Once Broken Faith (5 page)

“Wouldn't it be better not to bring a weapon if they're just going to take it away from me?”

“Not really.” May resumed stirring her Rice Krispie mixture. The marshmallow had begun to set. The treats resisted her machinations. “By bringing a weapon, you show that you're willing to defend the conclave. By giving it up, you show that you trust your hosts to protect you, and your fellow attendees not to need stabbing. It's a show of good faith. It also means that if day one goes really well—or really poorly—they might let you keep your knife on day two, because you'll have earned the right to go armed.”

“Pureblood hospitality gives me a headache,” I grumbled, snatching another piece of gooey cereal.

May shot me a sympathetic look. “It's designed to be learned over the course of decades and refined over the course of centuries. It's not your fault that you don't take to it naturally.”

“I wish you could go instead of me.”

“I'll probably go in addition to you,” said May. I blinked at her. She shrugged, beginning to spoon her
cereal mixture into a serving dish. “Apart from the fact that I was one of the people elf-shot in Silences, I have a long, long memory. None of the people whose lives I consumed had been elf-shot themselves, but some of them had lost friends and loved ones that way. One man, his wife was elf-shot and still decades away from waking when we came for him. He died with her name on his lips, and I put his face on to finish it. Elf-shot is supposed to be merciful, but I'm pretty sure it's not. I want to see how this goes.”

“Oh.”

May was my Fetch: a night-haunt who had consumed the blood of the living and transformed into a duplicate of that person when the time came to play death omen. She'd expected her long, long life to end when she became my mirror, and she'd done it anyway, because the night-haunts lived vicariously through the people whose corpses they ate, and the last person she'd consumed had been a girl named Dare. Like me, Dare had been trained as a street thug by Devin, a modern day Fagin crossed with Peter Pan. Unlike me, she'd never been able to escape the gravity of his attention. Dare died thinking I was her hero, and that thought had been enough to influence the night-haunt who took on the bulk of her personality. She had chosen to die a second time, all for the sake of warning me that my own life was coming to an end.

Under normal circumstances, May would have appeared, I would have died, and she would have vanished, dissolving into mist and the smell of rain. Instead, my mother, Amandine, had intervened, changing the balance of my blood for the first time in my adult life. Somehow, that had cleansed the elf-shot that was killing me from my body, and transformed me just enough to break the tether tying May's existence to my own. She was something unique now, a Fetch with nothing to bind her. And while the bulk of her memories were taken from
either me or Dare, sometimes she'd say things to remind me that she was so much older.

I sighed. Speaking of things that were older . . . “Do you have everything under control down here? I think I need to give the Luidaeg a call, let her know what's happening, and tell her the High King is in town.” She might already know. She was often surprisingly well-informed—or not so surprisingly, given that she was the sea-witch, Firstborn daughter of Maeve, and fully capable of grilling the local pixie population for news. Still, she'd appreciate hearing it from me, and it was always good to avoid getting on her bad side.

“Go, go,” said May, making a shooing gesture with her free hand. “I can control the ravening hordes for a while longer. I think they're enjoying the lack of adult supervision.”

“You're the best,” I said, and grabbed one more chunk of Rice Krispie treat before leaving the kitchen and heading up the stairs to my room.

San Francisco is one of the most expensive cities in the world, and getting worse as the tech boom moves more and more multimillion-dollar human companies into the business district. Jazz owns a secondhand shop in Berkeley. May works there occasionally, when Jazz needs the help, and spends the rest of her time doing whatever strikes her fancy. My PI work brings in a reasonable amount, although very few nobles ever think to pay me for knight errantry. Quentin mostly eats whatever appears in the fridge and spends his time learning how to be a better ruler. So how is it that we're able to afford a two-story Victorian near Dolores Park, in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood?

Simple: my liege, Duke Sylvester Torquill, has been in the Bay Area for centuries, and owns enough land in San Francisco to make the snootiest of human tech millionaires sit up and salivate. We live rent-free, and the foundation he'd established to handle mortal upkeep of his
properties paid the taxes. It's a sweet setup. It would be even sweeter if I didn't feel so guilty about it. Sylvester and I were . . . not estranged, exactly, but not exactly speaking to each other, either.

