Rosemary and Rue od-1 Page 8

  “Your Majesty . . .” She raised her hand, pale fingers shaking as she warded my words away. I quieted, waiting for her to compose herself before I continued, saying, “Your Majesty, she charged me to find the cause of her death. May I ask . . .”

  “No.”

  I stopped, surprised. I’d expected a lot of things. I hadn’t expected her to refuse me. “Your Majesty?”

  “No, October Daye, daughter of Amandine.” The Queen lifted her head, jaw set. “I will not help you, and we will speak of this no more. What’s done is done; when the moon is high, we will dance for her, and until that day, no one here will speak the name of the Winterrose, and after that day, no one will speak her name again. I will not help you . . . and you will not ask me to.”

  “But . . .”

  “No. Amandine’s daughter or no, I will not give you what you would ask me for. I would refuse you and be damned before I did such a thing.” She shook her head. “I have done enough for you down the years; there are no debts between us, and I will not help you now.”

  Not even being slapped would have surprised me more. “But, my lady, Evening was murdered, with iron—”

  “Don’t tell me how she died!” I rocked back on my heels, clapping my hands over my ears in a vain attempt to block out the voice of the Queen. Maybe time had diluted the blood of her Banshee and Siren ancestors enough that her scream wasn’t fatal, but I’ve never been much for roulette. “Don’t tell me!”

  The Court was buzzing again, but this time, their whispers were directed at the Queen. She was shaking where she stood, eyes gone moonstruck-mad with fury. Her rage might have been impressive if it was focused on something else, but it was focused on me, and that made it terrifying. Humanity has instincts that kick in around the fae, forcing them to be good and humble. Changelings don’t get the full brunt, but we get some of it, until sometimes even our own parents can scare us away. I backed up several steps, dropping a hasty curtsy. “Your Majesty, if we’re done, I . . .”

  “Get out!” She snapped her head from side to side, an unearthly wail seeping into her voice. “Now!”

  I didn’t need another invitation. Whirling, I ran toward the far wall, and through it, back into the darkness of the cave on the other side. My shoes were made for dancing, not running over seawater-slippery rocks. After the third time I nearly fell, I pulled them off, carrying them in the hand that wasn’t being used to keep my skirt as far out of the water as possible. Bruising my feet was a small price to pay if it meant I could get away from the queen before she decided to shut me up herself, or worse, forbid me to involve myself in Evening’s murder.

  The air outside the cave was so cold that running into the open was like being slapped. It didn’t matter; I didn’t stop. I ran across the beach, stopping only when I hit the pavement, and there only long enough to put my shoes back on. My original clothes hadn’t come back, and I doubted they would—the Queen is strong enough that a transformation of the inanimate was likely to be forever. I didn’t care. I kept running.

  SIX

  MY CAR HADN’T BEEN DISTURBED. I dug the spare key from under the bumper and fumbled with the lock until I managed to stop the shaking in my fingers and get the door open. I climbed into the driver’s seat, nearly slamming the trailing hem of my dress in the door as I closed it and started the engine. Evening’s liege wouldn’t help me. This wasn’t a mortal problem. Mortal tools wouldn’t solve it, and my camera wasn’t going to save my ass this time. The police could study Evening’s “body” forever if they wanted to, but a lot of the fae don’t leave fingerprints. They’d never find anything, and that meant there wouldn’t be anything I could steal from them.

  Slamming my human disguise back into place, so that I just looked like a hard-used brunette in a party gown, I slumped in the driver’s seat and scowled. I needed to look at things from a different direction. Maybe I couldn’t do anything as an investigator, but as a knight . . . there are resources in Faerie that don’t exist in the human world, and this was a faerie crime. I could solve it, if I found the right spells and called in the right favors. But still . . . I’m just a changeling. Evening was ten times more powerful than I’ll ever be. Whatever took her down wasn’t just lucky; it had to have been strong, too, or it wouldn’t have scared her that way. That meant I needed some power of my own, or I wouldn’t stand a chance.

