The Unkindest Tide

by Seanan McGuire

  There was a time, immediately after his abduction, when I’d thought Tybalt’s arrogance might have been broken forever. There had also been a time, much earlier in our acquaintance, when I would have considered that a good thing.

  Not anymore. He was my arrogant, smug, gloriously pointed King of Cats, and I wouldn’t want him any other way.

  I found my own shoes while he dealt with his, strapped my silver knife to my belt, and grabbed a double handful of shadows, chanting, “Ride a black pony to Banbury Cross, to see a fine lady upon a white horse. With rings on her fingers and bells on her toes, she shall have music wherever she goes.”

  The magic gathered and burst around me, drifting to floor level and leaving me garbed in a human disguise of my own, one that made me look like the woman who’d been Cliff’s lover and Gillian’s mother, brown-haired and blue-eyed and blissfully ordinary, unaware of the dangers ahead of her. Sometimes I miss being that woman, who never knew what she was capable of, who had never needed to know. She’d been ignorant in the most merciful of ways.

  I looked at Tybalt, who was smiling at my transformation with simple affection, and thought I liked who I’d grown into being a whole lot better. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t feel sorry for the way the other me had ended.

  “Are you ready?” he asked, stepping toward me with his hands extended, like he was going to escort me to a cotillion.

  “I was going to drive,” I protested.

  He snorted. “Please. And look for parking in this mess of a city? Allow me the privilege of saving us both the time.”

  “You’re too good at getting your own way,” I said, and slid my hands into his.

  Tybalt’s smile was a knife drawn in a darkened room. “I’m a cat,” he said, and stepped backward into the shadows, pulling me with him.

  All Cait Sidhe have access to the Shadow Roads, the secret corridors and connections drawn between the dark places of the world. As a King of Cats, Tybalt’s connection and control are better than most. He’s strong enough to take passengers with him—which, at least in the last few years, has usually meant me.

  It’s cold on the Shadow Roads. It’s cold and it’s dark and it’s airless, at least for me, because they can tell I don’t belong there. Like all the truly ancient passages through Faerie, like the knowes, the Shadow Roads are at least a little bit aware, and they can reject the things that shouldn’t cross their borders. Tybalt always comes out of the shadows chilly but not wheezing, and not covered in sheets of ice the way I do.

  Well. Not always. There have been a few incidents where, for one reason or another, I was unable to run beside him and he had to carry me through the darkness, putting a heart-stopping strain on his system. With as often as both of us seem to wind up dead, we should really get a frequent-flier card for the underworld.

  As long as there isn’t time for the night-haunts to be called for either one of us, I guess we’ll be okay.

  He ran through the darkness, his hand tight around mine, and I ran beside him, closing my eyes to keep them from freezing, trusting him to know the way. Just the fact of that trust made the shadows feel warmer, although I still wasn’t going to risk trying to breathe there. No matter how much I learned to follow my lover through the dark, I would never be welcome enough for the roads to grant me oxygen.

  When we stepped out of the shadows on the other end, the brightness and warmth of the mortal world was a shock. I pulled my hand out of Tybalt’s and staggered away, gasping, to catch myself against the nearest wall. Ice had glued my eyelashes together, but I trusted him not to have dropped us in the middle of a street or something.

  Faerie survives because humanity doesn’t know we exist. We have magic, sure; some fae could take out dozens, even hundreds of humans before they were overrun. But we don’t have the numbers, and our vulnerability to pure iron means humanity will always have the upper hand when we’re standing on their home ground. There are very few fae left in the former Kingdom of Oak and Ash, which consists of most of the land around the mortal city of New York. Once the iron makes it into the water, we’re done.

  Tybalt is savvy enough to have gone this long without getting caught. So I took the time I needed to catch my breath, and when the ice melted enough to let me open my eyes, I turned to find him watching me with undisguised fondness that seemed strange only due to his currently human appearance.

  “Where are we?” I asked. I was barely wheezing at all, and I was proud of that.

