TWENTY

OFFICER THORNTON—WHO HAD NEVER really been Officer Thornton; that man had never existed in the way humans think about existence, had never walked the world as an independent, mortal being, although he’d laughed and breathed and lived a life that was as much an illusion as the ones I sometimes wore—looked at me with patience and an infinitely kind acceptance, like he was waiting for me to catch up with his place in the story. It was suddenly hard to breathe. I pressed a hand to my chest, trying to stop my heart from beating too fast and breaking free.

The candleflame was roaring now, so tall that it crested my shoulder, still lambent blue.

From the other side of the not-so-human human man, the Luidaeg watched me warily, eyes black from side to side, the way they were when she was having trouble keeping her composure. I still wasn’t sure what all the little changes in her appearance meant, but I had a fairly decent grasp of her eyes at this point.

“Feeling better?” she asked, voice low.

“I was right,” I said.

She nodded, biting her lip. “You were right, and I couldn’t see it. His magic has always been greater than my own.”

“Makes sense,” I said, and held my hand out to her. “Please?”

She understood what I was asking and produced the small glass bottle from inside her shirt. When she removed the cork, my pigeon forced its way through the opening and flew unerringly back to me, disappearing into my chest. The last traces of her spell dissolved, like cotton candy in the rain, and I returned my attention to Officer Thornton—to Oberon.

“I got you home,” I said. “You were lost in Annwn, and I got you home.”

His smile was like the rising sun, radiant and bright and almost too much to look at directly. “You know me now,” he said. “You didn’t before.”

“We’ve been playing pass-the-curse around to make sure someone found you; it was my turn to have no idea who I was in the world or who loved me until I brought you home,” I explained. I still felt a little light-headed, but it was easier if I didn’t try to emotionally engage with what was happening, and if I didn’t look at Tybalt.

The Luidaeg seemed to feel the same way, minus the not looking at Tybalt part. She was still standing in the same place, not approaching her father, even though she must have been aching to put her arms around him and demand that he never leave again.

“Are you really . . . ?” I asked, as delicately as I could. He had to be: the Luidaeg’s magic is never wrong, and the curse that kept me from seeing my own way home even when it was right in front of me had started to lift as soon as he’d entered the room. And the Babylon candle I’d bartered from her as part of learning to give Simon my way home was a bonfire now, too bright to be anything but reacting to its purpose.

He shook his head, running a hand through his hair, an achingly familiar gesture that I remembered copying from my mother when I was too small to understand that no amount of pretending would turn me into the daughter she wanted me to be.

“Not quite,” he said. “Not yet. You have to say the words if you want me to be. But you brought me home, and you came here looking for me, and so I came to you.”

“What words?” I looked into his brown, perfectly human eyes, and saw no answers there. Behind him, the Luidaeg shook her head, expression helpless. She didn’t know either.

But the key to his location had been in Evening’s taunting reminder of what he’d said when I first pulled him out of Annwn, believing him to be a human man in need of saving. “Lady, let alone,” he’d said to me, in a dirty San Francisco alleyway. Why, unless he’d looked at me and seen my grandmother, the woman who’d borne his youngest daughter, the one who’d been instrumental, however accidentally, in the loss of his wives? No one had ever claimed Oberon had been kidnapped. Everything I’d ever heard had implied he left of his own free will, taking the time to put his affairs in order before walking calmly away.

And going into hiding, it seemed. It made sense. If his daughter could make herself seem so human that magic couldn’t tell what she was, why couldn’t he? The Three were supposed to be as much more powerful than their children as their children were than the rest of us, which was a horrifying thought. We were standing in the Luidaeg’s living room with a physical god, and I was casting around for the keys that would unlock the prison he’d placed himself in.

Simon hadn’t moved since Officer Thornton stepped into the room. I wasn’t even sure he was breathing. He was just staring at the man, eyes wide and jaw slack, a look of profound confusion and dismay on his face. He looked like a man who’d just lost everything, which didn’t make sense, since he had his way home back, and now he was going to get to keep it. I guess meeting the father-in-law for the first time is terrible for everyone.

I shivered as I offered my hands to Officer Thornton, resisting the urge to turn and run across the room, throw myself into Tybalt’s arms, and never think about any of this ever again. I was a hero. I had finally come to accept that. Being a hero didn’t mean I was equipped to handle actual gods.

But someone had to. And even if the spell was broken, the Luidaeg was standing lost and silent, waiting for someone to finish the process of bringing her father back to her. He slid his hands into mine, and they felt perfectly ordinary, perfectly human, like there was nothing strange about any of this. The heat from the Babylon candle was warming our skins, and we shared the same physical space, man and grandchild, as ourselves, for the first time.

