Ashes of Honor od-6

by Seanan McGuire

  I sat up, using the last of my magic to spin an illusion that made me look both human and uninjured. It wouldn’t do for me to go staggering down the street looking like something out of a Saturday night horror movie. The effort left me winded again. I stayed where I was for a few more minutes, waiting for my head to stop spinning. Then I stood and began walking back toward the street. I was done. I was exhausted, I was covered in blood, and I was absolutely, without question, done. Nothing was going to keep me from going home. Absolutely—

  Sudden light blinded me. I raised a hand to shield my eyes, squinting against the glare.

  “Stop where you are. Keep your hands where I can see them.” The voice was unfamiliar, but the combination of words and tone was unmistakable: that was a police officer talking into a speaker. Which meant someone had reported the gunshots, and I was about to be taken in for questioning. Oh, lucky, lucky me. At least I was wearing a human disguise. I might get arrested, but I wasn’t likely to be dissected.

  This is my life.

  TWO

  “LET’S GO OVER THIS AGAIN,” said the policeman.

  This is also my life: sitting in the Mission police station for almost two hours after getting picked up for standing in an alleyway where gunshots had been reported. I was waiting for the nice policeman assigned to take my statement to decide that he was done and tell me I could go.

  I had better luck with the drug dealers.

  “I can do that,” I said.

  Not fast enough, or maybe not enthusiastically enough. The policeman looked up from his paperwork, eyes narrowing. “Unless you had somewhere else you wanted to be tonight?”

  “I’m fine with going over my statement again,” I said, and smiled.

  He didn’t. “Good. Now, you were picked up at approximately ten thirty-seven PM—”

  He droned on. I kept smiling and nodding, trying to look like as if I was practicing attentive listening and paying attention to every word he said. Little could have been farther from the truth, but sometimes you have to play by the rules, even if they’re the rules of somebody else’s game.

  My name is October Daye. I’m a knight errant in service to the Court of Shadowed Hills, one of the secret Faerie fiefdoms hidden in the state of California. I’m a sort of supernatural troubleshooter, and what I do is technically outside human jurisdiction…but that’s not something I can explain to mortal law enforcement, since they don’t know that Faerie exists.

  The policeman stopped talking, apparently waiting for me to say something. I quickly reviewed the last few things he’d said and ventured, “It was dark.”

  “You’ve said.” He scowled, picking up another piece of paper. “You told Officer Brannon that you were walking home when gunfire broke out, and you didn’t see the shooters.”

  “Yes. It was dark, I didn’t expect people to have guns…” Darkness isn’t actually an issue for me—I see better at night than most humans do in daylight—but it was an excuse. I needed excuses, since there was no way the truth was going to fly with the SFPD.

  “Have you lived in San Francisco long, Ms. Daye?”

  “All my life.” I’ve never been fond of dealing with the human police. In addition to being a knight errant, I’m a changeling—part fae, part human—and most of the time I manage to restrict my interaction with authority figures to the fae side of things. I don’t like dealing with them either, but at least they’re honest about what they want. Sure, “what they want” frequently involves my head on a platter, but nothing’s perfect.

  “Yet somehow you wound up in a very disreputable neighborhood, by yourself, after dark. That doesn’t seem like the move of a native.”

  It was getting harder to keep smiling. I gritted my teeth as I said, “I had a fight with my sister and went out to clear my head. As soon as I realized where I was, I turned around.”

  “Ms. Daye—”

  “Let it go, Carl.” The new voice came from behind me, male, and familiar in a “maybe we were in the same Starbucks once” kind of a way. I twisted in my uncomfortable plastic chair. He was in his mid-thirties, Caucasian, brown hair, with a face as vaguely familiar as his voice.

  Carl glowered at the newcomer. “I have a few more questions for Ms. Daye.”

  “We’re not charging her with anything, and that means we can stop taking up her valuable time.” Translation: I wasn’t telling them anything useful, and they had better things to do. That was okay by me.

