Ashes of Honor

FOUR

I STARED AT ETIENNE. He must have been expecting that reaction, because he didn’t bat an eye. He just looked back at me, waiting for me to get it out of my system.

If I’d been asked to list the ten people most likely to have an affair with a human, Etienne wouldn’t have come anywhere near making the cut. And if I’d been asked to make a list of the people I could see fathering an accidental changeling, Etienne wouldn’t have made the top fifty. Like most Tuatha, he loved rules, and the rules said that sort of behavior wasn’t allowed. But Sylvester had been out of his mind with fear and grief, leaving Etienne to hold things together by himself, and that had changed the rules. Tired men make mistakes when they’re looking for a place to rest. Etienne wasn’t human, but he was still a man.

May’s laughter drifted up the stairs, reminding me that time was passing. Whatever had happened to Etienne’s daughter wasn’t going to unhappen just because I was busy staring at her father. “Etienne—”

“I’ve already rehearsed every objection you might make. I have answers to them all. Please. Can’t we just skip that part and reach the point where you agree to help me? My daughter is alone out there. Time is of the essence.”

He was wrong about one thing: she probably wasn’t “alone out there.” Teenage girls run away from home sometimes—I was a prime example of that—but they don’t usually vanish in broad daylight. If she’d disappeared that abruptly, the odds were good that someone made her disappear. I hate missing children cases, and that’s probably why the world keeps handing them to me. Reality is nothing if not malicious where I’m concerned.

Instead of arguing or objecting, I asked a simple question: “Why me?”

“Because you were the one who dared to go up against Blind Michael. When the sons of Saltmist were taken, you were the one who brought them home. And because my daughter is…she’s…”

“She’s a changeling,” I said. “You want me, instead of one of the other knights, because you think I’ll be more understanding of the fact that she’s not a pureblood.”

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. He just nodded.

“I’m going to regret this, but…okay,” I said. I picked up my mug and downed its contents in a single long gulp. The coffee was hot enough to burn my throat a little, but I didn’t let that worry me; I’m a fast healer. I set the empty mug aside. “What’s her name?”

“Chelsea.” He said her name like it was some strange, undiscovered country, one that had disappeared from maps a thousand years ago. The wonder in his voice would have been touching if we’d been talking about a baby and not a missing half-human teenager. As it was, it was just a little sad.

“You said she disappeared on her way home from school. Do you know what school she attends?” He wouldn’t have a picture, since he hadn’t known she existed before she went missing, but every school keeps photos of its student body. Breaking into the office couldn’t be that hard. It would be easier than breaking into Bridget and Chelsea’s house, since schools tend to be closed at night, and that’s when I do the bulk of my petty larceny.

“I…no, I’m sorry. I don’t.” Etienne shook his head. “Bridget didn’t tell me much. Mostly, she just swore at me. She said I had no right to steal her daughter, not when I’d been gone since before Chelsea was even born. If there’s a pejorative term for faerie that Bess doesn’t know, I’d be surprised. I think she used them all on me tonight.”

I managed to keep a straight face despite his use of the proper Irish diminutive for Bridget. I wasn’t even sure he knew he’d done it. “Right. Do you know where they live?”

“Yes.”

“Really?” I pushed a pen and paper across the table to him.

“I may have fallen out of touch, but I have always known where Bridget was,” said Etienne, taking the pen and paper and scrawling down a street address. Catching my expression, he added defensively, “I never went there. I watched her on campus from time to time, and I had my spies, but I left her with her privacy. I just wanted to be sure that she continued well.”

And somehow you managed to never check closely enough to notice that she had a kid with pointed ears? I thought, before inwardly slapping myself. We don’t see the things we don’t want to see, and mothers are nothing if not inventive when it comes to hiding the truth about their children. Look at my mother. She managed to hide the truth of my race from practically everyone for more than fifty years, raising me as Daoine Sidhe when nothing could make me anything but Dóchas Sidhe—a direct descendant of Oberon, and a natural magnet for trouble. If Mom could pull off something like that with half of Faerie looking over her shoulder, it wasn’t hard to believe that Bridget could find a way to hide a changeling girl no one was looking for to begin with. It was harder to believe we were ever going to see that girl alive again.

