I sighed. “Lily, being hasty doesn’t usually get you shot.”
“I see. So I suppose you paused to think through whatever actions did lead to your being shot before you took them?”
“I . . .” Lily narrowed her eyes, and I stopped, reviewing the events of the afternoon in my head. I hadn’t been thinking, or even acting: just reacting. I’d been reacting since I heard Evening’s voice on my answering machine. Looking away, I said, “No.”
“I didn’t think so. People have been trying to kill you for as long as I’ve known you; it seems to be a normal part of your existence, and I’ve grown resigned to that fact. Even so, I’ve never seen you giving so little care to evading their efforts. It almost seems like you want them to catch you.”
“Lily, I—”
“No,” she said, and I stopped, run up against the wall of her implacability. “You forget, how well I knew your mother. Amandine’s excuses were always very much like yours. Nothing you say will be new to me.”
I raised my eyes, and she met them without flinching. Her lips were curved in a faint, sad smile, creasing the scales that ran across her cheeks. “Maybe not. But you always let her go.”
The smile softened, growing sadder and more accepting at the same time. “I always regretted it, as well.”
“We do what we have to.”
“As, I suppose, we must.” She sighed. “Ah, well.”
“Now what?” I asked.
“Now you leave me. Even if I could hold you here against your will—even if I would, after what we’ve been through together—the Winterrose has bound you, and I can’t defy the law so directly. The sun will be down soon.”
“. . . down?” I asked, staring at her. “Lily, it was night when I got here.” Fleetingly, I wondered how much work I’d managed to miss.
“Time passes, October,” she said. I didn’t have an answer to that. Lily looked at me levelly and continued, “Once the sun is down, Marcia will summon a taxi for you, and I will have one of my handmaids escort you to the edge of the park. Once you have left my lands, you may do whatever you feel is needed, and I will have done what hospitality demands.”
“Okay,” I said.
“I am not done.” Her tone sharpened, becoming colder. “I wouldn’t let you go at all were it not for the binding, and had you not been my unwilling guest once before; understand that. Your mother will not forgive me for your death.”
“My mother hasn’t left the Summerlands in twenty years,” I said, unable to stop myself. “I doubt she’s going to come out to yell at you.”
“I think you might be surprised by what she would do.” I looked at her and couldn’t think of a single way to answer that. So we just sat and drank our tea while the silence stretched out between us, until Lily raised her head, acknowledging some unseen sign.
“The sun is down,” she said, and stood, moving with fluid grace. “Come, October. It’s time to go. I just hope, for your sake, that you’ve rested well enough.”
I pushed myself to my feet and followed her, pausing to take my bloody clothes from a Puca with drag onfly wings and white-blind eyes. She looked familiar, like someone I’d known once, but I didn’t ask. The stories you find in the independent knowes usually aren’t pretty ones.
Lily stopped, looking at me. “You should dress,” she said. “It’s cold outside, and you aren’t as accustomed to it as I am.”
“True,” I said. No one is as accustomed to cold as the Undine, unless you count the various breeds of snow fae. Lily could walk naked in subzero temperatures and not be bothered.
Pulling my jeans over the bottom of the too-short robe turned it into a slightly tasteless, expensive-looking silk blouse; pulling my sweater on, bloodstains and all, made me feel a little more like I was in control of the situation, despite the hole through the left shoulder. Not being dressed like an escapee from a faerie whorehouse will do that for me every time. I would have put my bra back on, but that would have required removing the robe; I wadded it into a ball instead, shoving it into the waistband of my jeans. My left arm bent reluctantly, but it bent. I’d have to be satisfied with that. Nodding to myself, I followed Lily through the darkness and back into the world of men.
Night had chased away the tourists, filling the shadows with a different kind of crowd. There are no fireflies in California, but points of light still danced over the surface of the water, darting away from ambitious fish. There are benefits to a pixie infestation; fireflies don’t pierce the night with glittering laughter or spin each other through ornate midair ballets. White Christmas lights were strung through the branches of the trees, providing brighter, more constant illumination. Pixies who had tired of aerial acrobatics perched on the cords, and clusters of the more human-sized residents were scattered along the pathways, talking and laughing. The Tea Gardens are always at their best when no one but the night-side inhabitants are there to see them. That’s when no one—and nothing—has to hide.
