Lucky for her, she hadn’t stepped out for a cigarette. The door opened a few minutes later, revealing a very nervous Dare and her slightly more relaxed older brother. Neither looked happy. That was my fault, but I was still too stunned to really care. I hadn’t known what Evening had meant to these people. I would never have guessed—I would never even have dreamed—and I should have known. What happened to the world while I was gone? How much needed to change before the most arrogant pureblood I’d ever known could come to a place like Home and earn that much respect?
“Sir,” said Dare, bending in what looked like a six-year-old’s approximation of a curtsy, “you need me to take Ms. Daye to her car?” Her accent was substantially lighter when she was speaking to Devin. The bruise on her cheek was flowering now, turning purple and gold.
Devin narrowed his eyes. I used to try guessing how much of The Look was real and how much was an act before I realized it wasn’t important. It worked. That was what mattered. Devin might lie to you, but he always got results. “That was why I called you, Dare. You can hear, can’t you?”
She cringed. Manuel turned to me, pleading with his eyes. I just shrugged. Devin used the same look and the same lines on me, once; I wasn’t foolish enough to try undermining his authority with someone who still believed they meant something. Dare gave him all the power he had over her. Once she grew up enough to figure out that Devin could only control her as long as she let him, she’d be fine, and if she never grew up that much, she belonged at Home, where someone else would take care of the real world and she could take care of the chores.
“Yes, sir,” Dare said, straightening. “I can hear, sir. I’ll take her to her car right away, it’s just outside, and then I’ll come back and wait, just like I’m supposed to.”
Devin settled back in his chair with a nod. I’d have been scared of him if I hadn’t known him so well—and knowing him like I did, I was terrified. He was putting on this little show for my benefit, reminding me that he was in charge and his word was law. He was always putting on the show for someone’s benefit, even when no one else was there. Playing mind games with Devin was like playing with dynamite: someone always got hurt in the end. I was hoping like hell that it wouldn’t be me.
“Good girl, Dare,” he said. She preened under the praise. I think all kids are hungry for a kind word, not just the lost ones that wind up drifting into places like Home. They all react the same way when they’re given the validation they need, locking fear and love together so tightly that they never even notice the moment when they grow up.
Dare turned to me, apple-green eyes wide, and said, “I’ll show you to your car now, Ms. Daye. You’ll follow me?” Manuel watched from behind her. It was hard to face both sets of eyes at once: the color was too bright, too needy.
“Yeah,” I said finally, giving in to the unspoken plea in Manuel’s eyes. “I’ll follow you.”
She smiled—the first honest expression I’d seen on her face—and led me away. I could hear Devin making a soft, almost smothered sound as the door swung shut behind us, but I couldn’t tell whether he was laughing or crying. For all I knew, all I still know, he may have been doing both.
EIGHT
THE REST OF DEVIN’S KIDS WERE still at the front of the bar. They watched warily as Dare and Manuel escorted me out. I didn’t say anything, and neither did they; we didn’t have anything to say. I’d been in their position, and I’d gotten out. From my perspective, they were being used, and from their perspective, I was just a sellout. I think we were all glad when I got into my car and pulled away, leaving Home, and the two golden-haired figures on the curb, to dwindle in the distance. Maybe there’s something to Devin’s little sign after all: every time I think I’m free of that place, it finds a way to pull me back in.
The sky was still dark; dawn was hours away. I’d been awake less than half the night, and I was so tired I could barely see straight. Multiple confusion spells, a major act of blood magic, an encounter with an angry monarch, and a trip Home all inside of six hours will do that to me.
Once I was far enough from Home to feel like I could stop the car without Devin’s kids coming knocking at the window, I pulled over to the side of the road and threw the cell phone onto the passenger seat. It landed without a sound. Putting my forehead down against the wheel, I closed my eyes. I only needed a few seconds. Just long enough for me to collect my thoughts and swallow the taste of roses before it could rise up and overwhelm me. Then I could start moving again.
Something knocked on the window.