He's my liege. He's supposed to be straight with me. He's supposed to be the person I could trust no matter what. And he'd destroyed that in the name of keeping a promise he'd made to my mother before I'd even been born. He hadn't lied to me according to pureblood standards, which were often more fixated on the letter of the law than on anything else, but as far I was concerned, a lie of omission was still a lie. He'd withheld a lot of information from me—information that could have helped me understand my past and protect my future—and he'd done it because he cared more about his word to Amandine than about his word to me. Maybe I have trust issues. I think I've earned them. That doesn't change the fact that Sylvester, who I had trusted with everything, had still been willing to betray me.

No matter how I currently felt about Sylvester, I loved our house. It was
home
. I'd been trying to find my way home for a long, long time.

My cats, Cagney and Lacey, and my resident rose goblin, Spike, were curled on the bed when I stepped into my room. Of the three of them, only Lacey bothered to open an eye, although she didn't move. They had clearly fled before the onslaught of teenage invaders, and had no interest in doing anything that could bring them back into the line of fire. I smiled at them as I closed the bedroom door.

“It's okay, guys,” I said. “Nobody's going to follow you up here.”

Lacey closed her eye.

Pulling out my phone, I sat on the edge of the bed and dialed a long string of numbers, tracing a spiral pattern from one to five and then back out again. The smell of cut-grass and copper rose around me as my magic
responded to the intent in my gesture. I lifted the phone to my ear, listening to the silence.

“To market, to market, to buy a fat hen,” I chanted. “We'll cook it and then we'll be hungry again, which is why I really appreciate the easy availability of KFC in the modern world.”

The magic gathered and broke around me, and the silence was replaced by the soft, distant sound of waves lapping against the shore of some tropical lagoon. I leaned back on the bed and waited.

There was a click, and suddenly a woman's voice was in my ear, snarling, “Who is this, and why am I not juggling your internal organs right now?”

“Hi, Luidaeg; it's Toby,” I said. “Got a moment?”

“Toby!” Her tone shifted, becoming warm—even welcoming. We hadn't always been friends, but our relationship was, at this point, built on a foundation of mutual respect and saving each other's asses. That was enough to buy me a positive reception. “Quentin's sleepover party is tonight, isn't it? Why did you call it that, anyway? It's not like they're going to sleep.”

“Human teenagers don't usually sleep during these parties either,” I said. “It's an excuse for them to hang out in their pajamas, eat lots of junk food, and not have to worry about going outside. Call it an artifact of my weird upbringing and let it go.”

“Right,” she said. “If I ever needed more proof that you were Dad's descendant, you filling your home with those kids would do it. That's heroism of the stupid kind. Please tell me you're not calling because you want me to come over and help you deal with them. I'd just turn them all into axolotls until the sun came up.”

“Peaceful, but probably stressful,” I said. The Luidaeg can't lie. That meant she
could
turn both my resident and visiting teenagers into axolotls. I wasn't even sure what those were, but I was pretty sure I didn't like the idea. “That's not why I'm calling.”

“No? What impossible quest are you planning to embark on now?”

“I'm skipping the impossible quest in favor of attending the High King's conclave to discuss what's going to happen with the elf-shot cure.” I explained the situation in quick, terse sentences, leaving nothing out, but not embroidering either. The Luidaeg didn't like it when people danced around the point. I guess a few millennia of listening to lies, bullshit, and pointlessly florid pureblood etiquette had eroded her patience.

When I was done, she said, “Well.”

“Yes.”

“That's a thing.”

“Yes.”

“A thing which is actually happening.”

“Probably.”

“You realize I'll be showing up to watch the fireworks, right?”

I sat up a little straighter. “What?”

The Luidaeg sighed. “Much as I hate my sister—and trust me,
no one
hates my sister like I do—she's still Firstborn. Elf-shot was her gift to our father, to curry favor with him when she was out of his good graces. I applaud unmaking it. I think this is a good thing. But that doesn't mean I can sit by while the work of one of the First is unmade, and not at least come for the sake of witnessing the process. I won't speak on her behalf. I won't try to suppress this cure. I'm still going to come, and watch, and see.”