The conversations quieted as we drew close, and I could feel eyes on my back as we passed. I didn’t turn. Some things are better left alone, and that includes questions from the people who lost their home for fourteen years because it had become my prison. I’m sorry, and I’d undo it in a heartbeat, if I could . . . but I was learning more and more each day that looking back never solved anything.
Lily’s promised handmaid was sitting balanced on the low wooden fence beside the gate, chatting with a tall, brown-haired man whose eyes were ringed with the characteristic gleam of faerie ointment. I stopped, eyes widening.
“Juliet?” I asked.
The woman turned toward the sound of her name and smiled, revealing oversized canines behind cherry-red lips. Narrow stripes ran up the sides of her face, vanishing into the gold-and-brown streaks of her hair. “Hey, Tobes,” she said, sliding down from the fence with hip-shot ease, half smirking at me. “Surprised much?”
“Julie,” I said, almost in a whisper. Somehow, we closed the distance between us; somehow, I was hugging her, laughing so hard I was almost crying—or was that crying so hard that I was almost laughing? Julie had her arms around me, and was doing much the same, with the added rumbling undertone of her purr. The man she’d been talking to stood back, out of the way, watching our reunion with a small, puzzled smile.
Finally, I pushed Julie out to arm’s length, staring at her. “What are you doing here?”
“The usual.” Julie shrugged, rolling her eyes to indicate that the usual was nothing of any real importance. “Uncle Tybalt’s in another snit, so I’m here, playing handmaid until it’s safe to go home.”
“What’d you do?”
She grinned again. “I bit him.”
“Good for you.” I squeezed her upper arms, returning her grin with one of my own. Julie’s a Cait Sidhe changeling, the result of a dalliance between one of Tybalt’s courtiers and a mortal woman. Unfortunately for everyone involved, Julie flunked the Changeling’s Choice in the most dramatic way possible. There was an accident—I never got the details—and her mortal mother was killed, while Juliet, at the age of six, tapped into her racial talent for shapeshifting. The police who came for the cleanup found a body, but no little girl. Julie was already in the hands of her father’s family.
It took them years to lure her back to human form. From what I’ve heard, Tybalt tried everything, until finally, one day, she just changed. That’s been their relationship ever since; as her de facto uncle, he tries to make her follow the laws of the Court of Cats, and she pretty much ignores them, right up to the point where she gets tossed out on her tail. Again. She was a bitter, resentful, maladjusted kid who grew into an equally maladjusted teenager; it was only natural that we’d become friends the day we met. She had a lot of anger in her, and she knew how to express it. As someone who’d always been better at repression than expression, I envied that.
Julie also has the lovely distinction of being the reason Tybalt dislikes me so much. We had quite a few hostile encounters during my t
ime in the Summerlands, most of which ended with him reminding me that he’d be happy to gut me if it weren’t for my mother. When we grew up, Julie followed me out of her uncle’s Court and all the way to Home—the first Cait Sidhe to pull that kind of stunt. Lucky me, he decided to blame me instead of her, because I was the “smart one.” That’s me. Making enemies with my brain for as long as I can remember.
“Wanna meet my sweetie?” Julie asked, grabbing the brown-haired man by the arm and pulling him over to be admired. “Ross, this is October Daye. Tobes, this is Ross Hampton.”
“Charmed,” he said, extending his hand. I took it, shaking firmly as I studied him. He was quarter-blooded at best, and his heritage was subtle; there was something in the shadows of his eyes that should have given me a clue, but I was too tired to quite put my finger on it. “Julie talks about you a lot.”
“Now I’m worried,” I said, taking my hand back and glancing toward Lily.
“His mother was a servitor of these lands,” Lily said. She leaned up onto her toes, ruffling Ross’ hair. He took it with good grace, even stooping to make it easier. “In her absence, we act as his home and hearth. He needs aid to see through our more basic illusions, but that isn’t enough to rob him of his place.”
