“Perhaps you misunderstand . . .” he began, with the sort of exaggerated care that implied he was speaking to a child or a crazy person. “I have a message from Duke Torquill, which he has tasked me to—”
“Sweet Lady Maeve protect me from idiots,” I muttered, turning back to the door and jamming my key into the lock. The wards glared an angry red. “I know who your message is from. I just don’t care. Tell Sylvester . . . tell him anything you want. I got out of that life, I quit that game, and I’m not listening to anymore messages.”
I waved my free hand and the glare died, replaced by the grass-and-copper smell of my magic. Good. No one had broken in. Someone who didn’t have the key could open the door without breaking the wards, but not without voiding the spell woven into them, and even a master couldn’t replicate the flavor of my magic that exactly. I couldn’t mistake one of Tybalt’s spells for one of Sylvester’s anymore than I could mistake sunset for dawn. That’s the true value in wards; not keeping things out, but telling you if something’s managed to get in.
“But—”
“But nothing. Go home. There’s nothing for you here.” I shoved the door open and stepped inside.
“The Duke—”
“Won’t blame you for failing to deliver this message. Trust me on this one.” I paused, suddenly tired, and turned in the doorway to face him. He looked very lost. It was almost enough to make me feel sorry for him. “How long have you been with Sylvester’s court?”
“Almost a year,” he said, confusion shifting into sudden wariness. I couldn’t blame him for that. I hadn’t been exactly pleasant.
“Almost a year,” I echoed. “Right. That explains why you drew the short straw. Look: I am a knight in the service of His Grace. That’s true. I can’t make him release my fealty. But unless he gives me a direct order, I don’t have to listen. Did he send you here with a direct order?” The kid shook his head, silent. “That’s what I thought. Tell him I appreciate him thinking of me, and I’d appreciate it even more if he’d stop.” Almost gently, I shut the door in his face.
The knocking started less than a minute later. I groaned. “Root and branch, don’t some people know how to take a hint? I’m not interested!” The knocking continued.
Swearing under my breath, I shrugged out of my coat and threw it over the back of my battered, Goodwill-issue couch. It’s the little touches that can make a house a home, right?
The knocking wasn’t stopping. I glared at the door, considering telling him to go the hell away before I shook my head and moved farther into the apartment instead. Sylvester has a knack for inspiring loyalty. If he told the kid to deliver a message, the kid was going to do his damnedest to deliver it. It might have been easier to just open the door and let him say whatever it was Sylvester felt needed to be said, but the thing was I didn’t want him to. As long as I didn’t hear it, I didn’t have to run the risk that I might care.
Sylvester started trying to contact me as soon as someone told him I was back. First it was with letters delivered by pixies and rose goblins. Then it was messages passed through mutual acquaintances. If he’d moved up to sending pages, he must be getting desperate, but I still didn’t want to hear it. What did he have to say to me? “I’m sorry you screwed up this simple little thing I asked you to do and got yourself turned into a fish while I kept suffering alone?” “Maybe you didn’t find my family, but hey, you lost yours, so I guess it all evened out?” Thanks, but no thanks. I can wallow in guilt just fine without any help from my titular liege lord.
One day, Sylvester’s going to move up to ordering me to answer him, or worse, to come to Shadowed Hills and see him in person. When that happens, I won’t be able to disobey—even if I’m trying to deny Faerie, he’s my liege, and his word is law. Until then, I’m free to disregard his messengers as often as I like, and as often as I like is always. Let the kid hammer on my door until someone called security. I was going to get some sleep.
The cats were puddled on the couch in a tumbled heap of cream and chocolate. I walked past them, heading for the narrow hallway that connects the living room and kitchen to the back of the apartment where the bedrooms are. The hall lights have been burned out since I moved in, but that’s not a problem; fae are essentially nocturnal, and even changelings see well in the dark. I left my shoes by the kitchen door and my shirt on the floor outside the extra bedroom. Keeping up a human disguise for the duration of a night’s work was exhausting, and I needed to sleep.