  Asking the Queen for help after she’d all but thrown me out of her knowe might be rude enough to get me killed. Dying wasn’t part of my plan for solving the case—it was bad enough that it might be the price of failure—and that meant our Lady of the Mists was actually a hindrance, because if I got in her way, I wouldn’t have time to run. There were other Courts and nobles I could go to, but only a few had the resources I’d need, and of the choices I had, only two didn’t leave me cold. I wanted to get out alive, and that ruled out both Blind Michael and the Tarans of the Berkeley Hills. I considered the Luidaeg, but cast that thought aside as quickly as it had come. Some things are worse than dying.

  I couldn’t go to Lily. I just couldn’t. That wasn’t as self-involved as it sounds; Lily’s an Undine, and she’s tied to her knowe. Unless Evening’s killers sat in the Tea Gardens discussing what they were about to do, she wouldn’t be able to help me anyway.

  Sylvester would help me if I went to him.Sylvester would insist on being the one to help me, and I couldn’t take it. I’d have to go to him eventually—he’d have to know that Evening was gone, and he was my liege; it was my duty to make sure he knew—but I couldn’t go until I was going to be able to say, “It’s all right, I have help, I don’t need you.” I could stand a lot of things, but I wasn’t ready for the idea of him being able to make me come back.

  If I couldn’t trust the Queen, and I couldn’t turn to Sylvester, there was really only one place left that I could go. Devin. Devin, and Home.

  Lips thinned with new resolve, I pulled out of the alley, heading away from the water and into the part of the city that smart people do their best to avoid after the sun goes down. I try to be smart when I can, and careful when I can’t, but at the moment, neither of those was going to work for me, because I was doing something I’d sworn I’d never do. Oberon help me, I was going Home.

  A lot of changelings have fled the Summerlands over the centuries, building an entire society on the border between Faerie and the mortal world. The purebloods know—of course they do—but they don’t know what to do with their precious half-blood children when they turn into angry adults, and so they’ve never done anything to stop it. It’s a vicious, cutthroat place, where the strong feed on the weak, and it’s where changeling runaways always seem to end up.

  I was twenty-five when I ran away from my mother’s household. I could barely pass for a young sixteen. I starved in alleyways, fled from Kelpies, and ran from the human police, and was on the verge of giving up and going back when I found what looked like an answer. Devin.

  He took me in, fed me, and said I’d never have to go back there if I didn’t want to. I believed him. Maeve help me, I believed him. Even when I realized what he was doing—what the “little favors” and the increasingly bigger assignments would lead up to, even when he came to my room at night and said I was beautiful, that my eyes were just like my mother’s—I still believed him. He was all I had. I knew I couldn’t trust him, that he’d use me, and that he’d break me if I let him. I also knew he wouldn’t turn me away, because his place was Home, and Home was where everyone stopped. Home was where they didn’t care what color your eyes were, or that you cried when the sun came up, or that your hair was brown like your father’s when the Daoine Sidhe are supposed to be brightly colored and fair. Home was willing to have me, and I knew I could earn myself a life there, if I was fast, clever, and heartless. I could earn my own way.

  If Devin had just wanted me for my body, he would have used me up and thrown me away, and no one would have been able to stop him. I’ve seen changelings better than me get destroyed by the border worl
d. Mortal drugs don’t have anything on their fae equivalents, and Faerie offers a lot of ways for the innocent to get themselves killed. I was lucky; Devin wanted me for the cachet of having me. My mother wasn’t nobility, but she was a celebrity of sorts, the strongest blood-worker in the Kingdom, a friend to Dukes and more. No one ever thought she would bear a changeling. And Devin was the one who took me away from her.

  I was his lover and his pet and his favorite toy, and he let me have my temperamental little ways, because it was all paid for when he got to walk into a pureblood party he’d bartered an invitation to attend with me on his arm. He gave me what I needed to survive on the outskirts of the mortal world; a birth certificate, lessons in mortal manners, a place to stay. I paid my keep with the shame I let him bring to the people who loved me, and I tried to tell myself it was worth it.