  “Service alley about two blocks from your ex-boyfriend’s house,” he said. “The owner of the liquor store,” he indicated a door set into the brick wall in front of us, “keeps swearing he’s going to install security cameras, and keeps putting it off due to the expense. I’m sure that will change when he gets robbed again, and we’ll need to find a different path to visit this neighborhood, but the cats will keep me apprised.”

  “Even when you’re not their King anymore?”

  For a moment, Tybalt looked conflicted, unhappy and hopeful at the same time. Then he nodded and said, “Raj will rule them, but they will still respect my place as one of the Cait Sidhe, even as they respect his. I’ll know where it’s safe to travel.”

  I had a lot of questions, like what he meant when he said Raj would rule “them” and not “us,” but for the moment, it seemed safer to let things slide. Tybalt was working hard enough to be okay with the changes in his life. They were necessary changes—he’d stepped down and allowed a regent to guard his throne for him because he needed the time to heal, not because I’d asked him to—but they were still an adjustment. For both of us.

  “Come on,” I said, and motioned for him to follow me out of the alley. Looking relieved, he did.

  San Francisco is an old city, which means it’s not as segmented as modern cities always seem to me. Small convenience stores and blocks of retail offerings are tucked into otherwise residential neighborhoods, making it possible for people to do most of what they need to do entirely on foot. That’s a good thing, considering how bad the parking situation is. I fully expect someone to get murdered over a good parking place one of these days, and go off to prison utterly content, as long as someone else stays behind to feed the meter.

  Turning left, we climbed the short hill between us and the nearest of those residential streets. The shops dropped away, replaced by the tidy, pressed-together houses that had been all the rage after the Victorians but before the condos. The house Cliff shared with Gillian and Janet—whose real name he still didn’t know—wasn’t far.

  His car wasn’t parked in the driveway. I felt bad about how relieved that made me. Still, the last thing I needed to add to an already-uncomfortable afternoon was trying to talk freely with my human ex-boyfriend sitting in the room.

  Tybalt flashed me a quick, understanding smile. “It will be all right,” he said.

  “It’ll be something,” I said as I climbed the steps and rang the doorbell.

  Seconds ticked by, enough of them that I was considering whether it might be a good idea to ring again, before I heard footsteps on the other side. I took a deep breath. No matter who opened that door, they were family, and that meant that they were complicated.

  “Coming!” The voice was Janet’s. I didn’t relax.

  Janet Carter—currently known as “Miranda Marks,” thanks to both her assumed name and her marriage to Cliff—is human. Totally, completely, perfectly human. She’s also more than five hundred years old, thanks to a curse flung by Maeve after her Ride was broken. Janet won’t age or die, through natural or unnatural means, until Maeve returns and allows her to do so. And since we don’t know whether Maeve is ever going to come back, well . . . .

  She could be around for a long, long time. She’s too human for Faerie, and too fae-touched to be comfortable as a part of humanity. Maybe it makes me a bad person, but in a way, I’m glad. She took my daughter away from me, and she di
d it on purpose, discouraging Gillian from reaching out, believing I was just another careless fae parent who didn’t want or deserve her partially-mortal child. Janet and I have reconciled some of our differences. We’ve had to, for Gilly’s sake. That doesn’t mean I’ve forgiven her completely, or that I’ll ever be able to.

  The door swung open, revealing a woman with the healthy tan of a gardener and buttercup-blonde hair drawn back in a complicated braid. She was wearing a lace sundress, and she looked like she could have stepped off the cover of a magazine advertising the latest in holistic health care, or maybe the newest trends in early childhood education.

  She blinked once. “October?” she asked, in a startled, wary tone. Her accent was pure California, but I could hear the shores of Scotland lurking beneath it, like her roots were unable to resist the magnetic pull of her own blood. She’s my grandmother. Parts of her will always know me, whether she wants them to or not.

