The Brightest Fell

by Seanan McGuire

  Quentin frowned at me, too worried and weary to even rise to the bait.

  I couldn’t blame him. I was exhausted. The only sleep I’d had since the bachelorette party had been in the pixie village; I was running on fumes, or maybe on whatever came after fumes. My stomach rumbled, reminding me that sleep wasn’t the only thing I’d been skipping out on. Maybe I hadn’t been bleeding as much as usual, but I was still pushing my body well past the point where it was going to keep forgiving me.

  “When Danny gets here, you’re going with him,” I said. “You can call me if the Luidaeg has any instructions. Simon and I are going to find August and finish this. Maybe with a stop for breakfast burritos.”

  “What in the world is a breakfast burrito?” asked Simon.

  I looked at Quentin again. “I am now genuinely sorry that you’re going to miss this,” I said.

  Officer Thornton raised his head.

  The rest of us froze. We weren’t wearing human disguises. They hadn’t been necessary in Annwn, and in my rush to hide the malnourished cop from any of his peers who might happen to be walking to work, I hadn’t suggested getting them in place. All he had to do was look at us, and he’d know we weren’t human.

  He turned to me. He blinked. His eyes were dark brown, the color of river clay, and still slightly unfocused . . . at least until he looked at my ears. His eyes focused real fast when he looked at my ears.

  “Lady, let alone,” he said. “Where am I?”

  “Um, hi,” I said. “We’re back in San Francisco. I have a friend coming to take you to see a doctor.” The Luidaeg was basically a doctor, if by “doctor” you meant “person who will totally fix whatever’s wrong with your body and mind, possibly by turning you into a boulder, since boulders don’t get sick.” It was close enough for Faerie.

  Officer Thornton frowned, eyes going unfocused again. “Who are you?”

  This was my chance. I could lie to him, obscure my part in the whole situation: I could let him go to the Luidaeg’s with no idea who had brought him home. She was going to wipe his memory no matter what I said. This way might be kinder.

  Or it might be crueler, because it would leave him thinking, however briefly, that it had taken a total stranger to care enough to rescue him. “My name’s October,” I said gently. “We’ve met before, remember? I’m going to make sure you’re taken care of. You’re safe now.”

  “October,” he said, slowly, wonderingly, sounding out each syllable of my name like it was a revelation. “Yes. Of course. I know you. I was waiting for you.”

  “I’m here now,” I assured him.

  A car roared along the mostly silent street, screeching to a stop in front of the alley. It was a fairly standard city cab. Only someone with an excellent eye for both magic and automotive modifications would have been able to see how much that cab had been enchanted and reinforced, until its mostly synthetic frame could contain the massive body of the cabby who drove it. The driver’s side door slammed, and there was Danny, unfolding from the vehicle like he was planning to go on forever.

  He wasn’t nearly as tall when enchanted to look human as he was in his normal guise, but he was still impressive. “Yo,” he boomed, in the low shout that served him as a whisper. “Your ride’s here.”

  “That’s your cue, Quentin,” I said.

  My squire nodded and snatched his own handful of shadows, weaving it effortlessly into a makeshift human disguise. The details of it were too vague to be entirely convincing—his skin was smooth to the point of being poreless, and his eyes looked like they belonged to a doll, not a living person—but it would get him to the car.

  Officer Thornton watched this with wide, disbelieving eyes. “Oh,” he said.

  “Yes, oh,” I agreed, and pushed Officer Thornton gently toward Quentin, who stepped forward and took his arm. “You’re going to be okay.”

  “Come on,” said Quentin encouragingly, and pressed the candle into my hand before he led Officer Thornton forward, through the fragile wall of my illusion, to the street.

  He stopped to say something to Danny, voice too soft for me to hear. Danny looked up, eyes searching the apparently empty alley until he settled on the spot where he assumed I would be standing and offered me a nod. He was good: his gaze was only a few feet off. Then all three of them got into the cab, and Danny restarted the engine, and they drove away.

