A Local Habitation

SEVEN

MELLY ANSWERED ON THE THIRD RING. “Shadowed Hills, how can I help you?” Her voice was broad, accented with the sort of jolly American drawl that thrived in the middle of the country about two hundred years ago. I’ve known Melly since I was a kid—she’s Kerry’s mother, and she used to sneak us sweets from the kitchen at Shadowed Hills—and just the sound of her was enough to relax me.

“Hey, Melly. Sylvester around?”

“Toby! How are you, darling? Did Himself really ship you off to Tamed Lightning with naught but a foster to keep you company?”

“Quentin’s not so bad.” Quentin was presently being “not so bad” in his own room, where he was hopefully going to get some sleep. ALH seemed to operate on a diurnal schedule, and we were going to be clocking a lot of daylight hours before we went home. “Put the boss on? I’ve got an update for him.”

“You’ll visit soon?”

“I will.”

“All right, then. Hold on a second.”

Sylvester must have been waiting for my call, because I was on hold less than a minute before he picked up, breathless. “Toby?”

“Here,” I confirmed. There were a few cold fries left on my room service tray. I picked one up, swirling it in a puddle of ketchup. “We’ve arrived safely, and I met your niece. You should’ve told me she was twitchy and paranoid.”

“I would have, if she normally were. Did she say why she stopped calling?”

“That’s the funny thing. She says she’s been calling, and that you haven’t been answering her messages.”

“Wait . . . what? But that’s ridiculous. Why would she say something like that?”

“You say she’s not paranoid. She says she’s been calling. You say she hasn’t been. This sounds to me like something’s up.” I popped the fry into my mouth, chewing quickly. “Is there any chance you can send reinforcements without causing some sort of diplomatic incident?”

“Not without more to go on, no. Did you talk to her?”

“Yeah. It was about as productive as talking to Spike. Maybe less. I mean, at least Spike makes an effort. It could be because she’s not sure I am who I say I am, and she’s trying to be careful. Has she been having a lot of issues with Dreamer’s Glass recently?”

“Not that I’m aware of.” Sylvester hesitated. “Are you comfortable continuing?”

“To be honest, no, but if she’s not getting messages somehow, I don’t think swapping me for somebody else is really going to make her less twitchy.” I sighed. “I’ll go back tomorrow and see what I can find. If you need to pull me out of here, we’ll reassess the situation from there. All right?”

“All right. Just keep me informed.”

“Of course.”

We chatted for a few minutes about inconsequential things—Luna’s latest gardening projects, my cats, Quentin’s performance so far—before I hung up with another promise to let him know if we needed anything. I was out as soon as my head hit the pillow.

My dreams were fuzzy, tangled things that faded when the sun came up. I rolled over, wrinkling my nose at the smell of ashes, and peered at the alarm clock. The first digit was a five, which was all I needed to see; groaning, I buried my head under the pillow and went back to sleep.

The sound of knocking hauled me back to consciousness about six hours later. I pulled my head out from under the pillow and glared at the door. The knocking continued. Knowing hotels, the knocking would probably be followed by someone from the housekeeping staff deciding to come in and start dealing with the sheets. I was too bleary to remember whether I’d thought to put up the “Do Not Disturb” sign.

Some people like to sleep naked; me, I like to sleep in a knee-length T-shirt. Nudity wasn’t the issue. The issue was that my human disguise had dissolved at sunrise, and I didn’t have time to weave a new one.

“Come back later!” I shouted, sitting upright and trying to finger-comb my hair over my ears. I could pass for human long enough to slam the door, if I could get my hair to behave. “I’m not decent!”

The sound of muffled laughter drifted through the door. “I didn’t know decency was a requirement for breakfast.”

“Alex?” I lowered my hands, scooting out of the bed and reaching for the hotel robe. “What are you doing here?”

“Currently? Shouting through your hotel room door. I brought breakfast.”

“Yes, but what are you doing here?” I shrugged into the robe, tying it shut as I moved to open the door. “I don’t remember ordering room service.”

Alex smiled, holding up a paper bag that smelled of eggs and melting cheese. He had a tray in the other hand, with two large paper coffee cups prominently displayed. My stomach rumbled. “Ordering, no, but needing to? Definitely yes. I told you I’d see you at breakfast.”