“Wait—you said you watched Bridget ‘on campus.’ Does that mean she’s still at UC Berkeley?”

“Well, yes,” said Etienne. “I believe she’s currently the head of their Folklore Department.”

“Why am I not surprised to learn that Berkeley has a Folklore Department?” I picked up the paper where he’d written Bridget and Chelsea’s address. I glanced at it to be sure that I could read his handwriting, which was perfect enough to border on calligraphy, before folding it in half and tucking it into the pocket of my jeans. “Do you remember Walther?”

“Your friend the alchemist?” Etienne frowned. “Of course I remember him. He helped save the Duchess Torquill’s life. We owe him a debt of gratitude.”

Trust Etienne to see things in terms of obligations. “Walther teaches chemistry at UC Berkeley. I bet he’d be willing to check on Bridget if I asked. He might be able to get some pictures of Chelsea from her.” Which would neatly avoid the possibility of my getting arrested for breaking and entering on a high school campus. “Plus he can sound out her emotional state. She may have been able to hide a changeling from us for sixteen years, but mothers can be unpredictable when their children are in danger. The last thing we want is for Bridget to go to the media saying that the faeries stole her baby.”

Etienne’s frown melted into a look of sheer horror. “No one would believe her. They would think grief had driven her mad.”

“Do you want to bet your life on that?”

He didn’t answer me.

“I didn’t think so.” I stood, picking up my empty mug. “I’ll do this for you, Etienne. I’ll find her. But I have a few conditions, and if you’re not okay with them, you’re going to need to find somebody else.” I was bluffing. He’d know it, too, if he stopped to think about it. There are a lot of things that I’m capable of. Leaving children in danger isn’t one of them.

“Anything,” he said. “Whatever you ask for.”

Oak and ash, he really was desperate. In Faerie, that sort of promise can get you killed. “You have to pay my operating costs. I can’t take any other cases while I’m working on this.”

“Done,” he said.

I raised an eyebrow. “I haven’t even told you what I charge.”

Etienne half-smiled. “I’ve had a great deal of time to invest in the mortal world, October. Will two thousand dollars a day be sufficient to purchase your full attention?”

Two thousand dollars a day was nearly four times my normal rate. “Very sufficient,” I said. I almost felt bad about taking that much of his money, but if he was paying me, I wasn’t creating a debt between us. I liked Etienne treating me with respect because we were both in Sylvester’s service, not because I had a giant favor to hold over his head. That was how the purebloods did business. That kind of thing wasn’t for me.

“Good,” he said. “What else?”

“No secrets, no surprises. If Bridget calls again, I need to hear about it. If you remember something that doesn’t seem important, you need to tell me about it anyway, and you need to tell me immediately. I don’t care if it’s the middle of the day—call and wake me if you have to.” Privately, I didn’t think that was likely; if this case was like most, I wasn’t going to be sleeping much until it was over. “Right now, we don’t know what is or is not going to matter.”

Etienne frowned. “I don’t understand.”

“We’re hoping Chelsea disappeared because she figured out how to do that teleporting trick you’re so good at, and maybe she did. That’s our best case scenario, since it would just mean we needed to figure out where she teleported to, go there, and get her back.”

“And if it’s not the case…?” asked Etienne, slowly.

“If that’s not the case, then someone saw an unprotected teenage girl and grabbed her. Human kidnappers, we’re risking exposure. Fae kidnappers, who knows what they want her for?” A lot of things can be done with young, inexperienced changelings. I managed to find people who would spare me from the worst of them—and that’s saying something, considering Devin. That doesn’t mean I escaped knowing what they were.

Etienne blanched. “If you’re trying to frighten me, you’re doing an excellent job.”