  “Fine,” said Carl, with obvious reluctance. His attention flicked back to me. “You’re free to go. Officer Thornton will take you to retrieve your things.”

  “I appreciate it,” I said, standing. I hadn’t surrendered my most important things—the silver knife at my belt and the Summerlands-compatible phone in my front pocket. Both were hidden by the illusion that made me look human. That was for the best, since San Francisco law frowns on carrying hidden weapons and explicitly forbids loitering while armed. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time and loitering aren’t quite the same, but I was willing to bet they’d have at least tried to make the charges stick, and I couldn’t afford a lawyer.

  Carl grunted, hunching over the paperwork he’d been toying with during my amateur interrogation. Officer Thornton gestured for me to follow him out into the station’s dingy hallway.

  “Let’s get you out of here while you can still get a few hours sleep,” he said. Out of habit, I squinted at him sidelong, trying to detect the flicker of an illusion. There was nothing. Officer Thornton might be unusually calm for a grave-shift policeman, but he was human. “Your friend is waiting for you up front.”

  I blinked. “My friend?”

  “Yes.”

  “Right.” That could be any one of a number of people. I gave Officer Thornton another sidelong look, this time focusing on his face. “I’m sorry, but you seem familiar. Do I know you?”

  “Golden Gate Park. You were wearing a leather jacket in the middle of summer.” Officer Thornton grinned at my obvious surprise. “I don’t forget a pretty face, especially when it’s refusing help for heatstroke. You’re not going to do that again this year, are you?”

  “Oh! That was you?” I remembered that day in the park. I hadn’t been suffering from heatstroke; I’d been poisoned by an old enemy, Oleander de Merelands, who was trying to drive me out of my mind. She came disturbingly close to succeeding. Sometimes I wish my problems were as simple as heatstroke.

  “That was me,” he confirmed. He turned to the officer manning the desk, and said, “Ms. Daye is being released. Can we get her things, please?”

  “You’ll have to sign for them,” said the officer, frowning at me.

  “I’ve been signing my name since I was six,” I said. “I think I can manage.”

  The desk officer rolled his eyes as he got up and vanished into the back, leaving me alone with Officer Thornton. We stood in silence for a few seconds before he cleared his throat and said, “You have an interesting file.”

  That was probably an understatement. “Yeah?” I asked, trying to sound uninterested.

  “You were the subject of a missing persons case that remains unsolved, since you never told us where you’d been. Your teenage daughter was abducted last fall—”

  “Are you implying something?” I interrupted. I didn’t care if that looked suspicious. I didn’t want him saying anything else about Gillian.

  I disappeared because Simon Torquill turned me into a goldfish for fourteen years. My little girl grew up believing I’d abandoned her. My only comfort had been knowing that Gillian was free of Faerie and its dangers…a solace shattered by Simon’s niece, Rayseline, when she abducted my now-teenage daughter. Raysel wanted to hurt me. She succeeded. I lost both my daughter and my lover thanks to her. Gillian was still alive. Connor wasn’t. It had been almost a year, and I hadn’t had a good day’s sleep since that night. The dreams were too much for me.

  “Not at all,” said Officer Thornton, clearly sensing my distress. “I just thought
it was interesting. That’s all.”

  “Try living with it,” I said. Living with the things in my file wasn’t that hard. It was living with the things that weren’t there that was threatening to kill me.

  Officer Thornton was saved from replying by the return of the desk officer with my confiscated belongings. Leather jacket, package of tissues, wallet, belt; it was all there and, thankfully, all still covered by the illusion I had spun. Suddenly appearing bloodstains and bullet holes wouldn’t have gone over well with the police. I signed the form and slipped my jacket on, relaxing a little as the weight of it settled on my shoulders.

  I looked up once everything was back where it belonged. “Is that all?”

  “That’s all,” confirmed Officer Thornton. “You’re free to leave.”

  “Great.” That seemed insufficient, so I added, “It was nice to see you again. Despite, you know. The circumstances.”