“I guess you did,” I said, and held the door wider. “Come on in.” I was taking a chance by asking a man I barely knew into my hotel room, but somehow I doubted that anyone who could be incapacitated with a cafeteria door was going to be much of a threat. If he’d been a pureblood, I might have thought differently. I’d take my chances against another changeling, even one whose bloodline I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

“Nice digs,” said Alex, walking past me. I watched him as I closed the door. He was clearly one of Faerie’s rare morning people, making a tidy contrast to my own bedraggled and half-awake self. I was in robe, oversized T-shirt, and socks, with my uncombed hair raked unevenly over my ears. Suddenly, I found myself wishing desperately for some excuse to sneak off for a shower and a change of clothes.

“Luna booked our rooms,” I said, giving my hair another swipe with my fingers. “I probably wouldn’t have asked for anything this nice.”

“Well, then, my compliments to the Duchess.” Alex put the tray down on the desk, opening the bag. “Egg and ham croissant, or egg and sausage croissant? Please don’t tell me you’re a vegetarian. I’d die of embarrassment.”

“I am definitely not a vegetarian. Can I get the egg and ham?”

“Egg and ham it is.” He tossed a waxed paper-wrapped breakfast sandwich toward me, and I caught it easily, sitting down on the edge of the bed as I did. Alex beamed. “Nice reflexes. How do you take your coffee?”

“Black is fine.”

He walked over to offer me one of the cups. “Sleep well?”

“Fairly,” I said, sipping the coffee. It was hot, strong, and about the most wonderful thing I could have wished for. I let my shoulders relax. “You?”

“It was a good night.” He walked back to the desk, picking up the second cup.

Sipping at my coffee again, I watched him. He looked perfectly comfortable. Whatever was bothering Jan, it didn’t seem to have touched him at all. “So how’re things back at ALH?”

“Oh, the usual. Mornings are essentially downtime—once the graveyard shift goes home, things slow down. I probably won’t get paged to fix anything for a few hours.”

“What is it that you do, exactly?”

“System maintenance. I’m a code monkey.” Seeing my blank expression, Alex explained, “I tell the computers what to do, and when they do something they’re not supposed to, I correct their instructions.”

“And Terrie? She does the same thing?”

“Pretty much. She works nights and I work days, but our jobs are essentially the same.” Alex quirked a smile, one eyebrow raising. “Just so we’re clear, has breakfast suddenly turned into a game of twenty questions? Because if it has, I think it’s only fair that we both play.”

“Meaning?”

“I’ll answer yours if you’ll answer mine.”

“Fair enough.” I put my coffee down next to the clock, unwrapping my sandwich. “Start from the top. January O’Leary. What do you know about her?”

“A lot, considering I’ve been working for her for about twelve years. She’s focused. I mean, scary- focused. Once she starts a project, she sticks with it until it’s finished or until she’s managed to beat every possible solution into the ground. She can get a little twitchy when she doesn’t have a handle on things, but she means well. Do you have a boyfriend?”

I nearly choked on my sandwich. Swallowing, I managed, “What?”

“I answered one for you, now you get to answer one for me. Do you have a boyfriend?”

“Not right now,” I said, cheeks starting to burn. I coughed to clear my throat and said, “Elliot. He does what around here, exactly?”

“He’s the County seneschal. He does administrative stuff, like the bills and talking Riordan’s people out of challenging us to single combat in the middle of the local computer store. He’s been with Jan for like thirty years. What’s the deal with your sidekick?”

“Quentin’s a foster from Shadowed Hills. Duke Torquill asked me to bring him along, since this is a pretty straightforward diplomatic job.”

A shadow crossed his face, there and gone before I could identify it. “Straightforward,” he said. “Right.”

“Is it going to do me any good to ask what that look was for?”

His grin was only a little bit forced. “Nope. Your question.”

“All right: April.”

Alex blinked. “April?”

“Sylvester didn’t say anything about Jan having a daughter. What’s the situation there?”

“April is . . . a special case. She’s adopted. Sort of.” Seeing my blank expression, he shrugged, and said, “She’s a Dryad.”