  A hand touched my shoulder. There was only one person left that it could belong to. I managed not to shudder as I turned to look at Simon.

  “What next?” he asked.

  “Food, and following,” I said. “Can you disguise yourself?”

  “I would be offended, but if you feel anywhere near as hungry as I do, your question is reasonable. Yes, I can disguise myself. Can you?”

  “I can.” My illusions have never been great, courtesy of me having none of Titania’s blood in me at all, but anger has always made them stronger. Anger fuels me in a way that all the training in the world never could. And I was so, so angry.

  Angry at Amandine, for stealing Tybalt and Jazz in order to get her own way; for never being there for me when I needed her, until she was more adversary than parent. Angry at Sylvester, for keeping secrets from me for so long that I had never been able to understand why my mother held herself so distant. If he had been open with me, I might have been able to heal the rifts between us—me and my mother, me and him—before they got so vast they became unbridgeable. Angry at August, for running off on a fool’s errand. She had been older when she disappeared than I was now, but she had been cared for, cosseted, and hadn’t learned the most important lesson of being a hero: she hadn’t learned that sometimes it was less about what you could do, and more about who could help you do it.

  Most of all, though, I was angry at myself. So much of this mess was mine. I hadn’t been the one to make it, but I’d been the one to keep saying “later, later,” like anything ever really waited until later to become a problem. I could have gone looking for Mom, to try to make things right between us: I hadn’t. I could have made more of an effort to fix things with Sylvester: I hadn’t. I could have asked Acacia what she was doing about the Riders, or asked the Luidaeg to help me find Officer Thornton. I hadn’t. All my chickens were coming home to roost, and while I didn’t want them, I had earned them. I had earned them, every one.

  When I finished gathering my anger, I tucked the unlit candle into my jacket pocket. Hands now free, I raked my fingers hard through the air and snagged the fabric of the magic that had risen around me, responding to my obvious need. I shook it once, hard, and layered it over me like a veil, tamping it down until my ears itched and the scent of cut-grass and copper sizzled in the air.

  The smell of smoke and rotten oranges rose to my side, underscored by a thin layer of mulled cider. Simon’s original magical signature was struggling to reassert itself, fighting through the rot to reclaim its place in the makeup of his magic. I still didn’t know how his magic could have changed, or how it was beginning to change back. Everything about it was a mystery to me.

  Our spells solidified and burst at the same time, leaving two apparently human individuals behind: me, with the colorless brown hair I once had naturally, before my shifting blood began acting as a magical highlighting session, him, with his usual fox-red hair, but with hazel eyes and blunter, kinder features. Cast as human, Simon Torquill was no longer a knife of a man, primed to cut out the hearts of anyone who looked at him. Instead, he was softer, more reasonable, the kind of man who seemed more likely to buy you a cup of coffee than enchant you forever.

  He looked me up and down, and smiled a little. “I almost recognize you better this way,” he said. “It’s clear you based your human face off the one you used to wear.”

  “Yeah, well, that was the face I expected to have for my entire life, and illusions don’t come easy to me, so I figured I’d go with what worked.” A
s if to remind me how hard illusions really were, a low throbbing started behind my temples. This wasn’t my best kind of magic, and if I was going to persist in doing it, I was going to pay.

  I could at least make the bill a little lower. I swept my hand through the air, dismissing the illusion on the alley. The scent of cut-grass and copper grew stronger as the illusion fell apart around us, showering down with the sweet, bright scent of magic released. The ache backed off. Not enough. Still, it might see me staying on my feet until I could get something into my stomach and make the next stages of our journey easier to handle.

  Simon was looking at me, half concerned and half calculating. “Where next?” he asked.

  “The Babylon Road wouldn’t have dropped us here if August hadn’t been here,” I said. “It’s too close to dawn for me to pick up her trail—assuming it’s still here to find.” Up until this point, I’d been following August through purely fae realms, places where dawn and its destructive cleansing force never reached. Magic could linger there for decades. Here . . .

