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 stab 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 paused. “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.

I was tired. I was so, so tired. And Gillian was still missing. No matter how tired I was, I needed to go and bring my daughter home.

“All you ever had to do was tell me to stay away, and I would have stayed away,” I said softly. “You never had to spy on me.”

“We knew you weren’t going to come to the house again,” said Miranda. “If I’d thought there was any chance you were going to show up on our doorstep, I would have convinced Cliff we needed to move somewhere else a long time ago.”

“Even as the noncustodial parent, I would have been able to fight that right up until Gillian turned eighteen,” I snapped, before I could think better of it.

Miranda smiled, slow and broad. “And I would have welcomed a court case. After all, nothing like taking all your inadequacies as a parent in front of a judge to clear the way for my adopting my own daughter.”

In that moment, I felt it would have been completely forgivable for me to smash her head against the wall until I was satisfied that I’d knocked all thoughts of adoption clean out of her skull. I didn’t do it. I didn’t move. I just stood where I was and glared at her, wishing all those old stories of the fae cursing people with a glance had any basis in truth.

Miranda’s smile turned brittle before curling up and fading altogether. “I’m sorry,” she said. “That was mean of me. I get petty when I’m under stress.”

“I never would have guessed,” I said. My teeth were clenched so tightly that it felt like they would shatter and dissolve into dust in my mouth.

“Gillian is missing,” said Miranda, like I had somehow forgotten. “There was blood. Please. Can’t we put all this behind us? Can’t we agree to settle our differences long enough to find our daughter?”

The way she kept saying “our” was like claws against my skin, ripping and tearing at me, stealing the air from my lungs. I forced the feeling away and said, “I already promised to help. Where is she going to school? I’ll head over there right away.”

“Berkeley,” said Cliff.

I managed to conceal my relief. Any local school would have been good, as long as it was inside the Kingdom in the Mists. I’d cause a diplomatic incident for my daughter’s sake if I had to, but it was better if it wasn’t necessary. Berkeley was the best-case scenario.

Thanks to an old land agreement, the city was unclaimed territory: Arden was the only noble with any direct authority there, and even she was mostly ignored by the inhabitants. Walther and Bridget were both on the faculty; they could get me the kind of access that would have been exceedingly difficult otherwise. Even better, Cassandra was a grad student there, which meant Arden wouldn’t need to assign someone to keep an eye on me. If she got concerned, she could just ask her chatelaine. All my attention and energy could go to finding my daughter and getting her back where she belonged. That was good. Getting started would be better. My initial shock was starting to thaw, replaced by the horrified conviction that I had very little time in which to find her and bring her safely home.

“I need to get dressed,” I said briskly. “I’ll call you if I find anything.”

“If you try to keep things from us—”

I leveled a flat gaze on Cliff. “You mean like you kept my daughter from me after I was abducted? Fuck you.” The mortal profanity felt good, like honey on my tongue. “Turnabout may be fair play, but some of us have standards. Now I need to get moving, and that’s going to be easier if you’re not standing here waiting for me to pull a miracle out of my ass.”

“October—” Cliff began.

“Get out your phone,” I said.

He stopped talking, a look on his face that made me feel like I’d just punched him in the gut—and it wasn’t a bad feeling, much as I might have wanted it to be; hitting him would have been real satisfying right about then—and pulled a phone out of his pocket.

“Good,” I said. “Go to contacts.”

“Done,” he said.

“Punch this in,” I said, and rattled off my number, pausing when I was done to ask, “Got it?”

“I do,” he said. “Toby, please—”

“Good,” I said, cutting him off again. “Text me, so I’ll have your number. Now get out, both of you. We’re wasting time.”

They walked toward the door, Miranda looping her arm through Cliff’s and giving me a poisonous look. I looked blandly back. I didn’t want the man she was clinging to so fiercely, hadn’t wanted him in a very long time—not since I’d fought my way home despite impossible odds and been told I was no longer welcome, that home was no longer mine to claim. Anyone who could reject someone they had claimed to love so conclusively wasn’t for me.

