The Brightest Fell Read online

  “They’re going to make me sing,” I said.

  “Probably,” he agreed, taking another sip of his cocktail. “But you know what?”

  “What?”

  “We’ve been here for three hours and you ain’t had to bleed on nothin’.” His grin was broad enough to show his back molars. “If we can make it another hour, you and I set a new personal best, and Quentin owes me twenty dollars.”

  I lowered my beer bottle in order to gape at him. “You’re betting on me?”

  “Oh, please. As if you didn’t know that going in.”

  “I suspected, but I didn’t think any of you would be stupid enough to admit it to my face.”

  Danny kept grinning, unrepentant to the last.

  We weren’t the only people in The Mint. Aside from the bar staff—mortals all, although given where they worked, they probably saw weirder groups than ours on a regular basis—and the karaoke DJ, there were about twenty regulars who had yet to give up and surrender their places in the karaoke rotation. May had planned the party for a Tuesday night because of the bar’s popularity: if it had been a Saturday, those twenty regulars would have been fifty or more, and it would have been a lot harder to get to the bar for a beer.

  I needed my beer. I needed a lot of beer. Thanks to my specific flavor of fae heritage, I heal at an incredible rate. Sadly, that means I can’t get drunk without really putting in an effort, and even if I manage it, I can’t stay that way; my hyper-efficient liver sobers me right up. By drinking almost constantly, I could stay mellow enough not to flee screaming into the night. If I stopped, sobriety would reassert itself, along with the true horror of my situation.

  All things considered, I might have been happier getting covered in blood, the betting pool be damned.

  May finished her song to scattered applause, some of it more sincere than the rest, and hopped off the stage to sweep Jazz into her arms and kiss her deeply. That got more applause from the regulars, who clearly appreciated a good floor show. I took another swig of beer.

  “Next up, we have . . .” The DJ squinted at the slip of paper in his hand. “Diana, come on down.”

  I choked on my beer.

  “No,” I said, refusing the evidence of my own eyes as Dianda Lorden got up and took the microphone, to general cheers from the people at her table. She was wearing a short blue-and-green–sequined dress that showed off the legs she normally doesn’t have. It was weird. I didn’t like it. “How does she even know what karaoke is? I call shenanigans.”

  Danny smirked.

  Dianda is several things. Cheerfully violent. The Duchess of Saltmist. A frequent ally of mine. And, oh right, a mermaid—specifically, a Merrow—which means she lives under the Pacific Ocean and doesn’t have that many opportunities for exposure to human culture. I’d been surprised when she’d shown up at all. I certainly hadn’t been expecting her to sing.

  I definitely hadn’t been expecting her to sing Phil Collins.

  “I really don’t know how to deal with this,” I said, staring at the stage.

  Danny plucked the empty beer bottle from my hand and replaced it with a fresh one. One nice thing about being the bachelorette: even if I was being forced to watch essentially everyone I knew play pop star while wearing illusions designed to make them look human, at least someone else was picking up my tab. I could drink until I forgot why I needed to keep drinking, let myself sober up, then do it all over again.

  “So don’t deal with it,” he said. “She’s pretty good. Have another beer.”

  “All my friends are awful and I hate you,” I said, handing the beer back to him as I slid off my stool. “Save my place. I need to pee before I do any more drinking.”

  “You got it,” he said, and settled in to loom menacingly over my stool. The few people who’d been looking at it thoughtfully backed off, recognizing a lost cause when they saw one.

  The Mint is designed to prioritize karaoke over alcohol, with the bar dividing the entryway—which served as a space for the serious drinkers to do their serious drinking—from the stage and performance space. The entryway side is narrow to the point of being a claustrophobic panic waiting to happen, and naturally, that’s where the bathrooms are, since that makes a poorly-timed flush less likely to disrupt someone’s Sondheim medley. I pushed through the crowd toward the back of the bar, feeling my buzz dwindle with every step I took.