“Tam Lin” didn’t quite feel like the answer. Maybe the ballad told the story of how my grandparents met, but Oberon wasn’t part of the narrative as it had been written down. Still, it was what we had, and if he was looking for something specific from me, I couldn’t imagine what else it would be. Maybe with a little alteration, it would work. “I forbid,” I said, voice low and level, “you maidens all who wear gold in your hair to come or go by Caughterha, for Oberon is there. And none shall go by Caughterha but they leave him a pledge, either their rings or mantles green or else . . .” I tapered off. Somehow, the idea of looking my grandfather in the eye and saying the word “maidenhead” was just a step too far for me.

Thankfully, the Luidaeg was there to pick up the slack. “Ye shall no sooner be entered into that wood, if ye go that way, he will find the manner to speak with you, and if ye speak to him, ye are lost forever. And ye shall ever find him before you, so that it shall be in manner impossible that ye can scape from him without speaking to him, for his words be so pleasant to hear that there is no mortal man that can well scape without speaking to him. And if he see that ye will not speak a word to him, then he will be sore displeased with you, and ere ye can get out of the wood he will cause rain and wind, hail and snow, and will make marvelous tempests with thunder and lightnings, so that it shall seem to you that all the world should perish, and he shall make to seem before you a great running river, black and deep.” She stopped to take a breath, and added, “The Book of Huon de Bordeaux, John Bourchier.”

As the Luidaeg spoke, Officer Thornton stood up straighter and straighter, and he changed. It was a subtle thing at first, a lengthening of the spine and a shedding of what seemed to be layer upon layer of weariness. Then the subtlety melted away, and with it, his humanity.

Antlers sprouted from his brow, many-pointed as an ancient stag’s, brown as weathered bone. They didn’t bleed. There was no velvet to soften or gentle them, but as they reached what I assumed was their full span, flowers bloomed along their points, small and white and smelling strongly of a forest’s sweetness. The part of my magic responsible for recognizing and cataloging smells couldn’t put a name to them. Maybe they were something that only existed when Oberon did.

His eyes remained brown but grew darker, irises spreading to devour his sclera, pupils dwindling until they were a dot of black amidst the layered brown. Predator’s eyes. His ears shifted as well, growing sharply pointed before elongating, becoming as flexible and responsive as a stag’s.

His body didn’t change in any measurable way. I suppose it would have made a certain sense for him to have the lower body of a stag, given the rest of him, but how could Faerie have wasted so much time and energy hating anyone they viewed as bestial if their forefather had been a beast himself? I’m sure we would have found a way—the fae are nothing if not self-contradictory—but it would have required effort, and purebloods tend to also be profoundly lazy.

The bones of his face shifted under his skin, until he looked like the same man and not the same man at all, humanity replaced by something impossibly beautiful, impossibly feral, glorious and terrifying. Looking at him felt the way looking at my mother used to feel, back when I was so much closer to human. I would have collapsed if he hadn’t been holding tightly to my hands, blunt claws denting the skin without breaking it.

“Lady, let alone,” he said, and smiled radiantly, showing me the razor points of his incisors. Then he let me go, and I did fall, or began to. Simon was there to catch me, wrapping his arms around my waist and giving me something to lean against. Together, we watched in silence as the lost King of Faerie turned to face his daughter. The Babylon candle guttered out, its purpose finally fulfilled, and the room was suddenly cold.

The Luidaeg bit her lip as she stepped toward him, black tears escaping from her eyes and running down her cheeks. They left tarry streaks behind, like she was crying off her mascara, but she was actually weeping the color out of her irises, leaving them driftglass green and clearer than I’d ever seen them.

“Daddy?” she asked, in a voice that was barely bigger than a whisper. It shook on the second syllable, breaking.

“Hello, my little Annie,” he said, turning to face her, and then he took her into his arms and held her against his chest while she wept into the white tank top that had carried over from his time as Officer Thornton. The fabric drank her tears, and it, too, changed, becoming a doublet of rough brown velvet over a long-sleeved poet’s shirt. She couldn’t possibly have cried enough to transform his sweatpants, but they grew tighter and more fitted, becoming simple brown breeches. He didn’t need any ornamentation. He was Oberon, crowned in horn and flower. That was enough.

That had always been enough.

Simon made a choked sound, loosening his grasp on me. I pulled away before Oberon could look my way again and root me to the floor, flinging myself into the open space between me and the person who needed me most in all the world.

Tybalt met me when I was barely halfway across the room, pulling me into a crushingly tight embrace and surrounding me with the scent of musk and pennyroyal. He held me so close that for a moment it felt like I wasn’t going to be able to breathe, and for the same moment, I didn’t care. If this was how I died after everything I’d been through, that was fine by me.

By the couch, Oberon and the Luidaeg were holding each other just as tightly, being stared at by Simon on one side and Quentin on the other. Neither of them looked like they were capable of moving. Unsurprisingly, it was Danny who spoke first.