I didn’t want the man, but I’d always wanted the child. I’d always loved the child. And Miranda had been part of keeping that child away from me. I was grateful to her for making sure Gilly grew up with a mother, even if it hadn’t been me. That was where my gratitude ended.

That was where my hatred began.

Cliff looked back when they reached the door. “I’ll text you with her residence hall information,” he said. “Please, bring her home. I know I haven’t been fair to you, I know there’s nothing I can do to make that better, but please . . . bring her home.”

“I will,” I said.

Sunlight lanced into the hall when he opened the door. I stepped back involuntarily, away from the burning brightness. Only dawn has the power to destroy illusions, but the one I was wearing hadn’t been made to stand up to any real scrutiny. It would look wrong in direct sunlight. It would look like the lie it was.

Cliff looked at me in confusion as Miranda’s eyes narrowed in something that felt like contempt. Then they were gone, stepping out into that terrible daylight.

It took everything I had not to slam the door behind them. I sagged, pressing my forehead to the wood and closing my eyes as I released my ragged illusions. They dissolved into the smell of cut grass and copper, and I sobbed, struggling not to let myself collapse. I couldn’t. There wasn’t time. I could have this, this stolen moment of tears and terror, but soon enough, I’d need to get moving. Gillian was out there somewhere, lost and scared, and while I couldn’t say for sure that it was because of me, because of who and what I was, I couldn’t discount it, either. Not yet.

I pushed away from the door and started for the stairs, wiping my eyes as I went, trying to look less like I was on the verge of collapsing. It wasn’t easy. Dimly, distantly, I realized that I wanted Tybalt more than anything else. He was supposed to be here, giving me something stable to hold onto when the world was dropping out from under my feet. I couldn’t be angry with him for being hurt by what my mother had done, but I could miss his solidity.

When had he gone from being an adversary to becoming my surest port in the storm? And how was I going to hold on now that he was slipping away, buried under his own terror and the weight of what it meant to love me? My mother would always be a part of who I was, just like I’d always be a part of who Gillian was. No matter how far we run, we never get away from family.

I plodded up the stairs, relaxing slightly when I reached the cool, shadowy upstairs hallway. May’s door was closed. That was normal. Jazz was usually the first one up, thanks to her diurnal nature and desire to maintain a real job, and she closed May’s door when she left, to keep the cats out. Cagney and Lacey mostly preferred to stay in my room these days, resting their tired bones in the piles of pillows and on the laundry that always wound up strewn on the floor, but when Tybalt came to visit—rare as that felt right now—he always kicked them out, saying that while a cat might look at a king, there were some things he’d prefer his subjects not observe.

I didn’t want to do this. I wanted to leave a note and let her sleep. She could wake up in the afternoon with the problem already solved and Gillian safely back in Cliff and Miranda’s arms . . . and I knew that wasn’t going to work. She would never forgive me. She would be right not to.

Carefully, I eased the door open, revealing a pirate’s trove of casual treasure. Putting my magpie Fetch in a room with a woman who had a literal raven’s eye for shiny things had resulted in a bedroom that looked like it was halfway through the process of transforming into a thrift store. There were two separate dressing tables, one on either side of the room, both covered in jewelry boxes and wire stands glittering with necklaces. Glass, precious stones, it didn’t matter: what mattered was that they were beautiful. Silk sheets covered the ceiling, playing peek-a-boo with strands of twinkling white lights, so that it felt like they were trying to recreate the foggy heights of Muir Woods in their bedroom.

May was a curled comma in the middle of the bed, her arms wrapped around what I assumed was Jazz’s pillow. I paused for a moment, looking at her without illusions or disguises. Her face was mine, blunted by a façade of mortal blood she had never truly possessed: whatever else she might be, my Fetch was a pureblood through and through. But she remembered being me, and more, she remembered being a girl named Darice—Dare—who’d died when she was young enough to be my daughter, who had considered me her hero.

