Late Eclipses Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  ONE - April 30th, 2011

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Teaser chapter

  Praise for the October Daye Novels

  “The brisk pacing, the effective mix of human and magical characters, and the PI ambience all make this an excellent choice for fans of Butcher��s Harry Dresden series. . . . Toby’s unusual heritage and her uneasy relationships with her mother’s family will remind readers of Brigg’s Mercy Thompson series, and Thompson fans will appreciate Toby’s tough and self-reliant character. This outstanding first novel is a must for fans of genre-bending blends of crime and fantasy.”

  —Booklist starred review

  “McGuire successfully blends Robert B. Parker-like detective fiction with love and loss, faith and betrayal—and plenty of violence.... Rosemary and Rue will have readers clamoring for the next genre-bending installment.”

  —www.bookpage.com

  “Well researched, sharply told, highly atmospheric and as brutal as any pulp detective tale ... sure to appeal to fans of Jim Butcher or Kim Harrison.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “October Daye is as gritty and damaged a heroine as Kinsey Millhone or Kay Scarpetta . . . an engaging narrator who promises to sustain as long a series as McGuire might wish to write. . . . Toby’s nocturnal existence is full of the kind of shadows that keep the pages turning. Changelings, like all faerie folk, live long; may McGuire and these novels do the same.”

  —The Onion A.V. Club

  “Second in an urban fantasy detective series featuring a resourceful female detective, this sequel to Rosemary and Rue should appeal to fans of Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files as well as the novels of Charlaine Harris, Patricia Briggs, and similar authors.”

  —Library Journal

  “It’s fun watching [Toby] stick doggedly to the case as the killer picks off more victims and the tension mounts.”

  —Locus

  “A gripping, well-paced read. Toby continues to be an enjoyable, if complex and strong-willed protagonist who recognizes no authority but her own. McGuire has more than a few surprises up her sleeve for the reader.”

  —Romantic Times Book Review (4 Stars)

  DAW Books Presents Seanan McGuire’s October Daye Novels:

  ROSEMARY AND RUE

  A LOCAL HABITATION

  AN ARTIFICIAL NIGHT

  LATE ECLIPSES

  ONE SALT SEA

  (September 2011)

  Copyright © 2011 by Seanan McGuire.

  All Rights Reserved.

  Interior dingbat created by Tara O’Shea.

  DAW Book Collectors No. 1541.

  DAW Books are distributed by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-50253-2

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Nearly all the designs and trade names in this book are registered trademarks. All that are still in commercial use are protected by United States and international trademark law.

  First Printing, March 2011

  DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED

  U.S. PAT. AND TM. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES

  —MARCA REGISTRADA

  HECHO EN U.S.A.

  S.A.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  This book is for Amy. Everyone should have a fiddler at the crossroads.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:

  Late Eclipses is the fourth of Toby’s adventures. You’d think it would be getting easier, right? I sure did. But the fact of the matter is, books remain a lot of work, no matter how many of them you write, and making them worth reading is the work of many hands. For me, those many hands begin with the faithful Machete Squad, a tireless team of heavily-armed and merciless editors who go through every chapter a dozen times before it becomes ready for prime time. Without them, I would be in a lot of trouble. Special thanks to Jennifer Midkiff, for scrupulous editorial attentions, and to Melissa Glasser, for being my “on-call vet” for weird questions about fae biology. Also, thanks to everyone at the Ohio Valley Filk Festival, who tolerantly allowed me to do copyedits during open filking.

  On the publishing side of things, my agent, Diana Fox, saved my sanity and my sense of narrative on several occasions, all while continuing to rock like the superhero she is, and my editor, Sheila Gilbert, offered support, critique, and everything else a girl could possibly want. The rest of the team at DAW was just as fabulous, although special thanks go to Joshua Starr, who puts up with most of my random mid-week questions. Chris McGrath provided my fantastic cover, and Tara O’Shea provided my fantastic interior dingbat. I seriously could not have done this without them.

  Here at home, my website was programmed and designed by Chris Mangum and Tara O’Shea, who gamely rose to every challenge I threw their way, even the insane ones. Kate Secor talked me through the big plot snarls, while her Tivo prevented me from destroying all mankind. Meanwhile, Michelle Dockrey and Brooke Lunderville helped me through everything else. Thanks to Tanya Huff, for San Diego, and to Jennifer Brozek, Jeanne Goldfein, and Cat Valente, for Melbourne. You guys made everything better. Finally, thanks to my cats, Lilly and Alice, for understanding that sometimes their monkey needs to stop petting them in order to type.

  My personal soundtrack while writing Late Eclipses consisted mostly of Promised Land, by Dar Williams, Little Voice, by Sarah Bareilles, endless live concert recordings of the Counting Crows, and all of the soundtracks to Glee. Any errors in this book are entirely my own. The errors that aren’t here are the ones that all these people helped me fix.

  Thank you all so much for reading. It means the world to me.