  “I apologize that we had to keep you past midnight,” said Officer Thornton.

  “It’s all right. I’m a bit of a night owl.” It being after midnight just meant I was fully awake. Fae are nocturnal, and I’m fae enough to be at my best after the sun goes down.

  “Get home safely, all right?”

  “I’ll try.” I forced myself to smile before turning to walk through the door to the public receiving area. The sweet air of freedom hit me as soon as I was out of the working part of the station. My smile turned honest. I started for the nearest exit…and stopped, blinking.

  When Officer Thornton said “my friend” was waiting for me, I’d been half-hoping he meant May. She’s legally my twin sister, thanks to some clever paperwork created by Countess April O’Leary of Tamed Lightning; she would have been the logical person for the police to call, if they were going to call anyone.

  It wasn’t May.

  Tybalt was standing near the center of the room with his hands shoved into the pockets of his jeans and an uneasy expression on his face, as though he wasn’t sure what he was doing there, either. He was wearing a human disguise that turned his tabby-striped brown hair solidly black and painted round pupils in his eyes. I caught myself smiling and hastily swallowed the expression. I didn’t want to be glad to see him. I couldn’t help myself.

  “Hi, Tybalt,” I said and started for the door. “Did everything get taken care of?”

  His anxiety vanished in a flash, replaced by a more customary air of mild hauteur. “Once I realized you intended to spend the evening in the company of the police, I saw to it the job was properly completed. Those children will no longer be peddling poison on these streets.” He fell into step beside me. “You may show your gratitude later, in whatever way you deem fit.”

  “And meeting me at the police station?”

  “I thought it might prove entertaining.” He sighed. “Sadly, I am again disappointed.”

  “Sorry I let you down. Maybe if you’d brought popcorn, the cops would have felt the need to step up their game.” I reached for the door leading out to the street. Tybalt slipped past me, opening it before I could. I kept walking. “I’m fine, really.”

  “October…”

  It was late enough that the stretch of Valencia Street outside the police station was virtually deserted. The lights were on at the local bars—last call was more than an hour away—and a few homeless people huddled in doorways or panhandled around the ATMs, but for the most part, we were alone. I still glanced around to be sure that there were no officers on the sidewalk before I said, “I’m a little dizzy, but it’s nothing some orange juice and new jeans won’t fix. How did you know I was here?”

  “I saw the police take you. I couldn’t prevent it. So I dropped by your house to see whether anyone was intending to collect you.” Tybalt shrugged. “You know what they say about curiosity and cats. Your lady Fetch said she would appreciate it if I would bring you home. As I try never to argue with death omens, here I am.”

  “What, May couldn’t come herself?” May is my former Fetch and current housemate. Not a normal living arrangement, even in Faerie, but she’s willing to do at least one thing I’m not: the dishes. Her girlfriend, Jazz, is a raven in her spare time.

  “She was otherwise occupied.”

  “Doing what?”

  Tybalt ignored my question. “I offered. She accepted. I felt we could stand to spend some time actually conversing. We’ve both been rather occupied of late.”

  “No, Tybalt, we haven’t been. I’ve been avoiding you. Which is a change from the way things normally go, but change is good, right?” I buried my hands in my jacket pockets. “I needed some time.”

  “I know,” said Tybalt, tone suddenly sober. “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah. So am I.”

  Our relationship—it was too rocky to call it a friendship, although I didn’t have a better word—has always been punctuated by long periods of absence. It’s just that usually Tybalt was the absent one, while I was the one trying to find him. This time…after Connor died, I didn’t want to deal with anyone, especially not anyone complicated. Tybalt can be a lot of things, but if there’s one thing he’s never been, it’s simple.

  “About earlier…” I began, then stopped, unsure how to finish the sentence. The fae prohibition against something as simple as saying “thank you” can be clumsy sometimes. Like now. The gang of changelings would have stuck around to finish me off if Tybalt hadn’t stepped in. It was as if my ability to be careful had died with Connor, and I hadn’t figured out a way to resurrect it yet.