  Maybe I was addicted to him; to the way he looked at me, and the way he touched me, and the way he made me feel like I was something more than just another half-breed. He hurt me, but everything I knew told me I deserved it. I never told him no. I never wanted to. Everything I let him do, everything I did, was of my own free will.

  When Sylvester got me knighted, leaving Home was part of the price. I agreed without hesitation, and I only saw Devin twice after that. Once on the day I told him I was leaving, and once . . .

  I yanked my attention back to the road. The streets were getting worse as I drove, squalor giving way to decay. My destination was at the heart of the rot, in a place where only the people with nowhere else to go ever went. It wasn’t a place for children—it was never a place for children—and maybe that’s why we flocked there, gathering in a dying Neverland ruled by a man who was more Captain Hook than Peter Pan. “You’ll be back,” Devin said on the day I left him, with my wrists still scraped and my lips stinging, and he was right, because here I was. Coming Home.

  The building I parked in front of looked abandoned, but was probably home to twenty people after the sun went down. The air seemed even colder now that I was inland. I gathered my damp skirts around myself, shivering as I locked the car door. Nothing had really changed. The wrappers in the gutter had different logos and the music thumping in the background had a different tone, but the eyes of the people who watched from doorways and windows, taking my measure as I passed, were just what they’d always been: hungry, angry, and hopeful. They all needed something, and every one of them was hoping I’d be the one to provide it.

  Catcalls and insults followed me down the block to a tiny, nondescript storefront wedged between a crumbling motel and an all-night massage parlor. I paused, feeling like I was falling backward through time. It was all exactly the same, even down to the old miasma of pleasure, pain, and promises, as falsely alluring as a call girl’s perfume. There were no tricks required to get inside, because Devin wanted you to come in. It was getting out that would be the hard part.

  The big front window was blocked off with graffiti-covered plywood, and a simple brass sign was mounted over the door. HOME: WHERE YOU STOP. That sign never tarnished or got dirty, and it served as the focus for a misdirection spell so powerful that I’d never seen a human glance toward the building, much less the door. Devin said he bought it from a Coblynau pureblood, trading the sign and its enchantment for nothing but an hour in his arms. I called him a liar the first time he told me that. Coblynau are ugly, lonely people who love metal more than they love air, and the promises you have to make to get a blade or bracelet of their crafting are dear enough that I couldn’t see him winning so much as a ring.

  It didn’t take long for me to realize he hadn’t been lying. Casually turning someone else’s needs to his own advantage was exactly the sort of thing Devin did best. He stole whatever he wanted, sharing his ill-gotten gains with his children, the empty-eyed girls and damp-palmed boys who came to him praying he’d have the answers. Now here I was again, praying for the same thing.

  I opened the door and stepped inside.

  The main room at Home was large and square, littered with ancient furniture and lit by a scavenged electrical generator that powered two refrigerators and an antique jukebox as well as the overhead lights. Heavy metal blared from the jukebox at a volume high enough to almost vibrate the floor. The air smelled like smoke, vomit, stale beer, and yesterday’s desires; all the things I left behind when I went off to live in a different, cleaner world.

  A handful of teens lounged around the otherwise deserted room like the casual ornamentation they were. I didn’t know any of them, but I recognized them on sight because they were Devin’s kids, and so was I. Our fellowship went deeper than our faces. It went all the way down to our bones.

  How many of you is he fucking? I wondered, and was immediately ashamed. Front room duty was always the hardest. You had to stay alert without seeming to pay attention, and no matter how long you had to sit there, you didn’t dare fall asleep. I hated it. You were a visible challenge to anyone who felt like calling Devin out for some real or imagined sin, but you couldn’t say no and you couldn’t leave once you’d been told to stay.

  These new kids could so easily have been the ones I remembered, only changed by updates in teenage fashion. They were all changelings, and not one of them was wearing even the most basic human disguise. There was a calculated reason for that; seeing them as soon as you entered told you that when you were Home, you came as you were. It made the edges of my own illusion itch, like a coat that didn’t quite fit. I wouldn’t take it off yet, though. Not until I’d seen Devin.