The Luidaeg was the eldest among the Firstborn. Almost everyone I'd ever met was afraid of her, and with good reason: she was terrifying when she wanted to be. Having her at the conclave would make a lot of people very uncomfortable. That alone would make the proceedings more entertaining, at least for me. But if the Luidaeg was planning to show up . . .

“Should we be worried about other Firstborn deciding they need to come sit in the audience?”

She was quiet for a moment before she said, “Acacia might. She's been getting out more, and I know that some of Blind Michael's Riders have been elf-shot and locked away by people who didn't see any other means of protecting their children. She could come just to see if she'll be able to free the last of her husband's victims. Your mother isn't likely to show up, if that's what you're worried about. Amandine never considered herself Firstborn, and she doesn't care enough about the work of her elder siblings.”

“I don't know if I'm worried about seeing Mom so much as I just really, really don't want to.”

“If she does decide to come, that'll give me the opportunity to drag her away by the ear and ask what the fuck she thinks she's doing. It'll be okay, Toby. This isn't an army marching on the Mists. This isn't a case you have to solve. It's just a bunch of nobles coming to puff their chests out at each other and try to look important. Do what I do. Bring popcorn.”

I smiled. Maybe it was weird to be reassured by the words of a woman who could remember the rise and fall of almost every mortal civilization, but my life has never been particularly normal. “Okay,” I said. “See you there.”

“Yup,” she said, and hung up.

I lowered my phone, looking at it thoughtfully for a moment before I stood. The kids probably didn't want my company, but May might, and there were Rice Krispie treats. It was time to focus on the ordinary, for as long as the world allowed.

B
Y SEVEN IN THE MORNING all the kids except for Quentin and Raj had been collected by their guardians. They slunk home with sugar-glazed expressions and doggie bags of leftovers. Etienne was going to learn a lot about nacho cheese over the course of the next day or so. I sort of wished I could be there for that. Quentin and Raj, meanwhile, had retreated to Quentin's room for an
actual
slumber party, meaning they were
actually
going to sleep. Raj's tendency to sleep in feline form meant they could both fit in a single bed, which was nice. One trip to the Mattress Outlet with the family had been enough to hold me for a decade—or until the mattresses needed replacing, whichever came first.

Please let it be the decade.

I turned out the last of the lights and drew the last of the curtains before retreating to my room. The house was blissfully quiet. The air smelled like fresh-baked cookies, a combination of burnt sugar and chocolate that would linger for hours yet. Jazz had gone to bed shortly after one o'clock in the morning, pleading the fact that she was diurnal. May had gone to join her at dawn.

Now it was my turn. I shut my bedroom door and
started toward the bed, unbuttoning my jeans as I walked. It was rare for me to be the only person awake in the house. I reveled in the feeling.

The smell of pennyroyal and musk cut through the scent of cookies, telling me that I wasn't alone after all. That was all the warning I got before Tybalt's hands grasped my waist, turning me to face him. I saw him smile, and then he was pulling me close and kissing me so fiercely that it was like we hadn't seen each other in weeks. It had only been hours, but I wasn't complaining. I slid my hands up his chest and linked them behind his neck, not hesitating as I kissed him back. A purr reverberated through his body, vibrating my skin and reinforcing the feeling that this, just this, was proof that I was finally home.

If someone had told me right after I stumbled out of the pond that I'd eventually fall in love again, I might have believed them. After all, the heart is a hardy organ: it heals, it moves on. If that same someone had added “with the asshole King of Cats,” I would have laughed until I threw up, and then probably started punching people. Tybalt wasn't my friend back then, much less a potential lover. He was a bastard and a bully who took too much joy in tormenting me for me to even consider the possibility that one day I'd start keeping company with him.

It's funny what time can do. Bit by bit, I'd come to realize that Tybalt's barbs were less about cruelty and more about keeping me at arm's length, where I couldn't hurt him—something I'd never imagined I could do until I was doing it. We'd traded a few kisses almost accidentally, and then, with no real fanfare or warning, we'd been in love. Me, the changeling street rat, and him, the handsome Cait Sidhe monarch. Maybe it shouldn't have worked, but it did, and it had become one of the rocks I put my trust in. The sun rose; the tide turned; Tybalt loved me.