My battered secondhand answering machine was on a low table just outside my bedroom door, dingy red display light flashing. I winced. It was probably another message from Stacy, inviting me to come over for dinner with the family, or out to coffee with her, or anywhere, just as long as I was willing to see her and let her make it better. I couldn’t deal with it. Not after Mitch and his concerned looks, and Tybalt in the alley, and Sylvester sending a page to hammer on my door until I let him yell at me. Stacy could wait. Hell, if I was lucky, maybe the machine would malfunction again and wipe the tape before I got around to listening to it.
Silencing the phone’s ringer with a flick of my finger, I walked into my bedroom and left the answering machine to flash at an empty hall. Almost as an afterthought, I closed the door.
I kicked off my jeans, taking my well-thumbed copy of the works of Shakespeare from the bedside table before crawling, otherwise dressed, into bed. My book-mark was set in the middle of Hamlet. The text was familiar enough to be soothing, and I fell asleep without noticing, sliding straight down into dreaming.
The dreams always start in the same place, and they always start so kindly, with a sunny kitchen in a little house in Oakland, California, and a smiling woman with white-blond hair baking cookies like a Donna Reed fantasy come true. My mother. Amandine.
I always knew she wasn’t human; that’s not the sort of thing you can hide from a kid. It took me longer to understand that I wasn’t human either. They’ve called my mother’s side of the family the Kindly Ones, guardians of the garden path, stealers of children . . . or in her case, before she met my father, assistant clerk at the local five-and-dime. Playing human teenager amused her, and I guess when you plan on living forever, you do whatever it takes to make the days pass. The arcane mechanisms of modern retail served well enough to keep her entertained for a while.
That was in 1950. They say the mortal world was simpler then, but it was complicated enough for her.
Daddy wasn’t like her, and that drew Mother to him like a moth to a flame. She played faerie bride better than I did; she could weave an illusion in an instant, hiding pointed ears and colorless eyes behind a human smile before the people around her had time to blink. She never got caught out by the dawn or wound up shouting excuses from the bathroom while she tried to shove her “face” back into place. The fae are liars, every one of us, and she was the best. They met in 1951, married three months later, and had me in ’52, in the month I was named after.
In the dream, she puts the cookies on the table and takes me in her lap, and we eat cookie dough while we watch the house clean itself, feather duster and broom and mop moving as smoothly as anything animated by Disney. Amandine was really my mother then; she grinned a chocolate smile as she held me, happy as anything with her weird little version of reality. She’d never played faerie bride before. The game enchanted her, and she followed its rules with the scrupulousness that was her hallmark. They were happy. We were happy. That’s something I try to hang on to. We were happy once. She held me in her lap and brushed my hair; she taught me to love Shakespeare. We were a family. Nothing can change that.
My blood meant it was inevitably going to end.
Every changeling is different. Some, like me, are relatively weak. Others get a full measure of faerie magic—sometimes more than their pureblood parents—and they can’t handle it. Those are the ones that get whispered about in the pureblood Courts, the ones no one names once the fires have been extinguished and the damages have been tallied.
I learned the stories when I was little, first from Mom as she tucked me into bed, and later, after things changed, from the ones who came to get me. I don’t know who was more relieved when we found out how weak my powers are—my mother or me.
Even weak changelings can be dangerous. They’re allowed to stay with their human parents while they’re young enough to keep their masks up instinctively, but that early control fades as they get older, and choices must be made. Some changelings have to make the Changeling’s Choice as early as three; others hold out until their late teens. That was the only time in my life that I’ve been on the precocious end of the curve, because I was seven years old when my baby magic started to fail.
I don’t know how they knew, and I don’t know how they found us. I was in my room conducting a tea party for my stuffed animals, and they were suddenly there, stepping through a hole in my wall, beautiful and terrible and impossible to turn away from. Looking at them was like looking into the sun, but I did it anyway, until I thought I would go blind from looking.