  Sometimes it’s nice to have a Timex watch for a body—I can take a licking and keep on ticking. But when I can’t stay drunk for more than ten minutes, or get enough of a jolt from a cup of coffee to actually wake myself up, it sort of sucks. It would be nice to be impossible to kill and capable of reaping the benefits of caffeine, but alas, we can’t have everything in this world.

  There was a short line for the two unisex bathrooms. I took advantage of the opportunity to check my phone. It was barely past midnight. We’d been here for three hours, and May had stated, several times, that she intended to close the place out.

  Swell.

  Dianda hit a high note; someone whooped. It was probably her son, Dean, who was refreshingly not embarrassed by everything his mother did. They have a remarkably solid relationship, one that has only been strengthened by him moving out to take over the County of Goldengreen. His father, Patrick, is Daoine Sidhe, and Dean takes after his father’s side of the family, which means he can’t breathe water. Dianda clearly misses him, and every time I see her, she’s just as clearly relieved not to have to spend her time worrying about whether he’s going to drown.

  Faerie makes families complicated. Mermaids have sons who can’t breathe water. High Kings and Queens send their children into hiding to keep them from being assassinated before they reach their majority. Fetches become sisters.

  People like me, who mix their fae blood with human ancestry, wind up standing on the outside looking in, wondering what it’s like to have two parents who know and accept them for who—and what—they are. My father died a long time ago, and he died believing that my mother and I had been killed in a house fire. My mother . . .

  Well, it’s complicated.

  The bathroom door opened, and Kerry came wobbling out, a broad grin on her face. “Bachelorette party, woo!” she cheered, before pressing a wet kiss to my cheek and weaving away into the crowd. I smiled after her and slipped inside.

  When I emerged from the bathroom several minutes later, Dianda had finished her song, and Quentin and Dean were on stage, gamely making their way through “One Week” by the Barenaked Ladies. I stopped to stare for a moment. Then I pushed my way back through the crowd to my stool, which Danny had managed to hold open during my absence.

  I sat. He handed back my beer.

  “This is a good time,” he said. “Stop looking like you expect to be ambushed.”

  “Have you met me?” I asked. “I’m always expecting to be ambushed, and I’m rarely wrong.” I looked around the crowd. So many of the faces were familiar, even under the veils of their human disguises. “But we’ll probably have them outnumbered.”

  Danny smirked.

  Four years ago, after I woke up naked, confused, and freezing in the Japanese Tea Gardens, I would have sworn I didn’t have a friend left in the world. My human fiancé had moved on with his life after my unexpected, unexplainable disappearance had stretched into fourteen years; my two-year-old daughter had grown up calling another woman “Mommy.” I’d tried to go home to them. Neither of them had wanted me there. They had moved on, and I still couldn’t give them any answers about where I’d been. When the fae and mortal worlds collide, someone always suffers.

  The changelings I’d known on the streets of San Francisco had viewed me as a lapdog of the nobility, thanks to my service to Duke Torquill of Shadowed Hills, while the nobility had viewed me as a failure, thanks to the circumstances of my disappearance. Everyone had gotten on with their lives while mine had
been on hold . . . or at least that was how it had seemed at the time.

  I was never as alone as I’d believed myself to be. If I had been, I wouldn’t have needed to work so hard to isolate myself from the people who still cared about me. But that didn’t change how I’d felt at the time. I’d thought my life was over. I’d thought I would die alone.

  Instead, I was in a jam-packed karaoke bar, listening to my friends whoop and laugh while my squire and his boyfriend belted out a late-90s pop hit. Most of the people here were here for me. To celebrate the fact that I was getting married—finally—to the man who’d taught me that moving on was possible, no matter how improbable it had seemed, once upon a time. They were here because my life was moving on, and I was moving with it.

  “I’m still not going to sing,” I said, and took a swig of my beer.

  Danny laughed.

  When May had informed me that I was going to have a bachelorette party whether I wanted one or not, I’d drawn the line at one very important point: it was going to be open to any of my friends who wanted to attend. I wasn’t going to lock out the men in my life just because she wanted to throw me a party out of a Miss Manners handbook.

