FOURTEEN

IF I’D THOUGHT the atmosphere in the car was uncomfortable before—with Tybalt brooding and Quentin exhausted, and me and May trying to deal with Gillian’s disappearance—it was nothing compared to what happened when we added Janet to the mix. She sat in the middle, crammed between Quentin and May, both of whom eyed her mistrustfully all the way across the city. It would have been funny if it hadn’t been so damn tense. Janet looked like an ordinary housewife, rumpled and out of place. May had returned her purse, and she clutched it like she feared it was going to be taken away again. Quentin watched her warily, not saying a word. May slumped against the window on her side of the car, obviously exhausted, making no effort to conceal her hostility.

“Where are we going?” Janet asked, after we’d been driving for ten long, silent minutes.

“To see a friend of mine who may be able to clear up some of what’s going on, and better yet, who makes an excellent babysitter for unexpected grandmothers in need of temporary protective custody,” I said tightly.

Janet’s eyes widened. “What? I thought you were taking me with you.”

“No, we’re taking you away from your unwarded, indefensible home, so Cliff doesn’t get hurt when whoever may or may not be messing with you shows up.” Keeping my voice level was more difficult than I’d expected. “You’re not coming with us. We need to be free to go anywhere the trail leads, and I don’t feel like you’d be welcome in most places, especially if you want to play ‘innocent little mortal woman’ and not have us broadcast your identity to anyone who wants to know why we’re hauling you around.”

“Where are you—”

“To my favorite aunt. She can answer a lot of questions for me, and I know she has space. I mean, her guest room is currently full, but she has a couch. You can probably sit on it, assuming she doesn’t make you stand in the corner and think about what you’ve done.”

Janet stared at me, expression hurt. “I haven’t done anything to you.”

“You’ve done everything to me. To all of us. You broke the Ride, if you are who you say you are. That means this world is your fault.” I pulled to a stop on the street in front of the Luidaeg’s alley. Technically, it wasn’t a legal parking place, thanks to the combination of red curb and fire hydrant. I wouldn’t get a ticket. No one who came to see the Luidaeg ever had to worry about anything as mundane as the police.

Being turned into something unpleasant and chucked into the bay, on the other hand . . .

There was a moment when I thought Janet might bolt. I took one elbow. Tybalt took the other. With her safely pinned between us, we marched on, Quentin in the lead, May ready to tackle her if she somehow broke free and tried to run.

The Luidaeg’s door looked like it always did: rotten wood and peeling paint, set so far back into the wall that it would have been easy to miss if we hadn’t already known where we were going. Quentin hopped onto the stoop and knocked without any sign of hesitation. He’s known the Luidaeg since before he formally became my squire, and while he appreciates that she’s terrifying and all, he also seems to consider her as much his aunt as she is mine. He adores her. She returns the favor. With as long as she’s been one of Faerie’s greatest monsters, it must be nice for her to have someone who just loves her, no qualifiers, no strings attached.

Seconds ticked by. Janet squirmed.

“Your friend isn’t home,” she said. “We should go.”

“She’s here,” I said. “Wait.”

Janet was still glaring at me when the door opened and the Luidaeg appeared.

As always, when not trying to make a point, she looked like a human teenager, somewhere in the baby-faced range between puberty and college. The ghosts of acne scars dusted her cheeks, and her thick, curly black hair was pulled into twin pigtails, one over each shoulder, both tied off with electrical tape. She was wearing a pair of denim overalls, her feet and shoulders bare, and the expression on her face was somewhere between annoyance and relief.

“I was wondering whether you assholes were going to come bother me today,” she said without preamble. “It’s been a week. I was starting to think you . . . had . . . forgotten . . .” Her voice slowed, finally trailing off as she stared at Janet. She took a step forward, stopping when her toes struck the edge of her threshold. She froze there, still staring.

“Hi, Luidaeg,” I said. “I finally met my grandmother.”

“October.” Her voice sounded hollow. “Do you know who that is? Do you know . . .” She stopped, swallowing hard. The blue was bleeding out of her eyes, replaced drop by drop with clear glass green. That wasn’t a great sign. Better than if they had been going black, but still, not great. “Do you know what she did?”

“Can we come inside?” I asked. “This doesn’t feel like the sort of conversation we should be having in the street.”

She looked at me with honest, raw confusion. I had never seen her at such a loss for words, not even when I had used blood magic to bring her back from the dead and loosened some of the geasa on her in the process. “Inside?” she asked. “Inside my home?”