“That’s good. I want you to be frightened, because I want you to understand that this is going to be hard. Maybe we’ll find her tonight, maybe she just ditched her friends because she’s upset over a boy, and she’s camped out at the Denny’s on Market Street, too pissed to go home and too scared to go anywhere more interesting. Maybe this will all seem like a bad dream tomorrow.”

“Then why—”

“But even if Chelsea is found safe and sound, Oberon willing, you’ll have to deal with the fact that she exists, and her mother—her human mother—knows about Faerie. You broke cover, Etienne. I mean, that’s…that’s something even I’ve never managed to do.”

“You’ve certainly tried hard enough,” he muttered, but the growing horror in his tone told me I was getting through. He’d come to me because he knew I had a track record of dealing with lost kids and because an undocumented changeling was a political hot potato no one higher in the food chain would dare to touch. Sylvester couldn’t get involved without punishing Etienne for his carelessness. The Queen would love an excuse to punish a knight in Sylvester’s service and, by extension, Sylvester himself. That left me.

What Etienne hadn’t done was stop and really think about what was about to happen. Because everything in his life, absolutely everything, was going to change. “When I find Chelsea—if I find Chelsea—you know what has to happen.” He looked away. I raised my voice, saying, “Etienne, you need to tell me you know what has to happen. This is the last thing you have to agree to.”

“She has to be given her Choice,” he said, in a voice that was suddenly very soft.

“Yeah.” I sighed. “She does.”

The Changeling’s Choice was established by Oberon as one of the ways for Faerie to protect itself. It’s supposed to be the defining moment in a changeling’s life. It’s the day their fae parent sits down with them and asks them to decide where they belong: Faerie or the mortal world. If they choose Faerie, they’re whisked away to the Summerlands. Their human parent will never see them again, and they’ll be raised the way I was, always an outsider, always held apart, but still a part of Faerie. If they choose the mortal world…

Everything mortal dies. That’s the main difference between humans and the fae. If our changeling children choose to live as humans, we have to kill them. That’s the price of playing faerie bride. At least, that used to be the price—my own daughter, Gillian, was able to choose humanity and walk away, but only because of what I am.

Dóchas Sidhe can’t just read blood: we can change it. I turned my own daughter mortal, and the Luidaeg wiped her memory, making her forget she’d ever had anything to do with Faerie. But Gillian was only a quarter-blood, if that. Maybe more importantly, she’d been raised in the human world by her human father, with no influence from me. Making her forget Faerie was easy. Chelsea, on the other hand…

Bridget had raised her daughter knowing that she wasn’t wholly mortal. Chelsea would have her fae nature woven throughout her memories. It might be too closely tied to her identity for even the Luidaeg to remove, no matter how much I changed her blood. If Chelsea chose human, there was a good chance she’d have to die. And either way, there was the matter of Bridget, who was mortal and aware of Faerie. Something would have to be done.

For a moment, Etienne simply sat there. Then he took a shaky breath and stood. “The Choice has always been given,” he said. “I have broken enough rules. It is unfair to expect that this rule, too, would be violated for my pleasure.”

“There’s a chance—” I began, then stopped, realizing what his expression meant. Sylvester never told him. Etienne wasn’t there when Gillian had her Choice; he knew I had a mostly mortal daughter, but that wasn’t the same as knowing she’d Chosen, or knowing she’d been changed. He still thought of the Changeling’s Choice as an absolute, one that ended with either death or temporary exile from the mortal world.

“A chance?” he asked suspiciously.

“Never mind.” I shook my head. Chelsea’s situation wasn’t like anyone else’s that I knew of…and it was kinder not to tell him. “There’s a chance she’ll choose Faerie, that’s all.”

“And lose her mother—assuming Bridget can be allowed to live freely after what I’ve done to her.” Etienne sighed. “I’ve lived my life by Faerie’s laws. I’ve served even when I wondered whether service was truly the only path open to me. But I’ve never before questioned this strongly whether those laws were fair.”