One of them—a man with hair the color of fox fur and a long, friendly face—knelt in front of me, taking my hands. “Hello there,” he said. “My name is Sylvester Torquill. I’m an old friend of your mother’s.”
“Hello,” I said, as politely as I could through a mouthful of awe. “I’m October.”
He laughed, unsteadily, and said, “October, is it? Well, October, I have a question for you. It’s a very important question, so I need you to think hard before you answer. Can you do that for me?”
“I can try,” I said, frowning. “Will you tell me if I answer wrong?”
“There are no wrong answers, October. Only right ones.” The door—the real door—opened, and my mother stepped into the room. She froze when she saw Sylvester kneeling in front of me, holding my hands, but she didn’t say a word. Tears started rolling down her cheeks. I’d never seen her cry before.
“Mommy!” I shouted, trying to pull my hands free, to run to her and stop those tears.
Sylvester tightened his grip. “October.” I kept tugging. “October, look at me. You can go to your mother when you answer me.” Sniffling and sullen, I stopped pulling and turned to face him. “Good girl. Now. Are you a human girl, October? Or are you fae?”
“I’m like Mommy, I’m just like Mommy,” I said, and he let me go, and I ran to her. She put her arms around me, still crying, and she never said a word. Not when Sylvester stepped up to kiss her cheek and whisper, “Amandine, I’m sorry,” not when the ones who had accompanied him grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her, and me, through the hole in the wall. It closed behind us, but not before I saw my bedroom burst into flames, wiping away the traces of our passing.
My human life was over the moment they found us; the only real question was whether I went to live with the fae, or whether I learned firsthand how cold immortal “kindness” can be. Changelings don’t grow up in the human world. It simply isn’t done. If I’d chosen to stay human, there would have been an accident, something simple, and my grieving mother could have stayed with her husband in the mortal world. Instead, I chose Faerie and condemned her to the Summerlands. That’s when she stopped being the mother I knew: I couldn’t fill the hole my father left in her heart, and so she never let me try.
Sometimes I wonder if the ones who choose to die aren’t making the right decision. No one told me “changeling” could be an insult, or that it would mean living trapped between worlds, watching half your family die while the other half lived forever, leaving you behind. I had to find that out on my own.
I tried to fight free of the dreams, surfacing just far enough from the unsettling memory of my Changeling’s Choice to actually believe I might be able to wake myself up. I could handle collapsing at work, I could go and talk to Sylvester’s page, anything, I would have taken almost anything over the dreams of my childhood and the choice I didn’t mean to make. Almost anything . . . except for what I got. I slid back into those golden-tinted dreams . . .
. . . and back into the pond.
I dream the fourteen years I lost to Simon’s spell often, although there aren’t many specifics; my memory of that time is a long blur of ripples through the water, and that’s probably a mercy. A few things stand out, but not many: the first light of day coloring the water; humans walking by on narrow wooden pathways; frantically circling at the surface of the water twice a year, on the Moving Days, even though I didn’t know why. I never saw any pixies on Moving Day, but I didn’t understand what their absence meant. I didn’t understand much of anything.
Even as a fish, dawn burned. I rose to the surface every morning, letting the light hit my scales, and for a moment, things would almost start to make sense. Part of me knew, however dimly, that something was wrong, and that part understood that dawn could free me, if I was patient. If I hadn’t been able to hold onto the knowledge that something about that place, that world, that . . . everything . . . wasn’t right, I might have stayed in the pond until I died. Maybe the sunrise helped, peeling the spell away one slow layer at a time until it broke. Maybe not. The odds are good I’ll never know.
What I do know is that Simon’s spell gave way just before dawn on June 11, 2009, exactly fourteen years and two days after it was cast. There was no warning. The spell didn’t compel me to rise to the surface or lift me out of the water like some modern Venus on the half shell. It just let go, and I started to drown. I shoved myself away from the water, sobbing in helpless confusion and gasping for air. The spell had released my body but still held my mind, and I couldn’t understand what was happening. The world was wrong. There were colors that shouldn’t exist and everything I saw loomed straight ahead of me instead of being tucked properly to the sides. Acting on disoriented instinct, I stood, and promptly fell backward as my already shaky grasp on reality refused to admit that I had legs.