“Yeah. I’m sorry to ask you to do this, but we don’t have anywhere else to go, and Janet may be in danger.”

The Luidaeg looked at her—scrawny mortal woman with her messy hair, sandwiched between me and Tybalt, both of us holding an arm so she couldn’t get away if she tried—and laughed. “In danger? Her? She is danger, and make no bones of that. But if you came all this way, I suppose you may as well come in.” Her gaze swiveled to Janet. “We’ll discuss the rest of this behind closed doors.”

Janet blanched, twisting in our hands as she tried, futilely, to break away. Tybalt and I both tightened our grips—I, at least, was still trying not to bruise her; I couldn’t necessarily say the same for him—and pulled her into the apartment, following Quentin and the Luidaeg. May brought up the rear, closing the door once we were all inside.

It latched with a sound loud enough to consume the world. Janet moaned, small and tight and, yes, terrified. I gave her a sidelong look.

“Why are you so afraid?”

“Why aren’t you?” she demanded, turning to face me. “Do you know whose door you’ve darkened?”

“Yeah. The Luidaeg is a friend of mine.” You couldn’t have told it from her apartment. The illusions that made it look like something that had washed up with high tide were back in place. Streaks of mold in a dozen virulent colors smeared the walls, all of them clashing with one another, and clashing even worse with the wallpaper behind them. The carpet was worse, seeming to squirm under its thick layer of slime and debris. It squished under our feet. Maybe it was just illusionary water, but the Luidaeg is a master of her craft, and the muck still felt like it was seeping into our shoes.

Janet wasn’t resisting anymore. She allowed us to drag her toward the living room, her eyes rolling wildly as she took in everything around her.

“You know, it’s pretty common knowledge that the Luidaeg is in San Francisco,” I said, tone light, almost conversational. I would have been lying if I’d tried to say I wasn’t enjoying seeing her so uncomfortable. This was the woman who had known I was fae, had known my disappearance was related to the world Cliff couldn’t touch, and rather than helping me make peace with my daughter, had used her knowledge as a lever to keep me even further away. “What the hell are you doing here, if you didn’t want to risk running into her?”

“I wanted to be near my Amy,” she said. “And I knew the sea witch was here, but she didn’t know about me. That made all the difference in the world. She’d never see me if I didn’t want her to.”

Tybalt and I exchanged a glance over her head. He looked baffled. Cait Sidhe sometimes seem to have a monopoly on arrogance, but this was a class above.

The Luidaeg was already seated in her favorite overstuffed armchair when we pulled Janet into the living room. She raised a hand and pointed imperiously to the couch.

“Put her there,” she said.

“Where’s Poppy?” I asked, as Tybalt and I led Janet to the couch.

“Sleeping, like all sensible fae should be at this hour. Which is how I knew it was you people on my porch. You can be accused of having many things, October, but ‘sense’ doesn’t even make the list.” The Luidaeg’s expression softened for a fraction of a second. Then it slammed down again, turning to ice as she looked at Janet. “Do you know what she did?”

“I know the story. Sort of. I was never sure how much of it was accurate and how much of it was people who weren’t there making things up.”

Everyone knew the story. Maeve’s last Ride, the night that broke Faerie forever. It was history and legend and cautionary tale, it was the moment when an empire fell and became an afterthought, all because of one human girl and her outstretched, grasping hands. It was the end. It was the beginning.

It was where we got lost.

“Then let me tell it to you,” said the Luidaeg, voice like high tide rolling across the beach. “Let me tell you about a time when Faerie was open to her children, when my father and his Queens still kept Court and counsel. It was my mother’s turn to host the Ride, and she had chosen her sacrifice, a mortal man by the name of Tam Lin. He was a liar and a poet and a sybarite, and he’d been more than happy to take his side of the bargain. For near seven years he’d feasted on the fruits of Faerie, growing fat and happy and rich beyond mortal measure at our expense. And then, when time was almost up, he decided he didn’t want to die for us after all.”

“Die for us?” blurted Quentin. “Why would he need to die for us?”

I kept my mouth shut for a change, glad that he’d asked before I could. It was nice to look like I knew what the hell was going on.

The Luidaeg looked briefly uneasy. “Things were different then,” she said, finally. “Every seven years, we made an offering to Faerie, to keep us healthy and strong. Tam Lin was to have been the latest in a string of brief, bright lives, stretching all the way back to our beginning.”