This time, there was no “nearly”; I literally choked on my coffee, coughing for several minutes before I managed to croak out a startled, “What?”

“She’s a Dryad.”

“How does that even work?” Most Dryads are sweet, reclusive bimbos who avoid people whenever possible, preferring the company of woodland fauna and other Dryads. They’re not the sharpest crayons in the box. Most of them probably don’t even realize the box exists.

“It’s a long story, and it happened before I got here, so it’s sort of secondhand . . .” Alex looked at my expression and continued without missing a beat, “But I guess I can try. April was an oak Dryad. She lived in a proper Grove and everything, with about a dozen others. Then some developers bulldozed the place—including her tree—to put up condos.”

“That’s horrible.”

“The Dryads thought so, too. Most of them sealed themselves away and waited to die, but not April.” Alex shook his head. “She grabbed the biggest branch she could carry and ran like hell.”

“So what happened?”

“She got lucky. She found Jan.” Alex picked up his own coffee, turning the cup in his hands. “Jan loaded her into the car and drove home. From what I understand, she paged Elliot while she was en route—they’ve been friends forever—and sent him to look for survivors. All he found was kindling. He cursed the land and came back to see what was going on.”

“And?”

“Jan was up with her all night. No one knows exactly what she did, but April lives in an information ‘tree’ inside one of the Sun servers now, and she’s doing fine.”

I paused. “You’re telling me you have a Dryad living in your computers.”

“She’s happy there. She doesn’t get sluggish in winter like most Dryads do, she doesn’t need clean water or fresh air, she’s pretty much indestructible—she’s happy.”

Jan moved a Dryad from her home tree into an inanimate object all by herself? I shook my head. “How does that work?”

“I’m not sure. You’d have to ask Jan.”

These people kept managing to get weirder. “What does April do in there?”

“She acts as the interoffice paging system.”

This time, I wasn’t trying to swallow anything. I gaped at him. “What?”

“Have you ever been on one side of a building and needed to talk to someone on the other side?”

“Yes.” That was why Shadowed Hills had a small army of pages on continuous duty.

“That’s what April does. She finds you, relays the message, and goes back to whatever she was doing before you called. She doesn’t seem to mind, and Jan doesn’t stop us, so we use her to make sure people are where they need to be.”

“You’re using the Dryad who lives in your computers as an intercom.”

“Basically, yes.”

“You’re all nuts.”

“Yes, and we’re cute, too.” Alex winked. My cheeks burned red. Now clearly amused, he walked over to sit down beside me on the bed. “I believe that makes it my question.”

“I believe you’re right.”

“Why don’t you have a boyfriend?”

“Ask the insulting questions, why don’t you?” I took a large gulp of coffee, ignoring the way it burned my throat, and shook my head. “It’s complicated. There just hasn’t been time.”

“So that means you’re available?”

I gave him a sidelong look. “I think that’s two questions.”

“Maybe.” Alex grinned. “Is that a complaint?”

“Three questions.” I could feel the heat coming off his skin. He hadn’t dropped his human disguise, and this close, I could smell the clover and coffee of his magic beneath the brisk cleanness of his shampoo. “No, I’m not seeing anyone, and yes, I might be available. After I’m off duty.”

“Good.” Leaning over, he plucked the coffee cup from my hand, set it on the floor, and kissed me.

Privacy and familiarity make a big difference where I’m concerned. I pressed myself against his chest, returning the kiss without hesitation. The state of my hair and clothing was forgotten in favor of the much more interesting question of how close we could pull each other without one of us actually winding up in the other’s lap. He’d been talking with his hands since the moment we met, and now, tangled in my hair and cupping the back of my neck, they sang.

Alex was the one who pulled away first, leaving me out of breath and wide-eyed. “After you’re off duty?”

Not quite trusting myself to talk, I nodded.

“Good.” He brushed his lips across my forehead as he stood, walked back to the desk and picked up his own discarded breakfast. “I’ll see you at the office?”

That was an easier question. I swallowed, and answered, “Yeah.”

“Great.” Grinning, he opened the door, and he was gone.

I stared after him for a long, stunned moment before I groaned, flopping backward on the bed. The smell of coffee and clover still lingered in the air, and I had the not entirely unwelcome feeling that things had just gotten a lot more complicated.