  The mortal world has a way of eroding even the most powerful spells in a matter of days. Whatever trail August had left was likely to be long, long gone.

  “So food.”

  “Food,” I agreed. It felt almost traitorous to be thinking about my stomach when my people were in danger, but I wasn’t going to do them any good if I collapsed from hunger. Tybalt would want me to eat.

  Tybalt would want to be eating with me, not leaving me alone with Simon Torquill, but we can’t have everything in this world. For the moment, I’d settle for a breakfast burrito and a glass of orange juice to help me keep this headache at bay.

  If you’re looking for a good burrito in San Francisco at any time of the day or night, the Mission District is the place to be. I led Simon up a few blocks to one of the many taquerias dotting Valencia Street. They were just unlocking the doors, and we were the first customers through. I was opening my mouth, preparing to give my usual order, when Simon turned to the man behind the counter and said something in amiable, flawless Spanish.

  The man he had addressed looked surprised before responding in kind, and that was that: the two of them were off and running, chattering away like old friends. Simon gestured to me and said something, and the man laughed, nodding. I smothered a scowl. Whatever was going on here, it seemed to be going well, and all I was going to do was complicate things.

  Then Simon reached for his pocket, presumably to pull out his wallet. I grabbed his wrist. He froze, looking startled, and I realized he hadn’t been expecting me to willingly touch him. Not so soon after he’d been woken up; maybe not ever.

  “My treat,” I said, through gritted teeth.

  Simon’s look of surprise deepened, but he relaxed his hand, making it clear that he wasn’t going to fight me on this. “As you like,” he said.

  Whatever he’d ordered for us came shy of twenty dollars. I paid with a crumpled bill from the inside pocket of my jacket, silently grateful for my policy of never using imaginary money with local businesses. Yeah, sometimes fairy gold is the only way out of a tight situation, but I’ve been the one who counts the drawers on the graveyard shift. No one’s getting fired because I wanted to turn some leaves into cash more than I wanted to buy generic.

  We took a number and retreated to a table in the window, far enough from the counter for me to drop my voice and whisper, “What the hell was that?”

  “Hmm?” Simon gave me another surprised look. I was starting to think his face was going to stick that way. “Oh, Miguel and I were just talking about how much this neighborhood has changed. If you wonder why he was smiling at you so much, it’s because I told him you were my daughter when he asked what we were doing wandering around the streets this early. Forgive me for presuming, but you’re not dressed for work, and neither am I, and I genuinely didn’t want him to decide that you were a prostitute.”

  “I’m not dressed for sex work either,” I said. It was difficult to hold onto my annoyance with my confusion getting in the way. “I didn’t know you spoke Spanish.”

  “There was a time when Spanish was the lingua franca of California. America bought this land from the Spaniards, you know, after they had invaded and conquered it. Really, I find it strange that anyone could live here and not speak Spanish. Language is an invasive species. Let it take root in new soil, and you’ll never beat it out, no matter how hard you try.”

  Simon fell silent as the man from the counter—Miguel—brought over a tray containing two large breakfast burritos, fried potatoes, and glasses of horchata, thick and creamy and frothy at the top. The two of them exchanged a few bright, amiable words, and I wished I could understand them. It would have made things so much easier.

  Miguel was smiling when he walked away. I returned my attention to Simon.

  “You don’t know what a breakfast burrito is, and yet you can order them perfectly. Got any more surprises?”

  “Putting eggs and—is this sausage? Fascinating—in a tortilla shell is a relatively new idea. It speaks to a shortness of time. People never roll an entire meal up into something portable when they have time to linger. But once you introduced the concept, it was relatively easy to understand.” He picked up his burrito and took an inquisitive bite. His eyes widened. He swallowed. “Mortal genius never fails to delight.”

  “Yeah, well, we do have a shortness of time here. We’re only stopping to eat so we don’t fall down.” I was still jittery. We needed to move. We needed to find August.