I raised my head. Either the fog had rolled in with phenomenal speed or there was something strange going on; the world outside the windshield was solid gray, making it an interesting but useless watercolor study. The knocking came again as I scanned for signs of movement. This time it was coming from the back of the car. I whipped around, catching a blurred glimpse of something roughly the size of my cats before it vanished again. Great. I was cold, exhausted, and cursed, and now I was being harassed by something that moved too fast to see. That’s always how I like to spend my time.
Moving slowly to keep from startling whatever it was, I opened the door and slid out of the car. Almost immediately, I wished the queen hadn’t seen fit to turn my coat into a thin silk ball gown, and that I hadn’t abandoned the habit of keeping an emergency change of clothes in the trunk when I decided to retire from my previous line of work. Shivering, I scanned the area. There was no one there. The dim streetlights barely made a dent in the fog.
“Hello?” The air caught my voice, echoing it back to me. That was strange. Most street corners don’t have the sort of acoustics that echo. “Hello?” I called again. The echo was stronger this time—something was bouncing my voice back at me. Oh, that was so not what I needed. The mist was too thick to be natural. A lot of Faerie’s creatures of the night have started taking their special-effects tips from horror movies during the last few decades, and that meant I could be dealing with something nasty.
Of course, it could also be something that just really liked fog. Either way, it wasn’t the only one that could use the stuff. Reaching out with both hands, I dug my fingers into the gray, pulling it toward me. I’ve never been good at shadow-weaving or fire-work, but give me a thick veil of water vapor and I can manage the basics. This time my aim was clarity: water’s excellent for scrying, and fog is just water that’s forgotten its beginnings.
My head started to pound as I yanked, gathering fog between my hands until I had a sphere the size of a basketball. That was a good sign. If my headache was getting worse, the spell was probably working. I pressed the sphere into a disk, muttering, “Please do not adjust the horizontal. Please do not adjust the vertical. We have control of what you see ...” The air on the other side of my captive fog began to clear, until I was holding what had effectively become a portable window through the gray. My headache flared before dimming to a slow, grinding ache. It wasn’t comfortable, but I’d had worse. I could deal.
Holding the disk at arm’s length, I began turning in a slow circle. I spotted my quarry on the second turn: a creature the size and shape of a small cat crouching on the roof of my car, covered in short, soft-looking pink and gray thorns. Shorter thorns ran down its ears and muzzle, making it look like the bastard child of a house-cat and a rosebush. It looked small, harmless, and completely out of place. Rose goblin. Not one of Faerie’s bigger or badder inhabitants. You don’t usually see them in an urban setting.
It rattled its thorns as it saw me looking at it, and it whined in the back of its throat; a grating, almost subsonic sound. The fog swirling around it smelled like dust and cobwebs. That was another oddity. Rose goblins normally smell like peat moss and roses, and while they have a few parlor tricks, fog-throwing isn’t one of them. Whatever spell had created this fog was attached to the goblin, but the goblin wasn’t casting it.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, trying to keep my voice level and soothing. Someone must have wrapped this g
oblin in magical fog and sent it after me, and that meant whoever it was, they were either clever enough to bind the goblin into following through or really desperate. Rose goblins don’t make good messengers for anyone who doesn’t have a solid way of controlling them. They’re about as intelligent as the cats that they resemble, but they’re related to the Dry ads, and they share the Dryad flightiness. If you send a rose goblin on an errand, you’d better have something following to make sure it remembers to come back.
“Hey, little guy,” I said, letting go of the disk of fog and stepping toward the car. The goblin wouldn’t be able to disappear as long as I didn’t take my eyes off it. Rose goblins are purebloods, but they’re not strong ones, and even a changeling has a good chance of keeping hold of them. It whined again, flattening itself against my car until it was basically a doormat made of spines. I stopped, raising my hands. “I won’t hurt you. I’m a friend of Luna’s. You know Luna, don’t you? Of course you know Luna, all the roses know her . . .”
