The Unkindest Tide

by Seanan McGuire

  May raced into the room, face pale and eyes wide, clearly ready to jump into battle against whatever was hurting her girlfriend. Then she froze as well, pressing one hand to her mouth. Jazz kept laughing, leaning back in her seat and tucking her hands behind her head, seemingly helpless against her own amusement.

  “Honey?” asked May. “Are you all right?”

  Jazz shook her head, still laughing.

  I found my voice, tucked away in a corner where I hadn’t been able to reach it before. “I think she’s going to be okay,” I said. “I think . . . I think maybe we’re all going to be okay.”

  May laughed once, and if there was a hint of a sob tucked inside the sound, none of us was going to point it out. She rushed to Jazz’s side, putting her arms around the other woman, and they held each other while they laughed, and for the first time since Amandine had shown up at my door, I started to feel like maybe things were getting back to normal. We were safe. We were home. We were together, and we were going to be okay.

  Tybalt smiled at me across the table as he picked up his burrito. I smiled back, and everything was exactly the way it was supposed to be. Finally, finally, everything was right.

  TWO

  THE HOUSE WAS QUIET by ten o’clock. The boys were in Quentin’s room with the door closed. I should probably have been concerned about them getting into trouble, but I was honestly too relieved to know where they were to care. May’s chocolate chip cookies had been baked and devoured, and May herself had gone upstairs, dragging Jazz by the wrist. They, too, had closed their bedroom door, and I felt like I’d be even less welcome in that particular room.

  The remains of dinner had been cleaned up and either put in the refrigerator or thrown away; there weren’t even any dishes to deal with. Tybalt and I took advantage of the rare lull to curl up on the couch and put on a BBC production of The Tempest. Not that we were paying any attention to it. There’s nothing like Shakespeare to blunt the sounds of impending hanky-panky, or current heavy petting.

  Tybalt had one hand under my shirt, cupping the curve of my right breast, while he tangled his other hand in my hair, tying knots that would take me hours with a hairbrush to untangle. I wasn’t complaining. I was too busy trying to mold myself against him, making it easier for him to reach any part of my body that caught his fancy. Living in a house with three other full-time residents and an endlessly shifting cast of visitors has taught me to take my pleasures where I can find them, and at the moment, I was very focused on finding them.

  It didn’t hurt that Tybalt is possibly the most beautiful man I’ve ever been lucky enough to set my eyes on. Some of the Daoine Sidhe could beat him for pure prettiness—prettiness is sort of what the Daoine Sidhe do—but personal tastes have something to say when it comes to attraction, and Tybalt is so perfectly suited to my tastes that he might as well have been tailor-made to keep me happy.

  He’s lean, like the predator he is. Before we started sleeping together, I’d mostly seen him tense, defending his territory, his people, or me. I’d never realized he was capable of the complete, seemingly boneless relaxation of a housecat who feels genuinely safe. A truly relaxed Tybalt is a creature of pure, hedonistic softness, with the occasional flash of very welcome hardness.

  Without a disguise to make him seem human, his fae origins are written plainly in the bones of his face, in the green, striated color of his eyes, and in the black stripes that paint a tabby pattern through his brown hair. His ears are pointed, his incisors are a bit too sharp, and his pupils are ovals that widen and narrow according to the light. He’s powerful enough to keep the more animal aspects of his fae nature from peeking through when he doesn’t want them to: unlike some Cait Sidhe, he doesn’t have to walk around with a tail.

  Of course, there are some animal aspects I don’t object to. Tybalt buried his face against my neck, nipping at my skin with those pointed incisors, and I squeaked, making no effort to pull away. He took that as the invitation it was and bit harder, making a small growling noise.

  The doorbell rang.

  We both stopped what we were doing, Tybalt letting go of my hair and pulling back enough to blink at me, startled and visibly unhappy.

  “Were you expecting someone?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “No, and my phone isn’t set to silent. Arden or Etienne would have texted.” As Queen in the Mists, Arden Windermere is officially in charge of telling me when it’s time to go out and do hero stuff. As Sylvester’s seneschal, Etienne is usually the one who contacts me when my actual liege lord needs me.