  PRONUNCIATION GUIDE:

  All pronunciations are given strictly phonetically. This only covers races explicitly named in the first four books.

  Bannick: ban-nick. Plural is Bannicks.

  Banshee: ban-shee. Plural is Banshees.

  Barghest: bar-guy-st. Plural is Barghests.

  Barrow Wight: bar-row white. Plural is Barrow Wights.

  Blodynbryd: blow-din-brid. Plural is Blodynbryds.

  Cait Sidhe: kay-th shee. Plural is Cait Sidhe.

  Candela: can-dee-la. Plural is Candela.

  Coblynau: cob-lee-now. Plural is Coblynau.

  Cornish Pixie: Corn-ish pix-ee. Plural is Cornish Pixies.

  Daoine Sidhe: doon-ya shee. Plural is Daoine Sidhe, diminutive is Daoine.

&nbs
p; Djinn: jin. Plural is Djinn.

  Dóchas Sidhe: doe-sh-as shee. Plural is Dóchas Sidhe.

  Ellyllon: el-lee-lawn. Plural is Ellyllons.

  Gean-Cannah: gee-ann can-na. Plural is Gean-Cannah.

  Glastig: glass-tig. Plural is Glastigs.

  Gwragen: guh-war-a-gen. Plural is Gwragen.

  Hamadryad: ha-ma-dry-add. Plural is Hamadryads.

  Hippocampus: hip-po-cam-pus. Plural is Hippocampi.

  Hob: hob. Plural is Hobs.

  Kelpie: kel-pee. Plural is Kelpies.

  Kitsune: kit-soo-nay. Plural is Kitsune.

  Lamia: lay-me-a. Plural is Lamia.

  The Luidaeg: the lou-sha-k. No plural exists.

  Manticore: man-tee-core. Plural is Manticores.

  Naiad: nigh-add. Plural is Naiads.

  Nixie: nix-ee. Plural is Nixen.

  Peri: pear-ee. Plural is Peri.

  Piskie: piss-key. Plural is Piskies.

  Pixie: pix-ee. Plural is Pixies.

  Puca: puh-ca. Plural is Pucas.

  Roane: row-n. Plural is Roane.

  Satyr: say-tur. Plural is Satyrs.

  Selkie: sell-key. Plural is Selkies.

  Silene: sigh-lean. Plural is Silene.

  Swanmay: swan-may. Plural is Swanmays.

  Tuatha de Dannan. tootha day danan. Plural is Tuatha de Dannan, diminutive is Tuatha.

  Tylwyth Teg: till-with teeg. Plural is Tylwyth Teg, diminutive is Tylwyth.

  Undine: un-deen. Plural is Undine.

  Urisk: you-risk. Plural is Urisk.

  Will o’ Wisps: will-oh wisps. Plural is Will o’ Wisps.

  ONE

  April 30th, 2011

  These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend

  No good to us: though the wisdom of nature can

  Reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds itself

  Scourged by the sequent effects: love cools,

  Friendship falls off, brothers divide: in

  Cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in

  Palaces, treason; and the bond cracked ’twixt son

  And father . . .

  —William Shakespeare, King Lear

  THE DOWNTOWN SAN FRANCISCO SAFEWAY was practically deserted. No surprise there, given that it was nearly one in the morning. May—my Fetch and current roommate—was in the produce department, tormenting the resident pixies. Their shrieks of irritation were almost enough to distract me from the task at hand. Almost; not quite. We had a mission, and I was, by Oberon, going to accomplish it.

  Glancing along the row of cereals, I considered my options with exquisite care before reaching out and grabbing a box of Lucky Charms. The stuff’s delicious when you combine it with enough coffee, even if it does mean putting up with that stupid cartoon leprechaun. I hesitated before taking a second box. It’s not every night that I get to splurge.

  My name’s Toby Daye. I’m half-fae, half-human, and depressingly excited by the idea of being able to pay for name-brand cereal.

  The empty Safeway was doing wonders for my mood. I hate shopping where I used to work, and the last thing I wanted to do after spending three days on stakeout was deal with my former coworkers. They seemed to share the sentiment, since they’d all vanished into the back as soon as they saw me. That was cool with me. I wasn’t friendly when I worked at the store—“hostile” is a more accurate description—and I didn’t “quit” so much as “walk out and never come back.”

  I wasn’t meant to be a checkout girl. I probably wasn’t meant to do anything that involves dealing with the public, which makes my career choice of “private investigator-slash-knight errant” all the more ironic. Still, when you live in the shady borderland between Faerie and the mortal world, neither beggars nor changelings can be choosers.

  The stakeout was for the first of my two vocations, the one that lets me pay the bills with a telephoto lens and a minimum of magic. My employer was a Silene who wanted to know where her husband was spending his spare time. Silene are horses from the waist down: sturdy, practical, and jealous as hell. She should never have married a Satyr if she didn’t want him looking at other women, since that’s basically what Satyrs are built to do. Her suspicions weren’t unfounded: her goat-boy husband was getting a little extramarital action from the Hind two streets over, a doe-eyed lady if there ever was one. A couple of nights in the car, a few incriminating photos, and I was in the rare position of being able to pay for groceries.