He slid his hands down to cup my ass, pulling my feet off the floor. I responded by kicking my feet up and wrapping my legs around his waist, making it easier for him to carry me to the bed. There was an aggravated yowl as one of the cats protested. I didn't look to see which one it was. I was distracted by Tybalt's hand in my hair and Tybalt's lips on my throat, and then I didn't pay attention to anything but him for a little while. Who could blame me?

One major advantage to living in the Victorian, rather than my old two-bedroom apartment: much thicker walls, and much less chance of someone wandering in to see what all the fuss was about.

Afterward, naked and sweaty and pleasantly loose in that way that followed strenuous exercise, I stretched and rested my head against Tybalt's chest, closing my eyes. He was purring again. I couldn't think of a more comforting sound.

“I take it you missed me, little fish,” he said, playing his fingers through my tangled hair.

“Excuse me?” I rolled over, opening my eyes and squinting at him. “Who jumped who here? I ask not because I'm complaining, but because I think it's important we keep the sequence of events as clear as possible.”

He chuckled. “Ah, but you see, had you not missed me, you wouldn't have responded so ardently to what could have been merely a simple hello. I kiss you quite often. Most of the time, you're capable of kissing me back without dislodging your undergarments in the process.”

“You waited until I was taking my pants off!”

“An accident of timing.” He waved a hand, dismissing my protest. “There's no need to be ashamed. Were I fortunate enough to be engaged to me, I would take every opportunity to get me to bed.”

“You are such a cat sometimes.” I yawned, snuggling down and closing my eyes again. “Did you have a good night at Court?”

“I did. Nothing of much interest happened, which is always the ideal; better a night where my people are free to make their own entertainment than a night where I must race from place to place, extinguishing fires and praying we'll live to see the morning. Alazne is finally able to hold her human form for more than an hour at a time. Opal and Gabriel are very proud, and hope you'll be able to come and visit soon.”

“I'd like that.”

“And you? Was your night a welter of teenage vexations and not enough quiet? I saw the kitchen when I first got home. The fridge appears to have been attacked by wild beasts.”

I couldn't suppress the thrill that went through me when Tybalt referred to reaching the house as getting home. Eyes still closed, I said, “Oh, the kids were great. They showed Dean
The Little Mermaid
. I'm expecting Dianda to call it a declaration of war and slaughter us all in our sleep. Arden came by, dragged me back to Muir Woods, and used me to get Walther to go ahead and wake Madden up before the High King got here. Only just before—he's in the Mists now, he's holding a conclave next week to discuss how they're going to distribute the elf-shot cure, and—oh yeah, right—I'm expected to attend. Are you going to be there? I know it's going to involve the neighboring Kings and Queens, but I'm not sure what involvement the Cait Sidhe would have with something like this.”

Tybalt was silent. Seconds stretched out like taffy until I opened my eyes, disturbed by the sudden weight of the air. I rolled over and sat up in the same motion, gathering the sheets up around my collarbone as I turned to look at him.

He was worth looking at, under any circumstances. Most fae are either beautiful by human standards or completely alien and inhuman, covered in leaves or feathers or spines. Tybalt managed to straddle the line
between the two. His face was lovely; his body was better. But his pupils were cat-slit narrow, against irises the banded color of malachite, and there were black tabby stripes in the brown of his hair. When he was distracted or distressed, as he was now, more stripes appeared on his skin. They were visible as I faced him, curving up the sides of his ribs and wrapping around his arms.

“Tybalt?” I said.

“If the conclave is to be held next week, it's reasonable that no invitation has yet been sent to us; perhaps one was always intended and perhaps not. Now that I'm aware a conclave is to occur at all, I must attend, or take it as an insult from a Court that has often been far too willing to dismiss us,” he said. He sat up, reaching out to cup the curve of my cheek with his hand. “I love you. You know that, yes?”

I blinked. “Okay, now you're worrying me. Of course I know that you love me.”

“Good.” He leaned in and kissed me, sweet and slow. Only the tension in his hand betrayed the fact that all was not well, that this wasn't just some sweet gesture motivated by affection. Something was really wrong.

Because of that, I was already braced when he pulled back and said, “I have to go.”