  Most purebloods aren’t comfortable with modern technology. It moves too fast for them. Arden spent a century hiding in the human world, and Etienne has a human wife and a human-schooled daughter. Both of them prefer texting to calling, since I ask fewer questions when they just send me my assignment.

  “Did Quentin order pizza?”

  “If he did, he didn’t warn me, and I’m probably paying for it. So if he did, I’m going to skin him,” I said.

  The doorbell rang again.

  I pushed myself off Tybalt’s lap with a groan, tugging my shirt into place before grabbing a handful of shadows and weaving them into a quick if clunky human disguise. Etienne would have been so disappointed in me. He liked elegant spells, and this wasn’t that. It relied more on making people not want to look at the sharp tips of my ears or the inhuman paleness of my eyes than on replacing those things with believably human facsimiles.

  My irritation at the interruption made the process easier than it would have been otherwise. Titania is the mother of illusions, the font from which all flower magic springs, and she’s no ancestor of mine. Anything that relies on flowers has never come easily for me. Anger, on the other hand, gives my magic a pretty substantial boost. And boy, was I pissed.

  Being a hero means people interrupt me, but that still didn’t make it okay for someone to be ringing my doorbell uninvited at ten o’clock at night when my fiancé was finally feeling frisky. My sex life had taken a massive hit since Amandine decided to come knocking, and I was going to be grumpy about interruptions for quite some time to come.

  “If it’s your mother at the door, or your sister, or any member of your extended family, I am grabbing you by the scruff of the neck and hauling you into the shadows before they have time to do more than sneer,” said Tybalt darkly, getting off the couch and following me down the hall.

  “Be my guest,” I said, and opened the door.

  The woman on the front step looked at me blandly. “Took you long enough,” she said.

  I didn’t say anything.

  She looked like she was somewhere in her late teens, like she’d come to join Quentin’s impromptu slumber party because it was more fun than hanging around watching Shakespeare with the boring adults. Her hair was thick, dark, and curly, gathered into twin pigtails that hung over her shoulders and tangled around the straps of her overalls. They were tied off with strips of what looked like electrical tape. Sometimes I wonder how she ever manages to take her hair down without screaming. And then I remember that she’s so much older and more powerful than I am that she could easily swat me like a bug, and I keep my idle questions to myself.

  She was wearing overalls, an old white tank top, and battered tennis shoes. The ghosts of old acne scars clung to her cheeks and forehead; her eyes were a murky, lake-bottom blue. She looked about as much like a powerful, unstoppable sea witch as I did, which was to say, she didn’t look like one at all.

  “Trick or treat,” she said mildly. “Let me in.”

  “It’s March, not October,” I said, and stepped to the side to let her pass.

  She stepped into the hall, accompanied by the smell of wind blowing across the open ocean. “Some people will tell you Halloween is every day if you have the right attitude,” she said, flicking her fingers. The door slammed shut. Smirking, she ran her eyes first over me and then over Tyb
alt, taking in all the little signs of dishevelment that our hurried illusions hadn’t been able to conceal. “Am I interrupting something?”

  “If I say ‘yes,’ will you leave?” I asked, folding my arms. Tybalt made a small sound, although whether of amusement or dismay, I couldn’t quite tell.

  To be fair, most people don’t talk back to the Luidaeg. She’s the eldest of Maeve’s remaining children, with so many centuries behind her that I’m not sure even she remembers—or cares—how old she actually is. Like most of her siblings, her power outstrips that of her descendants like a hurricane outstrips a zephyr, in both strength and flexibility. She can do things the rest of Faerie can only dream of.

  Or have nightmares about. I’ve had more than a few nightmares about the things the Luidaeg thinks are good ideas.

  “No,” said the Luidaeg. She took another look around the hall. “Who else is here? I know it’s not just you.”

