A Local Habitation

ONE

THE LAST TRAIN OUT of San Francisco leaves at midnight; miss it and you’re stuck until morning. That’s why I was herding Stacy and Kerry down Market Street at fifteen to the witching hour, trying unsuccessfully to avoid wobbling out of my kitten-heeled shoes. After the number of drinks I’d had, my footwear had become my new arch nemesis. None of us were in any condition to drive, and only Kerry was still walking straight. I blamed her stability on her fae heritage—pureblood Hob mother, Hob changeling father—giving her the alcohol tolerance of a man three times her size. No one keeps a house cleaner than a Hob, and there’s never any dust on the liquor cabinet.

Stacy stumbled against me. Being little more than a quarter-Barrow Wight, she didn’t have Kerry’s alcohol tolerance to help her cope with the number of drinks she’d had. I grinned down at her. “Did you tell Mitch you’d be coming home smashed?”

“He’ll have worked it out,” she said. “I told him we were going out for girl-time.” She burst out laughing, taking Kerry with her. Even I couldn’t help giggling, and I was trying to stay focused long enough to get them to the train.

The lights of the station entrance beckoned, promising freedom from my drunken charges. “Come on,” I urged, trying to nudge Stacy into taking longer steps. “We’re almost there.”

“Almost where?” asked Kerry, setting Stacy giggling again.

“The train.”

Stacy blinked. “Where are we going?”

“Home,” I said, as firmly as I could with my heel caught in yet another crack in the sidewalk. I would have taken them off, but my fingers didn’t seem to be working well enough to undo the straps. “Hurry, or you’ll miss the train.”

Getting down the stairs was an adventure. I nearly twisted my ankle, while Kerry skipped blithely on ahead to the ticket machines, returning with two one-way passes to Colma. I live in San Francisco; they don’t.

“I’ve got it from here, Toby,” she said, taking Stacy’s arm.

“You’ll be okay?”

Kerry nodded. “I’ll get a taxi on the other side.”

“Great,” I said, and hugged them both before waving them through the gates. I love my friends, but seeing them safely on their way was a relief. I have enough trouble taking care of myself when I’m drunk. I don’t need to be taking care of other people.

Market Street was buzzing with club hoppers and people stepping outside to sneak a cigarette—California banned all smoking in bars while I was still busy being a fish. That’s one of the few positive changes made during those fourteen missed years. No one gave me a second glance.

Catching a cab in San Francisco is practically an Olympic sport. I spared a thought for calling Danny, a local cabbie who’s more than happy to give me a free ride whenever I need one. We met six months ago, about five minutes after I got shot in the leg with an iron bullet. That’s never an auspicious way to start a relationship. Fortunately, it turned out that Danny knew me a long time before we actually met; I worked a case for his sister about sixteen years ago, and that’s left him inclined to help me out. He’s a nice guy. Bridge Trolls usually are. When you’re effectively denser than lead, you don’t have much to prove.

Calling Danny would mean finding a phone. Despite Stacy’s hints, I’ve been refusing to get a cellular phone; none of my experiences with the things have been positive. Besides, Danny probably needed to make a living more than I needed to spare myself the walk. Heels clacking staccato against the pavement, I teetered around a corner and started for home.

It only took a few blocks for me to exit the commercial district and move into the residential neighborhoods, leaving the sounds of human celebration behind. There were fewer streetlights here, but that wasn’t an issue; good night vision is a standard benefit of fae heritage. My lack of coat, now—that was more of a problem.

Several pixies had congregated around a corner store’s front-porch bug zapper, using toothpicks as skewers for roasting a variety of insects. I stopped to watch them, taking the pause as an opportunity to get my balance back. One of them saw me looking and flitted over to hover in front of my nose, scowling.

“S’okay,” I informed it, with drunken solemnity. “I can see you.” It continued to hang there, expression turning even angrier. “No, really, it’s okay. I’m Dao . . . Dao . . . I’m a changeling.” Whoever was responsible for naming the fae races should really have put more thought into making them pronounceable when drunk.

It jabbed the toothpick in my direction. I blinked, perplexed.

“No, it’s okay. I don’t want any of your moth.”

“He’s offering to stab you, not feed you. I suppose the difference is trivial, but still, one assumes you’d want to avoid finding that out firsthand.” The voice behind me was smooth as cream and aristocratically amused. The pixie backpedaled in midair, nearly dropping his toothpick as he went racing back to the flock. They were gone in seconds, leaving nothing but faint trails of shimmering dust in the air.

“Hey!” I turned, crossing my arms and glaring. “I was talking to him!”

Tybalt eyed me with amusement, which just made me glare harder. “No, you were inciting him to stab you with a toothpick. Again, the difference is small, but I think it matters.”

My glare faded into bewilderment. “Why was he gonna stab me? I was just saying hi. And he came over here first. I wasn’t saying anything before he came over.”

“Finally, a sensible question.” Tybalt reached out to brush my hair back behind one ear, tapping it with the side of his thumb. “Round ears, blue eyes, smell of magic buried under the smell of alcohol . . . it’s the perfect disguise. Well done. Although it doesn’t suit you.” My confusion didn’t fade. Tybalt sighed. “You look human, October. He was protecting his flock.”

“I said I was a changeling!”

“And he, quite sensibly, didn’t believe you.”

“Oh!” I blinked, reddening. “Oops.” Then I frowned. “What do you mean, it doesn’t suit me? I like this skirt!”

Tybalt pulled his hand away, stepping back to study me. I returned the favor, looking him up and down.