  We needed to eat. I picked up my own burrito and took a bite, only half-listening as Simon resumed chattering amiably about how much the city had changed and how much it had stayed the same; how familiar these streets would always be, all the way down to his bones. There was so much work left to do. There was so little time left to do it.

  Tybalt, I’m coming, I thought, and ate, and tried not to think about the future.

  EIGHTEEN

  WE FINISHED EATING as the breakfast rush was rolling in, busing our trays and waving to Miguel on our way out the door. He waved back, grinning. Whatever Simon said to him, he must have really liked it.

  Simon caught the expression on my face and smiled. “Difficult as it may be for you to believe, given our history, there was a time when I was the better liked among my siblings. I have a gregarious nature. September was more critical. She had standards. Whereas Sylvester, well, he was always haring off on some grand adventure and coming back with mud on his boots, bumbling around the place like a disaster waiting to happen. Sometimes I think he wound up landed because Gilad wanted him to stay in one place, rather than visiting every household in the kingdom and breaking all their dishes.”

  “He doesn’t talk about September much,” I said carefully.

  “No, he wouldn’t,” said Simon. “She died. I know that may not seem like such a betrayal to you—you’ve seen so much death already, and you’re barely more than a child—but we grew up believing we would live forever. Losing her was like losing the moon. Absolutely incomprehensible. The moon can’t simply vanish. It’s easier to forget that it was there in the first place than it is to live with the reality of its absence.”

  “Mmm,” I said.

  Valencia Street was springing to life around us: businesses were opening, shutters were being rolled up and doors were being unlocked. The street traffic had more than doubled since we’d gone to get breakfast. Locals mingled with tourists, all of them hurrying to get to where they needed to go. Up ahead, a familiar mural looked out over a small urban park. I nodded to myself.

  “We’re going to make a stop,” I said, and indicated the building.

  Simon followed my finger. “What is it?”

  “A bookstore and coffee shop. Arden’s seneschal works there. He’s Cu Sidhe. Even if I can’t find August’s trail, he might be able to.” And if not, he could let us duck into the office long enough to cast a
don’t-look-here and hide us from any prying eyes out on the street. Finding August’s trail again might require the use of my candle.

  San Francisco is a city of weird layered on weird, but even here, people will notice a woman carrying a burning taper down the middle of the street in broad daylight. We needed to find a way to disappear. A don’t-look-here would do the trick nicely.

  Borderlands Books and the Borderlands Café are owned by the same man. Conveniently, there’s a door between them. Less conveniently, the bookstore—which offers substantially more privacy, even when open—opens at noon, while the café’s doors were already unlocked, and the usual assortment of weary students, people with nowhere better to go, and commuters was scattered around the reclaimed hardwood tables, sucking down caffeine as fast as they could.

  I relaxed as we stepped inside and I saw the big blond man behind the counter, dishing out lattes and black coffees as fast as his hands could move. He was wearing a shirt for a band called “Cats Laughing,” which I’d never heard of, although I had no doubt Tybalt would approve.

  Madden looked up when the door swung closed, and grinned, the wide, honest smile of a man who honestly felt he had nothing to hide, and didn’t see why anyone else would either. Mercifully, he waited until we approached the counter before booming happily, “Toby! And . . . Sylvester? Whoa, I haven’t seen you here in ages!”

  He looked so happy that I hated to contradict him. Sadly, I had to. Even if I’d been willing to lie to one of my allies right before I asked for help, there was no way to guarantee that Simon wouldn’t immediately spill the beans. The only thing worse than lying is being caught doing it.

  “Simon, actually,” I said. “Sylvester’s brother.”

  “We’re catching up,” said Simon, in a voice that was desert-dry with a combination of amusement and caution. It was a rare blend. He wore it well. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  “Uh, okay,” said Madden dubiously. He looked over his shoulder to the small kitchen, where a human man with hair the color of ripe blueberries was washing dishes. “Hey, Z’ev, can you cover for me a minute? My friend needs to pick something up that she left in the bookstore.”