  When I first saw her, Cliff’s new wife, the woman who swept in while I was absent due to Simon’s spell, the woman who won when I didn’t even know that we were competing, I’d thought she looked too much like me for comfort, like Cliff had a type he couldn’t get away from. There were similarities in the shape of our eyes, the length of our fingers, even the curve of our hips. Her coloring was more saturated than my own—Dóchas Sidhe always look faintly bleached, if my sister and I are anything to go by—but it was easy enough to draw a line from her to me, from me to her. Learning we were actually related had almost been a relief, except for all the ways in which it wasn’t.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Can we come in?”

  Janet glanced warily at Tybalt. “Your friend is . . . ?”

  “Fiancé,” said Tybalt. “We’ve met, in passing. You may call me ‘Rand’ if it suits you to do so, or you may call me nothing at all if that suits your sensibilities better. I’ll be accompanying my lady either way.”

  Janet’s wary glance turned into a blink, and then a look of dawning comprehension. “I see. Well, I suppose you’d best both come inside. I can put a pot of coffee on if you’d like something to drink.”

  “That’s all right,” I said, stepping into the front hall and stepping to the side so that Tybalt could do the same. “Caffeine doesn’t do anything for me anymore, so coffee’s just bitter and frustrating.”

  “That’s not fair,” said Janet. “Caffeine is one of the true wonders of the modern age.”

  “What do you consider to be the others?” asked Tybalt.

  Janet shrugged. “The Internet. Telephones. Vaccinations. McDonald’s. Fast food in general. I assume this isn’t a social call?”

  I wanted to ask more about that whole “McDonald’s” thing, but this wasn’t the time. I shook my head. “Not a social call, no. Is Gillian home? I need to speak to both of you.”

  Janet went very still, like she thought I might forget she was there if she just waited long enough. There was a long, silent pause. Finally, in a softer voice, she said, “May I ask why?”

  “I’m not here to hurt her or to take her away from you,” I said. “Please. Can you get her?”

  “I don’t know if I want you talking to her right now,” said Janet. “She’s in a delicate place. She doesn’t need to be confused.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t have a choice,” I said. “I waited as long as I could, but time’s short, and we need to talk before things go any further.”

  “It’s all right, Mom,” said a new voice. Janet and I turned in sudden unison, and there was Gillian, standing on the stairs with one hand on the banister, watching us. My heart leapt and sank in the same moment, the way it always did when I saw my daughter’s face.

  She was so beautiful, and still so mortal in many ways; being a Selkie hadn’t changed the underlying softness of her bone structure, or stolen the riotous curls from her dark brown, almost black hair. Out of all Janet’s descendants, she was the only one who didn’t seem to have purchased her color from the “washed-out and pale” bin at the discount store. She was wearing sweatpants and a UC Berkeley sweatshirt, and she had never been lovelier.

  Then she took a step toward us, and the air around her glittered, the way it always did when someone was wearing a disguise intended to let them pass for human. My heart sank again, this time with no accompanying uplift. She wasn’t human anymore. She couldn’t even wear her own face in her own home, not without alerting her father to the fact that something had changed, for good.

  Gillian smiled when she saw the look on my face. It wasn’t a kind smile. “Liz has been teaching me,” she said, and snapped her fingers. The illusion around her fell away, leaving the smell of flowering fennel and primroses behind. It wasn’t the scent her magic would have had if she’d stayed Dóchas Sidhe, but it was close, so close. I breathed in deeply, memorizing the unique signature of her magic, before looking at her without her masks for the first time in months.

  She still looked essentially like herself, only . . . different. Her eyes were so dark they verged on black, irises and pupils blending seamlessly. Silver streaks ran through her curls, echoing the color of the seal’s pelt tied around her shoulders. Her ears were dully pointed, not as sharp as mine or Tybalt’s, but distinctly inhuman. She held up one hand, spreading her fingers to show me the webbing that extended to the first knuckles.

  “Daddy won’t be home for a few hours,” she said. “I don’t like being disguised all the time. It makes my ears itch.”

  Again, that strange fluttering in my chest. “Illusions make me feel the same way,” I said.

  “Huh.” Gillian finished coming down the stairs, looking first at me, and then at Tybalt. “If I’m not going to wear a mask, you shouldn’t either.”

