you a reason to. But you are never, never to do anything like this again. This is my home. You are not welcome here. You were not invited to be here.” I pau
sed. “How did you even know to come here? I never gave you this address.”
Miranda looked to the side, expression turning shifty, like she was afraid to look at me. Cliff sighed.
“I paid someone to find it, after you moved out of that terrible apartment,” he admitted. I stared at him, open-mouthed. “I’m sorry. It was low and shitty, and I shouldn’t have done it, but Gilly wasn’t sleeping after what had happened to her. She was crying all the time, and I needed to know where you were. For my own peace of mind, I needed to be sure you weren’t going to come and try to take our baby away. And then you went and moved into this house, like you were getting ready to need more room, and . . .” He rubbed the back of his neck with one hand. “I thought you were going to challenge me for custody. I’ve been waiting for years for you to come after her. To say I was a bad parent for letting her be taken in the first place.”
“Cliff . . .” I stopped, the protests dying on my lips. I didn’t know how to finish that sentence. It felt like I didn’t know anything anymore, like everything I’d fought so hard to learn had fallen away, tumbling into the abyss of my-daughter-is-missing.
Miranda returned to his side, looking down her nose at me. There was a condemnation as deep and wide as the Pacific Ocean in her eyes.
“Can you blame us for being afraid of you?” she demanded. “Can you blame me?”
Yes, I wanted to scream. Yes. Their fear sounded like an excuse. It sounded like the reason my little girl had become a woman in a house where I wasn’t welcome. Other people split up. Other children grew up with parents in multiple places. It would have taken a lot of time and effort to rebuild those bridges, to find a way to reconcile the angry teenager with the loving toddler I had left behind, but I’d been willing to put the time in. The only reason I hadn’t was because Gillian hadn’t wanted me to, and I’d loved her too much to force her into something she didn’t want.
Only now I was finding out that maybe Gillian hadn’t been the one who’d wanted me to stay away. Gillian hadn’t been the one afraid of custody challenges and missing mothers swooping in to snatch her from the home she’d always known.
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