The rose goblin stopped whining, watching me with wide, gleaming eyes. Good. Some flower spirits are more closely tied to their origins than others, and rose goblins tend to cling to the plants that birth them. I meant what I said: I’ve never met a rose that didn’t know Luna Torquill. Being a legend to the flowers must be interesting. It certainly keeps her busy during pruning season. I took another step forward. “Are you okay?”
The goblin sat up, whining in the back of its throat again. Rose goblins can’t talk. That makes getting information out of them an adventure all its own.
“You don’t look hurt.” I leaned forward, offering my hand. The whining stopped, replaced by something like a purr as it arched its back against my fingers. Rose goblins are built like porcupines—if you rub them the right way, you don’t have to worry about the spines. They’re sort of like people in that regard, too. “Aren’t you a friendly little guy?” It was kind of cute, really.
Opening its mouth, it displayed a fine set of needle-sharp teeth. “Nice.” It hissed. “Not so nice. What’s up?” It crouched away from my hand, rattling its spines, and arched its neck. Something red was wound around its throat. “Hey—what’ve you got there?”
Purring again, it tilted its head to show me the red velvet ribbon tied around its neck. Something silver was hanging from it. I reached down and twisted the ribbon carefully free, slipping it over the rose goblin’s head. The goblin stayed still, purring encouragingly the whole time, but even with this token assistance I pricked myself five times before I pulled away, clutching the ribbon in my hand.
I knew the key before I saw it: my hand remembered the weight of it, even though I’d never held it before. The image of a sprite with wings like autumn leaves darting out of Evening’s window, paid for its service in blood, flashed across my mind. I hadn’t been there, but I remembered. Blood has power in Faerie, and that power is greater when the blood is given freely. Only the Daoine Sidhe can ride its memories, but other races can use it in other ways—everyone needs a little bit of death. That sprite would have been able to mimic Evening’s magic for at least a night, and maybe longer. Long enough to make some smaller bargains of its own.
Faerie’s smaller citizens have their own culture and their own customs. Most of us are almost human one way or another: almost human-sized and almost human-minded. The smaller folks never acquired that “almost” and they scorn and resent the rest of us for having it. They don’t wear suits, get mortgages, or attend PTA meetings. They haunt the garden pathways, living in the space between what the eye sees and what it chooses to ignore, and they never pretend to be anything that they aren’t. I guess that makes it harder to forget what they really are, and what they are is inhuman . . . and greedy. I had no trouble believing that the sprite Evening paid would have commandeered a goblin to finish the deal without endangering itself.
The rose goblin started grooming itself as I pulled my hand away, washing the space between its front claws like a cat. I spent a moment watching it before looking down at the key. It was carved silver, covered in so many rings of ivy and roses that it was barely recognizable as a key, but it knew its nature: it knew what it was meant to do. The roses on the shaft never neared the teeth. They wouldn’t interfere. It was warm and heavy in my palm, and it gave off a pale light that colored the mist around it. I got the feeling that there were very few doors it couldn’t open. I just hoped it could handle the ones ahead.
The taste of roses was suddenly cloying on my tongue, surging back in tandem with the prickle of phantom thorns. If logic hadn’t already told me the key was important, the sudden strength of Evening’s curse would have. It was a clue, and her final gift to me. She gave me a job to do, one that might still involve the dubious privilege of dying in her service. She might also have given me the key to my own salvation.
“So where do we go now?” I asked, looking back to the car.
The rose goblin was gone, and the fog it brought with it was already thinning. I bit back a curse and bit my tongue at the same time, hissing to keep myself from shouting. The goblin was my one potential link to the lock that fit the key, and I’d been dumb enough to take my eyes off it. It was probably gone the second I looked away. Just great. Leaning against the car, I closed my eyes. The metal was freezing on my back and shoulders, but at least it stood a shot at easing my headache. I hoped so, anyway.
The key was the last piece I needed to make the situation perfectly frustrating: a murder without a motive, a curse without a cure, and now a key without a lock. If I could fit them together somehow, I would be in business. Fighting to focus past my headache, I opened my eyes and climbed back into the car, where the dome light would let me see the key more clearly and the heater would keep me from freezing.