As the local King of Cats and the most powerful Cait Sidhe in San Francisco, Tybalt rarely bothers to go anywhere that requires him to wear a human disguise. As far as I can tell, it’s not that he feels it’s beneath him; it’s just that he doesn’t care enough about the human side of the city to bother interacting with them. This was one of the few times I’d seen him passing for human, and he wore it well. Tall, lean, and angular, he held himself with a predatory air that would translate into feline grace when he moved. His dark brown hair was short, curly, and banded with streaks of black that mimicked the stripes on a tabby’s coat. The human illusion he wore concealed his sharpened incisors, pointed ears, and cat-slit pupils, but left his simple masculinity a little more noticeable than I liked. I tore my eyes away.

Saying that Tybalt and I have a complex relationship would be understating things just a tad. I endure his taunting because it’s easier than having my intestines removed by an angry Cait Sidhe. On top of all that, I owe him for services rendered following the murder of Evening Winterrose. Sadly, my being in debt to him encourages him to prod at me even more frequently. It’s getting to be a habit.

“The skirt passes muster,” said Tybalt, finishing his survey. “I might have called it a ‘belt’ rather than a ‘skirt,’ but I suppose you have the right to name your own clothing. While we’re on the subject of apparel, tell me, were you intending to walk all the way home in those shoes?”

“Maybe,” I hedged. The straps were starting to chafe my ankles, making walking even less comfortable than it had been to begin with, but he didn’t need to know that.

“You’re drunk, October.”

“And you’re wearing really tight pants.” I paused. That hadn’t come out right. “I mean, those are really nice pants. I mean . . .”

Crud.

Tybalt snorted. I glanced up to see him looking decidedly amused, shaking his head slowly from side to side. “Indeed. I don’t suppose you’d consider taking a taxi?”

“There aren’t any,” I said, feeling as if I’d won a battle with that stunning point of logic.

“Did you consider phoning for one? I understand they can be summoned.”

“Didn’t have a phone.”

“I see,” said Tybalt. “Well, as there are no taxis, and you have splendid reasons not to summon a taxi, and you are, in fact, drunk enough to be making comments about the tightness of my trousers, I believe it would be a good idea for me to escort you home.”

“I don’t need you to.”

“That’s nice,” said Tybalt, shrugging out of his jacket and draping it around my shoulders. “You look cold.”

“I’m not cold.” That was a lie—it was a nice night, but even the nicest night gets chilly after midnight in San Francisco. I pulled the jacket tight, trying to preserve the illusion of dignity. The leather smelled of Tybalt’s magic, all pennyroyal and musk. “I can get home just fine.”

“Of course you can,” Tybalt agreed, planting a hand on the small of my back and urging me to begin walking. “You are, after all, a perfectly reasonable, competent woman. It’s just that at the moment, you’re so drunk you can’t remember whether or not you’re wearing your own face, and I would really rather not scrape you off the sidewalk.”

His hand was a firm, insistent pressure. I began to walk, steadier now that I had something to lean against. “Nah, no sidewalk-scraping. You’d find me in an alley somewhere.”

“Probably true.”

We walked for a few blocks, with me wobbling along on clattering heels and him pacing silently by my side, only correcting my path when it seemed like I was going to fall off the sidewalk altogether. Finally, I said, “I don’t understand why you’re doing this.”

“I’m a cat. We aren’t required to make sense.”

No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t find any logical failings in that statement. It didn’t help that my head was starting to spin. I yawned.

“This is too slow,” Tybalt said, and, with that simple pronouncement, scooped me off the sidewalk and into his arms. I squawked. Amused, he said, “Oh, don’t bother. We both know how this ends, and it’ll be more pleasant for both of us if you just don’t struggle. I trust you haven’t moved?” I nodded. “Good. Now hold your breath; I know a shortcut.”

That was code for “I’m going to take you into the Shadows.” The Cait Sidhe have a lot of powers that my line—the Daoine Sidhe—don’t share. That includes access to the Shadow Roads, a gift that is, as far as I know, unique to the Cait Sidhe. Frankly, they can keep it. The Shadow Roads are dark and bitterly cold. It’s impossible to breathe there; your lungs would freeze. Tybalt seemed to take a perverse delight in hauling me through the Shadows, a convenient process neatly balanced out by the discomfort that it caused.

I took a deep breath, scrunching my eyes tightly shut. Tybalt chuckled, and I felt the muscles of his chest and arms bunch as he took two long steps and broke into a run.

The world flashed cold around us, all the heat ripped away in a few seconds. I nestled down against him without thinking about it as I started counting down in my head from ten, measuring the distance by the feel of Tybalt running. Drunk as I was, the experience was less disconcerting than it had been the first time Tybalt pulled me through the Shadows. It would have been almost pleasant, if it hadn’t been for the cold.

My silent countdown had just reached three when we plunged back out of the cold and into the comparative warmth of the June night. I opened my eyes, squinting through the ice crystals on my lashes. We were at my own front door. To fae eyes, the edges were marked with the glowing red tracery of the wards I’d set before heading out for the night.

“Much simpler,” said Tybalt. He walked up to the porch, noting, “I can’t go any further than this, I’m afraid. Wards.”

“Mmm.” The cold had made me drowsy, and I was comfortable where I was. Waving a hand, I mumbled, “Hey-diddle-diddle, the cat and the fiddle, the cow jumped over the moon.” The wards flared and disappeared, leaving the coppery scent of my magic hanging heavy in the air. I closed my eyes again. “There.”

“Nursery rhymes?” He sounded amused.

I shrugged. “They work.”

“Even so. The key?”

“Oh.” I freed a hand to dig into my tiny purse, finding my house key by feel. Tybalt plucked it from my fingers, juggling me effortlessly as he unlocked the door and carried me inside.

I fell asleep somewhere between the living room and the hall.