“Yeah, well. The humans call us ‘the Fair Folk’ because they’re trying to make us act that way. Not because we already do.” I raked my hair back with one hand. “Is there anything else I need to know before I start moving on this?”

“You know everything I do.” Etienne took a step back. He didn’t look away. “I’ll have your first payment sent over in the morning, as soon as the banks are open.”

I briefly considered explaining the concept of the ATM to him but decided against it. Quentin once spent most of an afternoon trying to explain “online banking” to me, and I walked away with a headache and the sincere urge to send mankind back to the Stone Age. As long as Etienne knew how to make a withdrawal, I was happy. “All right. I’ll call if I find anything.”

“Yes. I suppose you will.” Etienne glanced over his shoulder to the door. “I understand that this is terribly cowardly of me, but would you mind very much if I were to—?”

Understanding dawned. “You can go ahead and teleport out,” I said. “I’ll explain things to the others. We’re going to find her, Etienne. You have my word.” I wasn’t going to promise him we’d find her alive—I try to be optimistic, but that doesn’t make me an idiot. He looked relieved, all the same.

“I haven’t always been a good friend to you, October, and I regret that,” he said, tone grave. “I’ll never forget that you were willing to do this for me. Believe that.”

“I do,” I said.

Etienne bowed. Then he turned away, using one hand to transcribe a wide arch in the air. A glowing circle appeared in front of him as the smell of limes and cedar smoke filled the room. I could see one of the halls at Shadowed Hills through the circle; a faint hint of rose perfume came wafting through, making an odd counterpart to the scent of Etienne’s magic. Then he stepped into the portal, and it closed behind him.

“I need more coffee,” I said loudly, and walked to the office door. “Now I’m opening the door.” I grasped the knob, counted to three, and pulled.

As expected, Tybalt was standing in the hall.

“Feeling subtle tonight, are we?” I asked, brushing past him on my way to the stairs. “How long were you standing there?”

“Long enough,” he said, turning to follow me. “Is this going to be an issue?”

“No. I knew one of you would be listening and that it wouldn’t be May; she’s the loudest. Tactically, keeping her downstairs is the right thing to do.” I glanced back at him as I walked down the stairs. “You could have brought me a fresh cup of coffee, you know.”

“May thought the smell would betray my presence.”

“May was probably right,” I said, reaching the bottom of the stairs.

“May usually is.” May stepped out of the kitchen, holding out a fresh mug. “Peace offering?”

“Accepted.” I exchanged my empty mug for her full one, taking a long drink of scalding coffee before I shouted, “Quentin! Wherever you are, stop being there, and get in here!”

“That bad?” asked May.

“Perhaps worse,” said Tybalt. I raised an eyebrow in his direction. He shook his head. “I’m not being flippant, October. As I said before, I heard enough.”

“That’s good. Can I assume you’re still here because you’re willing to help with this?”

“You can.”

May looked between us. “Is this the part where I start freaking out?”

“If you think it would help,” I said. Quentin emerged from the kitchen with Spike—the household’s resident rose goblin, a sort of animate cat-shaped rosebush with an unfortunate tendency to jump on my lap without warning—riding on his shoulder. I saluted the pair of them with my coffee mug. “Great, we’re all here. Follow me.”

I led the way to the living room, where I put my mug down atop the pile of papers that obscured our coffee table and turned to face the others.

“Here’s the short form,” I said. “Etienne had a relationship with a human woman while Luna and Rayseline were missing. It ended when his duties at Shadowed Hills became too pressing. He hasn’t seen her since then. Unfortunately, what he didn’t know was that Bridget was pregnant when they broke up.”

“Etienne has a changeling?” asked Quentin, tone both amazed and horrified.

“Yeah,” I said, looking at him levelly. “Is there a problem with that?”

Quentin started to reply. Then he stopped, took a deep breath, and said, “I don’t know.”