  “As my lady wishes,” said Tybalt, and let his illusion go.

  To her credit, Gillian barely flinched when Tybalt’s human disguise wisped away and revealed him for what he really was. She turned to me.

  “Your turn.”

  I swallowed my sigh and flicked my fingers, willing the spell to break and disperse. I hate recasting my illusions when I don’t have to. My magic is stronger than it used to be, thanks to the shifted balance of my blood, but illusions still don’t come easy to me, and casting too many will leave me with a headache even my rapid healing can’t get rid of. I can heal a broken bone in minutes and bring myself back from the dead, and I still can’t cure migraines. Sometimes the world is just unfair.

  Gillian tilted her head, studying me, and finally said, “If you’d looked like this when you came back five years ago, I might have believed you were really my mother. This is how you always looked in my dreams. Mom?”

  “Yes, sweetheart?” said Janet, before I could open my mouth.

  Gillian’s smile was earnest and sincere, and so quick it broke my heart a little, because she had never been talking to me. “Can we go to the kitchen? I want to have time to put my face back on if Daddy comes home early.”

  “Of course,” said Janet, and put her arm around Gillian’s shoulders, guiding our involuntarily shared daughter away from the stairs, away from the windows through which a passing human might happen to see her, and into the room that belonged, more than anything, to Janet herself.

  It was impossible to look at Gillian’s choice of venues and not see it, however unintentionally, as yet another signal that Janet was her real mother. Janet was the one who’d been there when she lost her baby teeth, when she learned how to ride a bike, for her first day of kindergarten and her last day of high school. I might have given birth to her, but I hadn’t raised her, and I still didn’t know whether she was ever going to be able to forgive me.

  The kitchen was decorated in early kitchen witch. The window garden was lush with herbs and flowering plants; there was even a tomato bush that had somehow been coaxed into bristling with early fruit, each one golden orange and perfect, like a tiny sun. I eyed the plants warily, relaxing as I saw
that certain herbs and simples had vanished since our last visit.

  “I cleared out the plants that were inherently harmful to the fae,” said Janet, following my gaze and guessing the reasons for it. “It seemed unkind to ward my own daughter’s home against her.”

  “Stepdaughter, if you please,” said a voice, and for a horrifying moment, I thought it was mine. Then I realized Janet was looking at Tybalt. Relief washed over me. For once, I’d managed to keep my mouth shut.

  “I don’t think this is any of your concern,” said Janet stiffly.

  “Actually, he’s right, Mom,” said Gillian. Both Janet and I turned to her. Janet looked crushed. I didn’t know what to feel. My heart was beating too hard and too fast, making my head spin. “You’re my mom, but she’s my mother. We can’t pretend she isn’t. We shouldn’t pretend she isn’t. Not with . . . everything.” Her gesture encompassed her entire body, starting with the sealskin tied around her shoulders.

  Janet’s face fell. “Sweetie, you don’t have to let her in if you don’t want to.”

  I cleared my throat. “Okay, great as it is to go over this again, because I’m not tired of being stabbed in the chest just yet, I did come here for a reason. Gillian, honey, we need to talk.”

  “Why do parents always use food names when they’re talking to their kids? I’m legally an adult, and you still treat me like a dessert topping.” Gillian folded her arms. “Is this about whatever has Ms. Ryan so spooked? Because I’ve been waiting for someone to get around to telling me what’s going on.”

  I should probably have felt guilty. All I felt in that moment was relief. Gilly knew this was coming; had been waiting, in fact, for someone to get it over with. I was actually doing her a favor for a change. “It is, yeah,” I said. I glanced to Janet and Tybalt before asking, “Has someone explained to you where Selkie skins come from?”

  Gillian nodded. “Mass murder, very sad, and it’s why I’m not allowed to tell any of the other Selkies that their ‘Cousin Annie’ is secretly the actual sea witch from The Little Mermaid. I’m hanging out with Ursula on the regular, and I can’t even tell the other fairies about it.”