The sky paled while I huddled in the water. The cold eventually drove me to the land, and I somehow managed to stand without killing myself. I don’t remember how I did it. I just found myself walking down the paths on half-frozen feet, totally alone. None of the normal denizens of the Tea Gardens were there—no pixies, no Will o’ Wisps, nothing—but I was too confused for their absence to seem strange. That would come later, when I started understanding what had happened. A lot of things would come later. For the moment, I wandered at random, occasionally stumbling or stopping to cough up more water. I didn’t know my name, or where I was, or what I was. I just knew that the pond had rejected me, and I had nowhere else to go. I couldn’t remember any other life. What would happen to me now that I couldn’t go home?
I was in a state of utter panic by the time I reached the gates, ready to bolt at the slightest provocation. And then the mirror that hangs next to the ticket booth caught my eyes by glittering, and held them with the image it contained.
It was a tired face, with the tips of dully pointed ears barely managing to poke through its frame of wet, shaggy brown hair. Her skin was pale from over a decade without sun, and her features were too sharp to be beautiful, although people called them “interesting” when they were being charitable. Her eyebrows were arched high, making her look perpetually surprised, and her eyes were a colorless foggy gray. I stared. I knew that face. I’d always known that face, because it was my own.
I stood there, still staring, as the sun finished rising and the dawn slammed into me, bringing the truth about who and what I was crashing down, along with the inevitable comprehension of what had happened. It was too much. I did the only thing I could to make the pain stop: I passed out.
Lily didn’t appear during my slow stagger through her domain, but she must have been there, because when the maintenance man found me sprawled naked in front of the ticket booth with no identification or reason to be there, he saw nothing but a human woman who had been the victim of some brutal attack. He called the police, and they came, collected me, and carried me off to the station for questioning. I didn’t fight them. Shock is a bea
utiful thing.
The police station looked pretty much like every other station I’ve ever seen: a little sad, a little overused, and seriously in need of a good steam cleaning. I didn’t notice the computers on the desks or the dates on the calendars; I still wasn’t used to being bipedal, and most of my attention was fixed on staying upright. The attending officer, a brisk, no-nonsense man named Paul Underwood, called for someone to clean the scrapes on my elbows, hands, and knees, and had them bring me some clothes. They were kind enough to let me dress alone in the bathroom; I guess having no possessions or pockets makes you seem less likely to be a dangerous criminal, and the various small injuries I’d picked up during my trek through the garden made them more inclined to believe me when I claimed to have been assaulted and left for dead. Being in a state of shock helped me ramble convincingly.
Now that I was starting to understand what Simon had done, I couldn’t get past the fact that he’d actually turned me into a fish. My thoughts were chasing their tails like puppies, caught between fear and fury. I thought the worst was over. I had no idea that the worst was still to come, or just how bad that could be.
Officer Underwood fed me coffee and stale donuts until I started making sense, and then he gave me papers to fill out—name, social security number, residence, place of employment—all the standard questions. He took them away when I was finished, presumably to be filed. Still standard procedure . . . at least until he came back ten minutes later with murder in his eyes.
“Just what are you trying to pull, lady?”
It was my name that did it. He knew it because he’d been assigned to the case when I disappeared; he spent a year turning over rocks, questioning witnesses, even dredging the big lake in Golden Gate Park looking for my body and finding nothing, and he didn’t think it was very clever, or very funny, for me to be posing as a dead woman. He handed me a clean set of papers, ordering me to fill them out correctly, without any stupid jokes. I think that’s when I started understanding just how much trouble I was in. Numbly, I turned the papers over, starting to fill them out, and the first correction came before I even got to my name.
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