“Titania’s fucking ass, is that actually fucking Oberon?” he asked, in a tone that managed to remain reverent, despite the mortal profanity.

I choked on my own laughter, pulling away from Tybalt just enough to lean back, look at Danny, and say, “I know who you are, so yes, it is.”

“And don’t think we’re not going to discuss that, at length, later,” said Tybalt, voice low and menacing. I turned back to him. His eyes were narrowed, pupils hairline slits against the green, and he was looking at me like he’d never seen me before. “There are things you do not gamble with. My heart is one of them. Your memory is another. By gambling with the second, you could have destroyed the first.”

“I know.” I freed a hand to touch his cheek. “Will it help at all if I say I wasn’t gambling? By the time I traded my way home for Simon’s, I was already sure I knew where Oberon was.”

“It would help if not for the fact that you and the Luidaeg had clearly already begun the conversation, and she knew what you would want. Did you know where Oberon was then?” He could see the answer in my eyes, because he grimaced, a pained look flickering across his face, and turned away. “Of course you didn’t.”

“Tybalt, I—”

“Don’t you have someone you need to save?” he asked, and opened his arms, and let me go.

I stumbled a few feet back, looking at him with wounded bewilderment. I knew he didn’t like it when I risked myself, but this had been for us. If I didn’t save Simon, we couldn’t get married. I hadn’t been trying to get hurt. Had I?

Sometimes that’s the hardest question of all to answer, and at the moment, it wasn’t the important one, because my answer didn’t matter as much as Tybalt’s, or as Quentin’s. We still had messes to clean up. May. All the people at Goldengreen who had yet to be returned to their original forms. The question of whether or not I had screwed things up with my fiancé could wait until I had the space to breathe and give it the attention it deserved.

I took a deep breath and turned to Simon. “Can you undo the rest of the transformations you performed in Goldengreen so that the Luidaeg doesn’t have to?” I asked.

He shook his head, looking sheepish. “Not without more of what enabled me to cast them,” he said.

“You mean blood.”

“Yes.”

“You mean Evening’s blood.”

“Yes.”

“But it’ll kill you if you don’t stop using it.”

“I suppose it’s a yes to that as well,” he said, and shook his head again. “Addiction is a terrible thing. I can’t say I’m not addicted to the power she has to offer me, or that I wouldn’t be glad to have a reason to give in to the temptation one more time, but the risk of her getting her hooks into me again is too high. I finally have my way home.”

He said that last word with so much longing that I stopped, really looking at him for the first time since I’d agreed to take his place under the Luidaeg’s spell. He looked exhausted, wearied and worn away by what he’d been through; he was too thin, and while the fae don’t age the way humans do, I would have sworn he looked years older than his brother. But he was standing up straighter than he had been before, and he wasn’t cringing from every little sound in the room. He was a free man.

Free to make his own choices, and his own mistakes. I turned to Walther. “Hey, Walther,” I said.

“Hey,” he said. “Welcome back.”

Unlike Tybalt, he didn’t sound angry; if anything, he sounded almost amused, like this was part and parcel of an ordinary day.

“Where are we with waking May up?”

“Cassandra’s working on her now. The elf-shot is still interfering with her breathing, and it’s hard to keep her stable long enough to administer potions. Someday I’m going to figure out how to make a lot of these things injectable without also making them harmful, and then this will all be so much easier.”

“If anyone can do it, it’s you.” It felt almost sacrilegious to be having such an ordinary question in front of Oberon, like the lost King of Faerie appeared in the Luidaeg’s living room every day, but maybe that was why we needed to have it. Oberon’s return changed everything, and it changed nothing. May was still asleep. Tybalt was still angry with me. Life went on.

“I’ll get back to work as soon as I get back to my office,” agreed Walther. “It’s going to be fine.”

“I hope so.” I couldn’t get to Quentin without approaching Oberon and the Luidaeg, which meant it was time to bite the bullet and interrupt two of the most powerful beings in the world. No pressure. I stepped forward, knees only shaking a little, and cleared my throat.

Neither of them moved.

“Um, excuse me?” I managed. “Luidaeg?”

She didn’t lift her head from her father’s shoulder as she replied with a sullen, “What is it?”

“We need to restore everyone who’s still transformed in Goldengreen, and Simon can’t break the spell without drinking more of your sister’s blood, which will make it easier for her to influence him again. We just got him back. I think Patrick will kill me if I let her mess this up.”

“You just got him back? He’s been running around playing at evil for what, a handful of years? I’ve been missing my father for five centuries. You can give me an hour.”

“I . . . right.” I had no idea what Oberon’s return would mean for Faerie. I didn’t think any of us did. But he was back, and that meant things were going to change. There was no way to avoid that anymore.

Everything was going to change.