  I wanted to ask her how she knew. I knew, of course, but that’s thanks to a kind of tracking that seems to be unique to the Dóchas Sidhe. I can follow the scent of someone’s magic almost to the ends of the Earth. If I breathed in deeply enough, I could identify every person in my house, from May’s cotton candy and ashes to Dean’s less familiar but increasingly well-loved eucalyptus and wet rock. No two people have precisely the same magical signature. Even if they possess some common element, such as roses or heather, there’s always something about it that’s unique.

  “Tybalt, obviously,” I said. “May and Jazz are in their room. Quentin’s in his room, with Raj and Dean.”

  The Luidaeg nodded. “Good. Good. You can let your lady Fetch enjoy her evening; I doubt her Raven-maid particularly wants to see me.”

  “No,” I admitted. “Jazz isn’t a big fan of the Firstborn right now.”

  “That’s going to make your wedding fun.” The Luidaeg cast a measuring, narrow-eyed look at Tybalt. “I assume I am invited.”

  “We would no more dream of refusing you an invitation than we would of dancing naked through a storm of glass,” said Tybalt smoothly.

  “Unless that was your way of asking whether the wedding’s still on,” I said. “It is. Cake and everything. We just need to figure out when the Mists can spare us both.”

  “So next century; got it,” said the Luidaeg. Her expression sobered. “Fetch your boys.”

  “Which ones?” I asked.

  “All of them. This is relevant to all of them.”

  Tybalt and I exchanged a glance before he stepped around me and offered the Luidaeg a shallow bow. “Shall I show you to the dining room? We have a few burritos and some salsa left from our dinner, and I would be delighted to fetch them for your consideration.”

  “Sounds good,” said the Luidaeg. She swung her attention back to me. “Be quick. I have things to do tonight.”

  “That’s ominous,” I said, and started for the stairs. When the Luidaeg says it’s time to hurry, I hurry. Anything else could be taken as an insult, and while I don’t actually think she’d hurt me on a whim, it’s better to be safe than sorry.

  I met the Luidaeg when I was investigating the supposed murder of Evening Winterrose, her half-sister and—as it turns out—her direst enemy. It would have been nice to know that at the time. It would have been even nicer to know that Evening wasn’t dead but in hiding, healing and planning to come back and ruin absolutely everyone’s night. Too bad Evening has never been particularly interested in being nice.

  That’s when I met the Luidaeg, but I’ve known about her since I was a child. She’s the bogeyman fae parents use to threaten their children, the terrifying sea witch who will spirit them away to where the bad kids go if they don’t eat their vegetables or practice their illusions or make their beds. Out of all Faerie’s monsters, she’s painted as the one with the sharpest teeth, the cruelest claws. I suspect that’s more of Evening’s work, because while the Luidaeg can be harsh, she’s rarely cruel. Her gifts come with a cost. That doesn’t make them evil. It just makes them expensive.

  The upstairs hall was even quieter than the living room. I sniffed, detecting traces of multiple silencing spells. May and Jazz are usually considerate about that sort of thing. Quentin is less considerate than acting in self-defense, since I have a tendency to come to bed late, loud, and somewhat clumsy.

  His bedroom door was closed. I knocked. There was no reply. I knocked again before I realized that if the silencing spell was good enough, no noise could get in or out. That’s the trouble with magic. It’s useful, but it isn’t always easy to adapt to mundane uses.

  In some ways, the fact that the people living with me felt comfortable enough to use silencing spells on their bedrooms was incredibly flattering. They knew that if something went wrong, Tybalt and I would step in—and if I really needed them, I’d call. Not even silencing spells can stop a cellular signal from getting through.

  With that in mind, I pulled out my phone and selected Quentin’s name from my contact list. It was already ringing as I raised it to my ear. I waited.

  There was a beep. “Hello?”

  “Why is there a silencing spell on your room so strong that you can’t hear me knocking?”

  “Um.” I heard more than guilt in Quentin’s pause: I heard loud explosions, and the sound of Dean whooping with delight.

  I pinched the bridge of my nose. “You’re playing video games with Chelsea again, aren’t you?”