Thin blood is a social stigma in Faerie. It isn’t enough to ban you completely. Some of Faerie’s greatest scholars and magical theoreticians were thin-blooded: it gave them the ability to see us for what we were, but at a distance, and that made them stronger than most people could understand. It said something about Lily that she was willing to take in Ross and Marcia the way she had.
“Fair enough,” I said, sliding my hands into my pockets. Looking back to Julie, I said, “I guess you know what’s up?”
“Lil says you’re having problems with idiots with guns, so Ross and me are here to get you through the big bad park and down to your waiting chariot, which happens to be a San Francisco city taxicab,” she said, hugging Ross’ arm to her chest in a proprietary manner. “It’ll be a cakewalk.”
“Right,” I said and glanced at Lily, who shook her head. This was my choice. She knew that Julie was Cait Sidhe enough to never take threats of physical violence seriously: she thought of herself as the biggest threat on the block, even though her blood was as thin as mine. As for Ross . . . he might mean well, but he was quarter-blooded, which meant his magic would be weak, if it existed at all. She was giving me a quarter-blood who probably couldn’t do anything but scream and hide and a Cait Sidhe changeling who thought she could scare just about anything away by shouting and showing her claws. Why?
Because she thought it would convince me not to go. Shaking my head, I started for the gate. If anything attacked us, we could just panic at it until it went away. “Come on. Let’s get this traveling freak show on the road.”
Lily followed as far as she could. As we passed from her land back into the park proper, she stopped, saying, “October?”
Juliet and Ross were a few feet ahead of me, Julie still holding his arm. I looked back to Lily, silhouetted by the garden gates, and said, “Yeah?”
“Be careful.”
“Aren’t I always?” I asked. Then I turned, not waiting for an answer, and followed my escort out the gate.
It was almost totally dark outside the Tea Gardens, the shadows broken only by randomly spaced streetlights and the sparkle of passing pixies. Figures both fae and human moved through those shadows, taking whatever trails the night held for them. None of Golden Gate Park’s nighttime inhabitants need much in the way of light; all it would do was show them the things they’d rather leave hidden.
Julie led the way once we were clear of Lily’s domain. Her Cait Sidhe heritage gave her night vision that put mine to shame, and even mine was probably worlds better than Ross’. Faerie ointment lets humans see through illusions, but it can’t change the human eye. He was stuck with what his blood could give him. I did my best to keep pace. The throbbing in my shoulder was constant, but not enough to be more than a mild distraction. Lily did her work well.
“It’s a nice night, for December,” I said, squinting into the foggy dark. “I can almost pretend to see my hand in front of my face.”
“I guess,” Julie said. “It’s not raining. That’s something.”
“I like the rain.”
Julie threw me a dirty look, eyes glowing a pale, annoyed green. I smirked at her. Most cats don’t like water, and despite her pretensions of tigerhood, Julie was no different. Yes, tigers have stripes; so do tabbies. If you want to know the difference, try tossing one of each into your swimming pool. Then I would recommend running.
“I don’t,” she said, sullenly.
“I do,” Ross said. Some of the tension slipped out of Julie’s shoulders and she smiled, giving me a “what can you do?” shrug. I grinned back. Cliff taught me a lot about the sort of attitude changes you sometimes have to pull midstream if you want to keep peace in a relationship. I was starting to think this Ross guy was something more than a casual fling.
The Cait Sidhe don’t fall in love often; mostly, they get involved in short, torrid affairs that don’t mean anything to either side, and they never fall in love with changelings if they can help it. It’s easier that way. Falling in love with someone that’s going to get old and die while you live forever isn’t a survival trait, and so they’ve learned to keep their distance . . . but all that means is that when they finally fall, they fall hard. Julie’s only half Cait Sidhe, but I’d never seen her look at anyone the way she was looking at Ross. I studied him with a bit more interest, trying to puzzle out where his fae blood had come from.