Dare was the reason May existed. Without those memories to urge her on, the night-haunt she had been would never have been willing to activate Oberon’s ancient binding and have herself called as a Fetch. It should have been the end of her. Instead, it had become a new beginning. I was grateful. I would always be grateful, just like I’d always be sorry that I hadn’t been able to save her.

I sat on the edge of the bed, leaning over to gingerly shake May’s shoulder. She made a soft mumbling noise and burrowed deeper into the covers.

“May,” I said. “It’s me. I need you to wake up. Come on. We don’t have time.”

May opened her eyes. Rolling onto her side, she pushed herself up onto one elbow and squinted at me. “Toby? What time is it?”

“Way too damn early,” I said. I stood. “Get up and get dressed. You just missed Cliff and Miranda. There was an incident at Gillian’s school last night. The campus police found blood in her car. I need to wake Quentin, and we need to get moving. I thought you might want to come with us.”

May’s eyes widened for a moment. Then they narrowed, a look of steely determination sliding into place. “There’s no might about it. I’m coming with you. How dare you even imply I wouldn’t.”

I blinked. “I didn’t think—”

“No, you usually don’t. And I’m usually pretty forgiving of that, since I know how your head works. I know how easy it is for you to get swallowed up in that swamp you call ‘logic.’ But no. I am not sitting this one out.” She rolled out of the bed and onto her feet, eyes wild, teeth all but bared. “She’s my daughter, too. I’m helping you bring her home.”

“Okay.” I raised my hands, palms outward, trying to defuse the situation before it could get out of hand. “That’s fine: that’s why I woke you. We’ll leave a note for Jazz, and . . . that’s fine. I’m going to go get Quentin. All right?”

“Go,” she said.

I went.

Quentin’s door was slightly ajar. He didn’t mind the cats, and when they weren’t with me, they could usually be found with him, hogging the covers and somehow managing to force my adult-sized squire onto a strip of mattress about six inches wide.

There was no response when I knocked. I pushed the door open, choosing a small invasion of privacy over trying to wake him by making enough noise to rouse the dead. Assuming I even could wake him that way. If Cliff hammering on the front door for as long as he had hadn’t been sufficient to wake Quentin up, I wasn’t sure any amount of noise would get him out of bed. I sort of envied that. Sleeping deeply is a gift.

Enough light slipped around the edges of his curtains to illuminate the room, showing the hockey pennants and posters on the walls and the scattering of laundry on the floor. I didn’t judge. Quentin has been keeping his room cleaner than mine since the day he moved in, which is pretty impressive for a kid who grew up in a literal palace, with servants to cater to his every whim. Most people would take “it’s okay to be a slob” away from that. Quentin took “somebody has to clean up the mess, and it might as well be me.” It’s things like that that make me convinced he’s better than I ever deserved to have in my keeping.

There was a tank atop the dresser just inside the room, filled with tiny hippocampi, brightly-colored fae creatures with the lower bodies of impossible fish and the upper bodies of horses. The stallion circled his mares, eyeing me suspiciously. The reason for his caution became clear when I looked closer: there were several foals at the middle of the herd, their equine bodies no larger than my thumb. Almost everything that lives is willing to die in the defense of its young.

I turned away from the tank and started for the bed. The cat draped atop the blankets over Quentin’s hip raised its head and looked at me. I blinked.

My cats, Cagney and Lacey, are Siamese. This cat wasn’t mine. The shadows were deep enough to turn most colors to gray, and for a moment, my eyes sketched stripes where no stripes existed, telling me the cat on Quentin’s hip was a burly tabby, telling me things were getting back to normal.

The cat blinked enormous yellow eyes and yawned, showing me all its fine, sharp teeth. All his fine, sharp teeth. I sighed.

“Hi, Raj,” I said in a low voice. “Didn’t know you were sleeping over.”

Raj licked a paw before looking down the length of his nose at me, his entire body forming a question of what the hell I thought I was doing there. I shook my head.