  “Raj has the best reflexes of anyone we know! He could go competitive if he weren’t—” Quentin caught himself and stopped mid-sentence.

  “If he weren’t expected to take the throne soon; I know,” I said. “You’re going to have to tell Chelsea you’re sorry, but it’s time to log off. The Luidaeg is here. She wants to talk to all three of you.”

  There was a long pause before Quentin asked warily, “Really?”

  Smart boy. “Really,” I said. “I think Tybalt’s feeding her our dinner leftovers. Get downstairs as soon as you can.”

  I ended the call and turned away, hesitating only long enough to glance one more time at May’s door, shake my head, and keep walking. May has a lot of my memories. She has a lot of my regrets. What she doesn’t have, thankfully, is my personality: she looked at the things that made me who I am and interpreted them in a whole new light, weighing them against the memories she’d brought with her from her previous existence as one of the night-haunts and deciding that what mattered wasn’t heroism, it was home.

  She’s my sister—the only one I’m willing to acknowledge. And what she needed, right now, was to spend time with her girlfriend, who was finally remembering how to laugh, and not get dragged into some wildly dangerous quest. I’d tell her what was going on before I did anything as serious as leaving the house, but for right now?

  She deserved to rest.

  Tybalt and the Luidaeg were in the dining room. She had claimed both leftover burritos, split them open, and created a half-horrifying, half-aspirational plate of pseudo-nachos by dumping their contents on the remaining chips. She was seated at the head of the table and munching steadily away, as focused as if she hadn’t eaten since the last time San Francisco burned to the ground.

  “I don’t think some of those flavors are supposed to go together,” I said, moving to stand next to Tybalt. He was leaning against the wall by the china hutch, which was really more of a “random mail and things we didn’t care about enough to put properly away” hutch, keeping a careful eye on the Luidaeg.

  “All flavors go together if you’re willing,” said the Luidaeg matter-of-factly. “Didn’t you go to fetch the boys?”

  “They’ll be right down.” I settled against the wall, folding my arms. “I’m guessing this isn’t a social call.”

  “What was your first clue?” asked the Luidaeg.

  “The part where you asked me to fetch the boys. Also the part where you don’t usually just dr
op by for no reason. Is something wrong?”

  “You could say that.” She laughed, and the sound was mirthless, hollow; it was the rattle of bones across the bottom of the endless sea, and there was nothing in it that remembered what it was to forgive. “Something’s been wrong for a long, long time, and it’s finally time to make it right again, or as right as it can be. I’m not sure there’s any real fixing what’s been broken.”

  Dread coiled in the pit of my stomach. “I—” I began, and stopped, catching myself before I could ask the question. If she wanted me to wait for Quentin and the others, I would wait. No matter how difficult it was, no matter how much I wanted to know now. I owed her that much, after everything she’d done for me and mine.

  The Luidaeg shot me a quick, thankful look and returned to her nachos, working her way through them with the single-minded focus of a woman who didn’t know when she was going to eat again. I’m not sure the Firstborn—any of the Firstborn—actually need to eat; the rules for killing them are specific and complicated and don’t include “starvation.” But that doesn’t mean they can’t enjoy being comfortable, and there’s something about a full stomach that’s a comfort for almost everyone.

  Tybalt shifted to stand closer to me. I bumped my shoulder against his, but didn’t lean. This felt like hero business, and while I might resent both the title and the responsibility, it deserved to be taken seriously.

  Footsteps cautiously descended the stairs. Only two sets, which meant Raj was unnerved enough about the interruption in his gaming time to have gone into full silent Cait Sidhe mode. Like Tybalt, he only makes noise when he wants to. Tybalt and I looked toward the hall.

  The Luidaeg kept eating nachos.

  “Toby?” Quentin was the first to appear in the doorway. He spotted the Luidaeg and shifted his focus to her, offering a small wave and an even smaller grin. “Hi, Luidaeg.”

  “Hi, yourself,” she said, pushing her plate aside. “Come give me a hug before shit gets serious. You haven’t been visiting enough recently.”