  The lack of clerks wasn’t a problem, thanks to my shopping companions. May was racing through the store fast enough that she might as well have been on roller skates. Our mutual friend, Danny, was moving more sedately; it’s just that he was doing it while being more than seven feet tall. He’s not actually all that big, for a Bridge Troll, but he’s good for getting things off of high shelves.

  “Hey!” May jogged toward me with an armload of cantaloupes. She dumped them unceremoniously into the cart, without regard for what might be crushed in the process. “Did you know there were pixies in the produce section?”

  “Yes, and so did you.” I tapped my temple. No one’s ever quite figured out what makes Fetches appear, but when they do, they come equipped with all the memories of the person they mirror. They’re death omens; once a Fetch with your face shows up, your days are supposed to be numbered. Lucky for me, May has about as much innate interest in following rules as I do, and she’s actually saved my life on at least one occasion. As far as I know, I’m the first person to live more than a month past the arrival of a Fetch—and I’m definitely the first person to ask their Fetch to move in.

  May’s store of borrowed memories includes my mind-numbing stint as a Safeway checkout girl. That’s not a period of my life I like to dwell on, although the cynic in me insists on pointing out that fewer people were trying to kill me in those days. And yet, without all those attempts on my life, I wouldn’t have needed a Fetch, and I’d have missed out on May’s excellent vegetarian lasagna. There’s a bright side to everything.

  May pouted. Yet another expression never worn by my face until the universe decided to make a copy of it. “You take the fun out of everything.”

  “That’s me,” I agreed. “Toby Daye, assassin of fun.”

  “You should put that on your business cards,” said Danny, chuckling as he came around the corner. I promptly elbowed him. I just as promptly winced, making him chuckle even more. Bridge Trolls have skin like granite. Hitting them is a good way to break a knuckle.

  I glowered. “Not funny.”

  “I disagree,” said May amiably.

  “Oh, go get the bread,” I said.

  “On it!” She saluted before zipping off again.

  Danny gave me a sidelong look. “You okay? You seem tense.”

  “It’s the store.” I shook my head. “I know this is the best place to get groceries, but there’s a reason I mostly live on things that come from drive-thru windows.”

  “Maybe that’s why you got a Fetch. She’s the nutrition fairy, here to punish you for all those double cheeseburgers.”

  “Well, that explains why she keeps trying to make me eat salad.” I started dropping boxes of Pop-Tarts into the cart. Danny rolled his eyes and moved pointedly toward the granola bars.

  I wasn’t always a connoisseur of fast food hamburgers and microwave burritos. I’ve never been a very good cook—my ex-fiancé once compared my meatloaf to roadkill—but I used to make more of an effort. Then my liege lord asked me for a “little favor” and I wound up spending fourteen years as an enchanted fish. It was difficult to work up any enthusiasm about learning to make a casserole after that.

  Curses and contradictions are the story of a changeling’s life, mine maybe more than most. Changelings aren’t stolen human children; we’re crossbreeds, born to both worlds, belonging fully to neither. My mother was fae, and my father . . . well, wasn’t. I was raised human until Mom’s family found us and hauled us off to the Summerlands. Mom didn’t want to go, and she mostly raised me through negle
ct after that. I ran away as soon as I thought I was old enough, and immediately fell in with a bad crowd. It’s a sadly common story, but I got lucky. Good luck and good friends got me out of a bad situation, and I swore fealty to Sylvester Torquill, a man who didn’t care how mixed-up my blood was. I met a human man, fell in love, and made my mother’s mistakes all over again, even down to deserting my own little girl. Like mother, like daughter.

  May eyed the Pop-Tarts as she returned with the bread. “Do we really need those?”

  “They’re part of a balanced breakfast.”

  “In what reality?”

  “Mine.” I grabbed another box of Pop-Tarts. “Danny, we got everything?”

  “We do,” he said, and lifted the three industrial-sized bags of cat litter from the floor, hoisting them with ease. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “That assumes we can get somebody to ring us up.” I started pushing the cart forward. “We could be reduced to shoplifting if my former coworkers stay in hiding.”

  “That’s our girl.” Danny patted my shoulder with one huge hand, nearly knocking me off my feet. “Making friends wherever she goes.”

  “Something like that,” I muttered.

  May can be as susceptible to colorful displays as any six-year-old; she tossed five candy bars into the cart while we waited in the checkout lane. I raised an eyebrow. “Do you need that much chocolate?”

  “You get to criticize the amount of chocolate I eat when I get to criticize the amount of coffee you drink.”

  I wrinkled my nose. “Low blow.”

  “Yet so well aimed.”

  The door to the employee break room opened, and Pete—the night manager and my former boss—started toward us, expression suggesting that he’d just bitten into something sour. He usually looked like that when he had to interact with customers. That the customers included me was just a bonus.