“It’s a long story,” I said. “Can you hop off, please? I need to wake Quentin.”

Raj stretched with as much insolence as a cat could show and slid off of Quentin, landing on the mattress and continuing to watch me through wary eyes.

I tried not to think about what it meant for Raj to be coming here to sleep. It wasn’t unusual to find him in the house—he’d basically moved in when Quentin became my squire, claiming that if one of them got to live with me, they should both be allowed to live with me—but normally, he told me when he was going to spend the night. That he hadn’t done so smacked of trying to hide something . . . or trying to hide from me. To keep me from asking him questions he didn’t want to answer. The fact that he was staying in his feline form made me suspect there was a lot he didn’t want to talk about.

“Yeah,” I said mildly. “Me, too.”

I stepped over Quentin’s discarded backpack, which I only ever saw him use when he was going to spend the night at Goldengreen with Dean, and shook his shoulder. He grumbled.

“I’m going on errantry, and I will leave you here,” I said calmly.

He opened his eyes so quickly that if it hadn’t been for the change in his breathing, I wouldn’t have believed he’d been asleep at all. “You wouldn’t dare,” he said, voice heavy with exhaustion. He sat up, barely seeming to notice when Raj slunk out of the way, and ground the heel of one hand against his left eye. “Toby? What are you doing in my room? What time is it?”

“We need to go,” I said. I took a step back so that I could address both boys at the same time. “My daughter has been taken. We don’t know whether it was humans or the fae—I’m hoping humans, sweet Titania, I’m hoping humans—but we need to move if we’re going to get there before the trail goes cold.”

Raj meowed, the sound small and lost in the dark room. I looked at him and nodded.

“I know you can’t help, and I know Tybalt probably can’t help right now either, and I’m not going to ask how he’s doing, because this isn’t the time and it isn’t fair to you. But, yeah, you can tell him. You should tell him. And tell him I’m going to call Arden and ask if I can borrow Madden.” Madden is a Cu Sidhe, a fairy dog in the same way that Tybalt is a fairy cat. Which meant that his nose could be the difference between finding my daughter and not.

Quentin had finished rubbing his eye and was openly staring at me. “Gillian? But isn’t she . . . ?”

“Yeah, she’s human,” I said. “I’m going to get ready; you need to do the same. May is coming with us. Cliff and his new wife were just here, since clearly if my estranged, adult daughter is missing, it must be because I kidnapped her.”

The urgency that had flooded my veins when they told me about Gillian’s disappearance was getting stronger, starting to burn. My daughter was missing. I needed to find her. Even if she wouldn’t thank me for it, even if she would just . . . just turn away from me again, I needed to find her. I needed to bring her home.

I’d been forced to build a life without my child, one where I would always love and worry about her, but where she was no longer in the forefront of my daily thoughts. I had surrendered her to her father in a cave that shouldn’t have existed when I pulled the immortality from her veins and allowed the Luidaeg to wipe the impossible from her memory. Cliff had never done any of those things, had never made any of the choices that would put our daughter out of his reach. He didn’t know how to live without her. He’d never needed to know.

It was tempting to envy him for being that secure in his position as friend and father to our little girl. But there wasn’t time for envy, either. We had work to do.

“All right,” said Quentin, and slid out of the bed.

I nodded. “Good. Meet you in the hall in five minutes. Raj, open roads, and if Tybalt wants to find me, I’ll be in Berkeley.” I turned on my heel and left the room, heading down the hall to my own door.

We had so much to do and so little time. All I could hope for was that we’d be fast enough to bring my daughter safely home. Anything more than that would be greedy, and so I didn’t even dare to think about it. Just let me bring her home.

Cagney and Lacey were curled up against my pillow, bodies compacted into the warm spot my body had formed during the short time I’d been allowed to spend sleeping. Spike was a few feet away, stretched out in the narrow sunbeam that had managed to slip through my blackout curtains, its thorny belly exposed to the ceiling. I couldn’t stop myself from smiling, just a little, at the sight. Rose goblins are basically cat-shaped, impossibly mobile rose bushes. When Spike and I had met, it had been the size of a rabbit, or maybe a small cat. Now, after years of fertilizer, water, and all the sunlight it could want, it was nearly the size of a corgi. I didn’t know how big it could wind up getting, but I was looking forward to finding out.