  To my relief, she had agreed to my demand, in part, I think, because she knew Quentin would kill her if he didn’t get to come. Technically, he and Dean were both too young to be here, but they had human disguises that made them look like they were in their mid-twenties, and no squire of mine was going to walk around not knowing how to get a fake ID. Given that Dianda is at least two hundred years old and still using an ID that says she’s twenty-two, it seemed like one of the lesser lies of the evening.

  Raj, Tybalt’s nephew and heir, would normally have been present, since he and Quentin are functionally joined at the hip, but he was staying with his uncle for the night, keeping Tybalt company and learning more of what he’d need to know when he became King of Cats. Once Tybalt and I were married, he’d need to step down in order to avoid a situation where his family and his crown came into conflict. Raj was only eighteen. He was still ready to serve his people. Thank Oberon for that. I don’t know if I could have handled the guilt if he’d been taking the throne unwillingly.

  The rest of the room was a weird cross-section of the local fae courts. In addition to Dianda, we had Queen Arden Windermere in the Mists and her Seneschal Madden, both of whom were pureblooded fae, and both of whom had been recognized by the bartender when we arrived; my changeling friends Stacy and Kerry, and Stacy’s daughter, Cassandra; Danny, who was pureblooded but associated with no noble courts; Jazz and May, and a good dozen others.

  The only person who’d refused the invitation was Sir Etienne of Shadowed Hills, who sent his regrets, enough money to buy two rounds for the whole party, and his human wife Bridget. She was sharing a table with Marcia, both laughing as they pored over the book of song options. Thick rings of faerie ointment surrounded their eyes, letting them see through the illusions around them. They may as well not have bothered. For once, everyone was on an equal playing field, and everyone was enjoying it.

  Quentin and Dean finished their song. The applause was more enthusiastic than it had been for May, probably because both boys had managed to stay within a reasonable distance of the right key for the entire song. It wasn’t that we were musical snobs. We just enjoyed our ears not actively bleeding.

  “All right, all right,” said the DJ. “Next up, we have Annie. Annie to the stage!”

  “Arden’s going to punch him in the nose for getting her name wrong,” I said, and took another swig of my beer.

  “Uh,” said Danny. “That ain’t Arden.”

  I turned. A dark-haired woman in tattered jeans and a white tank top was walking toward the stage. She didn’t look familiar. I shrugged.

  “We’re not the only people here,” I said. “Everybody gets a chance to sing if they want it, right? She’ll be done in a few minutes.”

  “Don’t you recognize her?”

  “No. Should I?”

  Danny looked frustrated. “I dunno. She looks familiar, but I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen her before.”

  I frowned, first at him and then at the woman. There was no sparkle in the air around her; she wasn’t wearing an illusion. She was, however, wearing one of May’s glittery red-and-silver “Bachelorette Backup” buttons pinned to the left strap of her tank top, marking her as either part of our group or as an opportunistic stranger who was hoping to get some cake.

  The music started. I felt the blood run out of my face, leaving me cold.

  “Oh, oak and ash,” I said. “This isn’t happening.”

  I wasn’t the only one to have that thought. Quentin pushed through the crowd to stand on my other side, trying to snatch the beer away from me. I slapped his hand. It wasn’t that I specifically objected to underage drinking—especially since he was of legal age in Canada, where he comes from—it was that I really, really needed my beer.

  “That’s the Luidaeg,” he said, sounding dazed.

  “Uh-huh,” I agreed.

  “That’s the Luidaeg, singing ‘Poor Unfortunate Souls.’ In a karaoke bar. In front of other people.”

  “Uh-huh,” I agreed again. Doing anything else seemed impossible. Well, except for maybe drinking my beer. Drinking my beer, I could do. I drank some of my beer.

  The Luidaeg did not disappear. The Luidaeg remained on the stage, belting out the sea witch’s song from Disney’s The Little Mermaid. Given that the Luidaeg is the sea witch according to every legend I’ve ever heard, the overall effect was more than a little jarring.