There seemed to be no logic to the twisted brambles making up the key’s head and handle; they were tangled like real vines, and looked like they’d keep on growing if left alone. For all I knew, they would. I narrowed my eyes, looking for the place where the briars began. There were differences in the lines of metalwork if I looked closely enough. Some of the tangles were picked out in darker metals—copper, bronze, or gold—while others blended back into the silver handle. I chose a vine outlined in gold, following it through an overhang of carved ivy and rose branches until it faded behind a triple-twist of interlocked thorns. Jackpot.
Threes are sacred in Faerie. We have three Courts and three rulers, the absent King and Queens that par ented our myriad races. Most of our legends say there are three roads to any destination: the hard way, the easy way, and the long way. Evening was a traditionalist. Even when she played human, part of her wasn’t willing to fully hide what she was, and so her human name was Evelyn Winters, and the name of her human business was Third Road Enterprises. She brokered her faerie gold and natural skills through the doors of Third Road, and no one ever looked twice, even though the name announced what she was hiding.
Third Road Enterprises, whose offices were coincidentally just a short drive from where I was studying the key she’d been so anxious to protect. I don’t believe in coincidence. Everything happens for a reason in this world. I had a destination again. Now . . . well, now I just needed a lock to go with my key.
NINE
THIRD ROAD ENTERPRISES WAS DARK when I arrived. According to the clock on the dashboard, it was a little less than an hour to dawn, when the janito rial staff would probably start to arrive. The rest of the staff wouldn’t show up for a few hours after that, if they came to work at all. It was two days before Christmas, after all. If there was any time when I’d be reasonably able to get in and out undetected, it was now.
Despite my best efforts, I found myself wondering how many of the people who worked there would spend the next few days feigning sorrow before suddenly finding work a lot more pleasant. Evening was even worse with people than I am; she froze them out, while I just let them pass me by. Most folks would forget me if I disappeared again, but they’d remember Evening. They always remembered Evening:
she was too wild and strange and fair to forget.
The people in that building would never have believed in Evening’s true face. They thought they knew her, but they were wrong. They knew a woman as human as they were, and I was willing to bet none of them ever looked for anything deeper. They’d never needed to, because in their world, you put Faerie away when you turned off the nursery lights. There’s no place for us in the human world these days, and still we can’t let go.
And when the hell did it go back to being “we”?
I walked toward the building, grateful for the lack of security guards. Considering my stained and increasingly grimy gown, no one was going to believe I had a good reason to be entering an upscale office building in the middle of the night. There’s pushing the bounds of credibility, and then there’s just getting silly.
The taste of roses faded as I walked. It was like playing a game of Hot or Cold with the rules reversed: the closer I got to my goal, the harder it got to know where I was going. If I caught Evening’s killer, the curse would snap and the roses would fade altogether, leaving me free to live or die as I chose. My fingers continued tracing the outline of the key cupped in my palm, trying to puzzle out its secrets. Evening had been more worried about it than she was about her own life. Why? Borrowed memories moved in the back of my mind, hissing, The key will open the way in Goldengreen, in her voice. I stopped where I was, almost stumbling.
Riding the blood isn’t an exact art: bits and pieces of the person you travel with can linger for days afterward, their secrets shaking loose like sand through a sieve. I hadn’t thought of the key in conjunction with Goldengreen before. It made perfect sense. I didn’t want it to.
Goldengreen was Evening’s knowe, and the gateway to her small holdings in the Summerlands. It was locked and sealed to her desires, and the idea of going in didn’t appeal. Once I set foot inside the boundaries of Goldengreen, the odds of being caught would go through the roof. I hadn’t considered that. What would someone who’d been able to kill Evening do to me? Probably nothing I’d enjoy. Not that I had any choice—not with Evening’s curse egging me on. If the key unlocked something in Goldengreen, Goldengreen was my next destination.