He must have been used to those sorts of looks, because he smiled, and said, “My mother’s father was one of the Roane.”
“Oh, I see,” I said. The Roane are gentler cousins to the Selkies. They aren’t as inclined to vengeance, and their magic is innate—they’re shapeshifters, like the Cait Sidhe, not skinshifters like the Selkies. They’re also practically extinct.
Julie flashed another grin my way. “He’s my guy.”
“That’s cool,” I said. The light was getting brighter as we approached the street, where my taxi was hopefully waiting. I wanted to go home, drink a gallon of orange juice, and eat something before I started calling people to let them know I was alive. I grimaced. Sylvester had to be in a state of utter panic, and Devin probably wasn’t much better.
A branch snapped behind us. I whirled, wincing as the bandage on my shoulder pulled the edges of the still raw gunshot wound together. There was nothing there. I still stood there for a moment before turning back to my bewildered escort, taking the time as much to catch my breath as to scan the darkness for danger.
Julie looked amused, but Ross looked terrified. Trying to be soothing, I said, “I’m just jumpy.”
“I don’t smell anything,” Julie said, “but the wind is blowing away from us. I don’t think we’re being followed.” Ross looked at her nervously, and the tiger-striped changeling smiled. “It’s okay, sweetie, we’re cool. You’ve got me and Tobes with you. What could happen?”
Never tempt fate. It plays for keeps. I started to turn when I heard the second branch snap—and it was closer now, so much closer—but I already knew that I wouldn’t be fast enough. You’re never fast enough when the danger is real.
The gunshot sounded like thunder.
Ross screamed. I didn’t look back, not even when Julie started snarling like the tiger she pretended to be. There wasn’t time to worry about them; there was barely time to react. I already knew what had happened, and I cursed myself for a fool even as I ducked, letting the second shot pass over my head. The Redcap who tried to kill me earlier saw me get on the bus. After that, it was just a matter of following the trail to Lily’s door and waiting for me to come out again. We’d walked right into his trap.
He was standing on the open ground between us and the street below, gun drawn, fog swirling thick around his ankles. Six and a half feet of muscle and grinni
ng, shark-toothed malice would have been enough to give me pause even without the gun . . . but having it definitely upgraded him from “possible threat” to “probable cause of death.”
I was standing frozen, trying to figure out what to do when Julie hurtled over my head with a snarl, turning in midair to hit him feetfirst in the chest. He staggered back, batting her aside like a house cat. She hit the ground still snarling, bouncing back to her feet and glancing to me. I knew my cue when I saw it. Julie and I fought beside each other when we both worked for Devin; we’d even been pretty good at it. I knew how she would move. She knew how I would dodge. And tag-team tactics are your best bet when you’re as outgunned as we were.
It’s hard to pay attention to more than one person at a time—that’s why gangs have such an advantage in most fights. I pulled my arm back as I charged, punching the bastard in the side of the head as hard as I could. The rebound ran all the way along my arm, and I bit back a scream as I felt something rip. Still, it had the desired effect, because he snarled and turned toward me, raising his gun. That gave Julie the opening she needed to hit him again, shrieking and spitting as she clawed at his eyes. It’s never good to be a single person fighting off a gang. Unless you take them out as they appear, your opponents will just keep bouncing back and getting in the way.
Unfortunately for us, he was catching on. He swung at Julie, and she ducked out of the way, timing her dodge to match my next blow—but rather than turning his attention toward me, he adjusted his aim so that his gun was pointed directly between her eyes. She froze, eyes going wide and frightened. I don’t think anyone had ever pointed a gun at her before, and at that sort of range, he didn’t even need to be accurate: all he had to do was pull the trigger.
Wincing, I braced to hit him again. It wouldn’t hurt him, but it might get him to look away long enough for Julie to dodge. He was a goon, and goons don’t usually get the job because of their brains. If we kept switching off, we might be able to keep either of us from being shot before we had a plan, and that struck me as a good idea. Changelings don’t take as much damage from iron as the purebloods, but any sort of bullet can ruin an otherwise good day.