  “We’re gonna need more beer,” said Danny.

  May flounced through the crowd and wedged herself between us, beaming from ear to ear. “Didn’t I tell you this would be the best place to hold your bachelorette party?” she demanded. “Tell me I’m a genius. Go on, tell me. I promise not to argue with you.”

  “The Luidaeg is singing,” I said, in case she hadn’t noticed. May can be a little flighty sometimes. It was possible she’d been too focused on her need for another cocktail to realize that we were witnessing one of the portents of the apocalypse. “The Luidaeg is singing Disney songs.”

  “Because I’m a genius,” said May. She leaned over the bar, waving to the bartender until he nodded and flashed her a thumbs-up. Then she rocked back to the flats of her feet, looking obscenely pleased with herself. “You can say it.”

  “I didn’t even know you invited her.”

  “Uh, duh, I had to? It’s the Sleeping Beauty principle. You always invite the biggest badass on the block, or they show up later and curse everybody just to make a point. Besides, she’s having fun. We’re all having fun.”

  “Not all of us,” I said, nodding toward Dianda.

  The Duchess of Saltmist was staring at the Luidaeg, hands clasped so tightly around her beer bottle that I was worried about her crushing it and getting broken glass everywhere. The Luidaeg used to spend most of her time in the Undersea, which only makes sense for someone whose most frequently used title is “sea witch.” She stopped after the slaughter of the Roane—better known as her children and grandchildren. So far as I know, she’s lived on the land ever since.

  This might have been the closest Dianda had ever been to the Undersea’s most powerful, most legendary Firstborn. She was looking at the Luidaeg the way I would have expected her to look at Oberon himself, if he’d still been around to be seen.

  May sighed. “She needs to take a deep breath and remember that you and the Luidaeg are friends.” A fresh cocktail appeared by her elbow. This one was as green as Danny’s was pink, and garnished with several wedges of fresh kiwi.

  I eyed it. “I’m not sure what’s more disturbing. This party or that drink.”

  “Both. Neither. Everything.” May grinned. “You’re having fun, October. Just relax and let yourself enjoy it. You never go out and just have fun anym
ore, and I’ll be damned before I let you march off to your own wedding like it was your execution.”

  “I’ve been sentenced to death before, and I assure you, nothing I do with Tybalt is nearly as unpleasant,” I said.

  Danny laughed. “I don’t wanna know what you and the kitty-cat get up to when I’m not around,” he said. “That’s the sort of thing that should be between two consentin’ adults, and not their designated driver.”

  “I don’t need a designated driver,” I protested. “My body burns alcohol so fast I can’t even stay drunk for more than five minutes at a time. And the house is barely more than a mile away.”

  “Don’t care,” said Danny. “I have a taxi for a reason. Driving the bride-to-be around is part of it.”

  I considered pointing out the ridiculousness of a man who’d consumed six pink cocktails claiming to be my designated driver, and decided against it. Danny probably weighs upward of six hundred pounds, and most of his body is made up of something close to, if not identical to, granite. I’m not sure he can get drunk. I’m absolutely sure that if he can, he wasn’t going to manage it on less than several gallons of straight whiskey. He was still perfectly safe behind the wheel.

  Instead, I said, “I’d prefer it if you’d drive the bride’s drunk friends home.”

  Danny grinned. “That’s a compromise I can live with.”

  The Luidaeg finished her song. Everyone clapped. If the applause from the other members of our party was a little more enthusiastic than her performance warranted, well, who could blame them? Failure to properly appreciate one of the Firstborn was probably bad for silly things like “continuing to have a pulse.”

  The DJ called a name. An actual stranger this time, someone whose song choice wasn’t going to make me choke on my drink or otherwise lose my composure. I took advantage of the break to turn and smile wryly at May.

  “All right, you got me,” I said. “You were right, and I was wrong: I am having a good time. This is a good party. I bow before your infinite wisdom.”