“Gillian’s missing,” I informed it, as I stripped off my sleep clothes and started digging in the laundry on the floor, looking for something that was suitable for dealing with the police. Sure, I could use illusions to make myself fit into the scene, but illusions always work better when they have something to work with. My magic isn’t strong enough for me to discount that.

Spike rolled onto its side, thorns rattling in what sounded like a question. I shook my head. “I don’t want to take you with me. May and Quentin are coming, and I don’t want Jazz coming home to an empty house.” Cagney and Lacey would be there, of course, but they were just ordinary cats. Spike . . . I’d never been sure how intelligent rose goblins were, but it was at least smart enough to keep Jazz company.

Spike rattled again. I leaned over, risking a pat to the top of its head before I returned to getting ready.

Dark jeans; black T-shirt; leather jacket; silver knife. Not much as armor goes, but all I’ve ever needed, and enough to have seen me through a lot of bad situations. Wearing black is a financial decision as well as a stealth one: I have a tendency to bleed on my clothes, made worse by the fact that most of my magic is blood-based, and anything pale doesn’t usually survive being worn more than once or twice. Fortunately, dark colors often read as more formal in the mortal world, and that would make it easier for me to pass myself off as someone in authority.

I took a moment to run a brush through my hair, leaving it down to tangle around my shoulders. Not great if I wound up in a fight, but another layer of camouflage. Apart from my ears—pointed, although not as visibly as say, Quentin’s—the surest betrayal of my heritage is in my bone structure, which is too sharp to be human, and too hard to look away from. Keeping my hair loose would make that less evident even if my illusions happened to slip—and might give me time to get out of sight.

My shoes were by the door. I grabbed them and stepped into the hall, to be greeted by Quentin, fully clothed and looking anxious. Raj was nowhere to be seen. I raised an eyebrow.

“He went back to the Court of Cats,” said Quentin.

It was interesting that he didn’t say Raj had gone home. I decided to leave it alone, saying instead, “Good. He can make sure Tybalt knows what’s going on.”

“Yeah,” said Quentin softly. He glanced toward the stairs. “May already went downstairs. Is she . . . is she okay?”

“Wait here. I’ll call you when it’s safe to follow me,” I said, and patted him once on the shoulder before I started down.

May was in the middle of the hall, arms wrapped around herself, staring blankly at the door. She was dressed and had donned a human disguise that made her look distressingly like my human twin. It was like standing outside myself, watching my own distress over my missing child. It ached. I stopped several feet away, trying not to startle her.

“May?”

“How did this happen?” She turned, looking bleakly at me. “I remember when she was born. I know the memory isn’t mine, but I have it, and I’m not giving it back. I remember her being so small, and she had this one black curl,” she mimed tugging on the air at the center of her forehead, “that was so long, right after she was born. It was like silk. I’d never touched anything so soft. I said I’d do anything to protect her. Remember?” She was almost pleading.

“I do,” I said softly. I knew what she was asking: she was asking me to reassure her that she was Gillian’s mother, too, because she remembered it, and those memories burned. “I wanted to keep her safe. All I wanted to do was keep her safe.”

“You took the fae blood out of her to keep her safe. To keep her away from our world.”

“I did.” There was no point in arguing: she wasn’t accusing me of anything. All she was doing was telling me the truth.

“Why didn’t it work?” she asked, tears beginning to roll down her cheeks. “Why wasn’t that enough to keep her safe? It should have been enough. It should.”

I sighed and went to my Fetch and held her as tightly as I could, letting her press her face into my shoulder and cry. After a few minutes, Quentin came padding cautiously down and joined our silent embrace, and my family was so damn broken, and we were still holding on just as tightly as we could.

We were still holding on.