“You were going to murder him,” snarled Janet, seeming to forget her fear.

“He was destined for the gallows when my mother found him,” said the Luidaeg. “We gave him seven years that might as well have been stolen. We gave him everything he asked for.”

“Except for his freedom,” said Janet.

“Who among us is free?” The Luidaeg spread her hands, indicating the apartment walls. “We’re all bound by promises and obligations and fealties we had no say in. No one’s free, not unless they’ve slit a hundred throats to get that way. He made a promise. He took a vow. He said he’d die for us, and when he didn’t—when you broke my mother’s Ride—Maeve had to go in his place or throw everything out of balance. Only it turns out that taking one of my father’s queens away throws everything out of balance in a whole different way. Everything we’ve suffered, everything Faerie has suffered in the last five hundred years, it’s all down to you.”

“I didn’t know,” said Janet.

“Oh, didn’t you? They told you not to go to Caughterha, didn’t they, Jenny?” The Luidaeg’s lip curled as she looked at Janet. “They told you what you’d find there wasn’t yours to have. But you went anyway. Greedy little girl. Had to have it all.”

“I’ve paid for what I did, and not everyone said to stay away,” said Janet. There was no fire in her voice. “I was a child.”

“You were a thief.”

“I was a child.” Janet shook her head. “I paid for what I did. I paid, and I paid, and I paid, and no one came to save me from the consequences of my own actions. No one even said I deserved saving. You can be as angry with me as you like, but there’s no way you can pretend I haven’t suffered.”

“You don’t know what it means to suffer, human,” said the Luidaeg. “You have no idea.”

“Maybe she does and maybe she doesn’t, but we brought her here because we need you to keep her safe,” I said. “Please, Luidaeg. Can you protect her?”

The Luidaeg turned and stared at me. Then she sniffed the air. “Blood,” she said, sounding disgusted. “How much blood are you wearing right now?”

“Some,” I said. “That’s not the point.”

“Oh, isn’t it?” She snapped her fingers. The air briefly became a haze of conflicting scents as our illusions—all of them—were ripped away, leaving the four of us with something to hide fully revealed.

Janet gasped. Whether because of the blood or because she was suddenly in the presence of four unmasked fae, it was difficult to say. Quentin and May made almost identical noises of displeasure.

“Do you have any blood left inside your body?” Quentin demanded.

“I asked her much the same,” said Tybalt.

“Dad’s eyes, Toby, sometimes I wonder how you’ve lived as long as you have.” The Luidaeg stood. “I’m making you a sandwich before you fall over. That’ll give me a minute to calm down, and when I get back, you’re going to eat, and you’re going to tell me exactly what the fuck you think you’re doing. If I like what you have to say, maybe I’ll let you keep all your limbs.”

“They’d grow back, and you know it,” I said.

“That’s what makes threatening to pull them off so much fun,” she said, and swept out of the room.

Janet started to rise. “Now’s our chance. We can run.”

May pushed her back down. “No,” she said coldly. “We stay.”

Janet gave her a wounded look. “You’re a Fetch. You’re new to Faerie. You shouldn’t share their preconceived notions of who I am.”

“You seem to have some preconceived notions of what a Fetch is, so I guess we’re even,” said May. “I should have known who you were the second I saw your face in October’s memories. It should have been the first thing I said when she and I met. ‘The woman who condemned us all is here, in San Francisco, and she has your child.’ I should have known. But memory fades when it gets overwritten. A Fetch is a palimpsest of people they aren’t anymore, because every new life removes pieces of the old one. I didn’t know you, and I’ll be carrying that forever, especially if Gillian has been hurt to get to you.”

“You don’t know why I did what I did,” said Janet. “You weren’t there.”

That wasn’t always a safe assumption to make, with May, but under the circumstances, it was a reasonable one. No one had been there. “So tell us what happened,” I said. It was a way to keep her talking and calm until the Luidaeg came back; it was a way to keep the squirrels in my mind from chasing each other down dark holes. Gillian was out there somewhere. She needed me to find her, to bring her safely home. But if I left while the Luidaeg wanted me to stay, I would have more problems added to the pile I was already carrying.

Janet looked at me defiantly. “You won’t listen,” she said.

“Try us,” said Quentin.

Janet looked at him. Looked at me. And took a breath.

“It was a very long time ago . . .” she began.