  Four kids were in view, which meant there were at least three more I hadn’t spotted. A boy and girl who looked too alike to be anything but siblings sat near the jukebox, their sharply pointed ears and glossy gold hair marking them as descendants of the Tylwyth Teg. A half-Candela girl with pale green eyes leaned against the wall by the door, juggling globes of dim light, and a boy with hedgehog spines instead of hair squatted in the corner, a clove cigarette dangling from his lips.

  All four had turned to watch as I entered, an inquiring band of Lost Children studying the grown-up who had wandered into their territory. Maybe I used to be one of them, but they didn’t know me. For once, this proof of my escape didn’t make me feel any better.

  “Nice dress,” said the Candela. The room erupted in snickering. I stayed where I was, waiting for it to die down.

  Knowing Devin’s kids, they were all armed and ready to jump me at the first sign of trouble. That was fine. I hadn’t come to Home looking for a fight, but starting a small one would get me to Devin faster. Protocol said I should be polite: introduce myself, make nice, put up with whatever crap they handed me, and ask if I could see Devin before the end of the night. Maybe they’d even let me, if I was nice enough. But I was tired and Evening was dead, and I didn’t have the time or the patience to play at pleasantries.

  The brother of the paired changelings looked like he was the oldest one in the room, if only by a year or two. That made him the point man. I walked toward the pair, and they looked back at me, expressions not betraying any interest in who I was or what I was doing there. Never be the first one to show that you care; that kind of weakness can get you killed.

  “I need to see Devin,” I said. Now that I was closer, I could see that their eyes were the glaring neon green of pippin apples. Faerie is anything but stinting in the colors it uses.

  The brother blinked, obviously expecting something subtler. Good. If he was off balance, he was more likely to give me what I wanted. Unfortunately, it was his sister who spoke, flicking her bangs out of her eyes as she announced, “That’s not gonna happen.”

  Her accent was a mixture of inner-city Spanish and downtown punk so thick it verged on parody and a perfect complement to her overdone makeup, rat’s nest hair, and seemingly permanent sneer. She could have been pretty, if she’d been willing to gain twenty pounds and stop trying so hard, but as it was, she looked like a cross between Twiggy’s younger sister and every downtown whore I’d ever seen. There was no way she was
more than fourteen.

  Of course, that was looking at her from a mortal perspective. I looked sixteen when I came to Devin, and I always did my best to look even younger when I had to do bar duty. It helped if they underestimated you. So she might have been older than she looked . . . but I saw her as fourteen, and the way she held herself told me I was pretty close to right.

  “Sorry, lady, but you can go home now,” she continued. “He’s busy.”

  I sighed inwardly. I hadn’t been underestimating her; she was as young as she looked, and she had no idea what she was messing with. I narrowed my eyes, glaring, and she licked her lips, fixing me with what was probably meant to be a languid sneer. I managed not to laugh. Instead, I shook my head, and repeated, “I need to see Devin. Now, please.”

  “So why do you need to see the boss-man?” she drawled. Her accent was starting to get on my nerves. “I don’t think he’s expecting you. I think you’re trying to sneak in while he’s not looking.”

  Well, she was smart enough to guess my motives. Not that it was going to do her much good, since I wasn’t planning to let her stop me. “Does it matter?” I replied. “I need one of you—I don’t care which—to tell Devin that Toby’s here, and she needs to talk to him right away.”

  The girl smirked, obviously thinking I would back down. “I think you should go sit down for a while.”

  Was I ever that young or that stupid? That young. Maybe. “I think you should go tell Devin that I’m here.”

  “Really? Because I’m thinking . . . no. I think you’re gonna sit, and he’ll see you in an hour. Two, maybe. It’s really no difference to him, lady.” She started to turn away. I grabbed her arm, twisting it up behind her back. She yelped, trying to wrench herself free. “Hey! Crazy bitch!”