  “The house seems nice,” Tybalt said, tone neutral.

  I recognized the conversational save and grabbed it with both hands. “We’re almost unpacked. I’m getting used to it. It’s nice to have everyone in their own room, so I don’t trip over Quentin every time I go to get a cup of coffee.”

  “I’m glad Sylvester was able to arrange the move.”

  “Me, too.” My liege, Sylvester Torquill, had been trying to get me to move out of my apartment for years. When I gave up Goldengreen—the knowe that was briefly in my possession—Sylvester put his foot down, insisting that if I wasn’t willing to move into Shadowed Hills, I was at least going to move into a place where I wasn’t sharing walls with humans. I’d responded by saying I wouldn’t move out of San Francisco. It was the Queen’s territory, and it was a long way from Shadowed Hills, but it was home. After some arguing, he acquiesced, and I took possession of one of the many houses he and his wife owned the title to.

  The new house was on 20th Street, overlooking Mission Delores Park. It would probably have cost a million or more on the open market. Sylvester did all his real estate investment in that area over a century ago. All he had to do was hand me the keys, and suddenly we had as much room as we needed.

  Moving meant boxing up all the things Connor had accidentally left at my place: shirts and sandals, toothbrushes and half-finished paperbacks. I found them, boxed them, and took them with us. I didn’t know how to let him go. I don’t believe in ghosts, but there were times when I felt like I was being haunted. Worse yet, there were times when I didn’t know whether I minded the haunting.

  Tybalt cleared his throat. “Quentin’s studies are proceeding well?”

  “I think so. They seem to be. I’ve never done this before.” Quentin was my squire, making me responsible for teaching him how to be an effective knight of Faerie without getting himself killed. Mostly, this seemed to mean he was underfoot all the time, and Sylvester sent money to pay for feeding him. At least he had his own room now.

  “Raj is quite envious, you know.”

  I shot Tybalt a glance. “Really?” Raj was his adopted nephew and probable heir to the throne of the Court of Cats.

  “Really.” He nodded. “We have nothing so organized in the Court of Cats. No one teaches a King to be a King. You claim your position the day the old King no longer holds it.”

  “Because the new King has just kicked his ass?” I asked.

  The amusement faded but didn’t disappear. “In
most cases, yes,” he said.

  We kept walking. It’s not far from the Mission Police Station to Mission Delores Park, but I wasn’t hurrying. It was a beautiful night, and I was too tired to hurry. I risked another glance at Tybalt as we walked. For someone who used to be one of my biggest—not enemies, exactly, but annoyances—he’s become very important to me. There have been times I was pretty sure I was important to him, too. Maybe I was right, but we’d silently agreed to let the issue rest after Connor died. We both needed some time.

  Tybalt managed to seem feline even wearing a human disguise; it was something in the way he moved, something that had nothing to do with the shape of his ears or the color of his hair. Cats have no stripes in the dark, after all. His jeans and flannel work shirt looked at once too mundane and exactly right for him. He was walking slowly to pace me, despite his longer legs, and was staying carefully outside my personal space.

  That’s something else that changed when Connor died. Tybalt used to take obvious pleasure in standing too close just to watch me squirm. As soon as I went into mourning, that part of his feline nature faded. He’s always been a contradiction that way, part arrogant feline, part genuinely compassionate man. It just took me a while to see the second side of him.

  As always, walking with Tybalt was strangely comfortable. This time, it came with a new feeling—guilt, as though I was betraying Connor’s memory by being comfortable with another man. Finally, to break the silence, I asked, “How did you know where to find me before?”

  “Ah.” Tybalt sighed. “It was, in a roundabout way, your squire.”

  “Quentin?”

  “Yes. He told Raj, including a complaint that you were going to get yourself killed. Raj, naturally, assumed this was something I might like to know, and, well…” Tybalt shrugged. “I am sure you would have been fine without me.”