“Why?” The question came out harsher than I'd intended. I didn't try to take it back or temper it. I knew I had to share him with his Court, but Oberon's teeth, I'd already done that today. He was supposed to be with me for at least a night before he left again.

“Because my Court will need to be told that so many monarchs of the Divided are coming to our territory; because you are a daughter of the Divided Courts, and until I know whether they intend to shun us or curry our favor, I mustn't seem to have already been pacified. I must seem aloof. Because I need to prepare myself to walk among Kings and Queens who stand too much on ceremony as their equal.” His smile was brief and wry. “I
am
their equal, of course; I am a King. But they'll look for any excuse to say that I'm less than they are.”

I caught his meaning. I didn't want to. Shoulders going tight, I asked, “Excuses like arriving next to a knight who swears to the throne of the Mists? One who might have ‘pacified' you?”

He didn't answer me. He didn't need to.

Irritation flared in my chest, hot and toxic as bile. I swallowed it down as best I could. “You should go, then.”

“I'll make it up to you.” He slid from the bed, grabbed his clothes, and was gone. He didn't bother getting dressed first. Cait Sidhe are even more casual about nudity than the rest of Faerie. Cats are technically naked under their fur, after all. Combine that with the whole “grooming with their tongues” thing, and body shyness just isn't an option.

I stared at the place where he'd been, inhaling the mixed scents of pennyroyal and musk. Then I groaned and flopped backward into the pillows, closing my eyes. We were going to make this work. We were
going
to make this work. The fact that he was the monarch of an independent Court and I was tied inextricably to the Divided Courts wasn't going to change the fact that we loved each other—and as long as we could keep loving each other, we could find a way through this. We could do it. I was a hero, after all. What was a hero, if not someone who went up against impossible odds, and won?

Sleep claimed me while I was worrying the problem over and over in my head, like a dog with a bone. I fell into tangled, confusing dreams, and found myself looking for Karen in every corner. She could guide the things I dreamed about. Normally, it was nice to have some privacy in my own dreams, but after the day I'd had, being able to say “hey, kiddo, wanna go to the imaginary carnival and eat cotton candy until the sun goes down?” would have been a nice change.

A knock at my bedroom door pulled me back to
consciousness at—I checked the clock—a little after two in the afternoon. I sat up, blinking and groggy, clutching the sheet around my chest like it would somehow transform into a nightgown if I wished hard enough. The blackout curtains over my windows kept the light from getting in. So where was the light coming from?

“Toby?”

Oh. The bedroom door was open. I turned to blink blearily in that direction. Jazz, fully dressed and looking far too alert, with the feathered band that held her fae nature tied in her hair, was standing there, grimacing apologetically.

“Huh?” I said.

“You need to get up now.”

I blinked at her again before pointing at the clock. “Nuh-
uh
.”

“The High King and High Queen are here,” said Jazz. “In the dining room. With May. Drinking lemonade and eating the last of the Rice Krispie treats.
Please
will you get up now? I'm really not equipped to deal with this.”

The words “High King and High Queen” acted like an electric shock to the part of my brain that had been trying to drag me back to sleep. I stiffened. “They're where?”

“In the dining room. Are you up?”

“I'm up,” I confirmed. I paused. “Is Quentin?”

Jazz shook her head. “They, um, asked us to let him sleep.”

Great. So this wasn't a social visit: it was a job evaluation. “I'll be right down.”

“Good. Hurry.” Jazz shut the door, leaving me alone in my darkened bedroom.

Most fae are nocturnal, which means we have excellent night vision. I got up and got dressed without turning on the lights, retrieving yesterday's jeans from the floor and digging a charcoal gray tank top out of my drawer. Most of my wardrobe is designed not to show
the blood. That sort of thing was an occupational hazard for me, and I didn't enjoy shopping, which meant that darker colors were better.

I didn't have time for a shower, but I had time to run a brush through my hair and take a quick, critical look at myself in the mirror. There were dark circles under my eyes from the lack of sleep. Well, that was the High King's fault. He could deal with it.

Voices drifted from the dining room when I was halfway down the stairs. They were talking quietly, presumably so as not to wake Quentin. I could have told them not to bother. He was a teenage boy. He didn't wake up for anything short of a small explosion, and even then, he was just as likely to decide that I could take care of things, roll over, and go back to sleep.