He looked utterly ashamed of himself, which said a lot about how far he’d come since we met. Quentin started out as your average pureblood, convinced that he was innately superior to the changelings and just as convinced that there was nothing wrong with that. I’d started slapping that attitude out of him almost immediately, and it had worked, sometimes surprisingly well—for a little while, he’d even had a human girlfriend. They didn’t have a happy ending. People who play faerie bride so rarely do.

“Her name is Chelsea,” I said. “There’s nothing wrong with the fact that she exists, but there’s something very wrong with the fact that up until today, Etienne didn’t know about it.”

Tybalt nodded; he’d already heard this much. Quentin gaped at me, shame melting into surprise. It was May who spoke, exclaiming, “WHAT?!”

“He didn’t know she existed. He hasn’t been monitoring her. And her mother teaches Folklore at UC Berkeley.”

Now it was Tybalt’s turn to stare at me. He’d apparently missed that part. “He was fool enough to court a folklorist?” he asked. “Did he wish to be the one to betray Faerie’s existence to the mortals?”

“I doubt he thought about it. People usually don’t when they’re in love.” I raked a hand through my hair again, this time pressing my fingers against the base of my skull. It wouldn’t stop the night I was having from giving me a headache, but it made me feel a little better. “Chelsea’s mother knows she’s not human. We can’t change that, although we’ll probably have to deal with it before this is over.”

“Wait—you mean that’s not the problem?” asked May. “Because call me naïve, but that sure sounds like the problem to me.”

“It’s a problem, but it’s not the main problem.” I pulled my hand out of my hair, picking up my coffee cup. “Chelsea is missing. She disappeared earlier today, in full view of her mortal friends. They said she ‘just vanished.’”

“Sounds like she figured out how to teleport,” said May.

“Or someone figured out she existed and thought she’d be a great way of getting at Etienne,” I said. “Maybe I’m being paranoid, but after the last few years, I figure I’ve earned a little paranoia.”

“What do we do now?” asked Quentin.

It was a simple question. It still made me smile, just a little. The situation was bad, and it was going to get worse before it was over…but I was part of a “we” now. Once upon a time, not that long ago, I would have been trying to do this on my own, even if there were people willing to help. I hadn’t learned to be part of the “we.” I hadn’t realized how much I needed it.

“We have to find her, and we have to find her fast. I’m going to call Walther and ask him to talk to Bridget, as a fellow faculty member. Tybalt—”

“If you ask that I leave, you will be sorely disappointed by my answer, and I will be even more disappointed by you,” he said, with unexpected sharpness.

I blinked. “I wasn’t going to ask you to leave. Can you ask your cats to watch for anything out of the ordinary, like an appearing-disappearing Tuatha teenager bopping around the city? We need to figure out where she’s been, so we can get the scent of her magic and start tracking her.”

“Of course,” said Tybalt, not looking entirely mollified.

“What about me?” asked May.

“I’m going to want you to stay here and coordinate things.”

My former Fetch frowned. “There has to be more I can do than just that.”

“I’m sure there will be. For the moment, though, I need someone at the house to answer the phone, answer the door, and keep everyone posted.”

“Okay.” May sighed. “Jazz and I can take shifts. She can take over after the sun rises.”

“That works,” I said, and took a gulp of coffee. “I’m going to call Walther, and then Quentin and I will head for Chelsea’s house and see whether we can find her high school. Maybe we’ll get lucky and there will be a nice big sign. ‘Chelsea Ames was abducted by…’”

“Wouldn’t that be a pleasant change from the norm?” asked Tybalt dryly.

“I’ll get my coat,” said Quentin, and trotted out of the room, heading for the stairs.

“Okay.” I waited until I heard his footsteps on the stairs before looking from May to Tybalt. “You know how this is going to end.”

“I do,” said Tybalt softly. Even if Chelsea died, Etienne could be accused of treason for betraying the truth of Faerie’s existence. And if she lived…if she lived, life as she knew it was going to be over, one way or the other.

Nothing is ever simple or easy when Faerie meets the mortal world. There are just times when I find myself wishing it didn’t have to be quite so hard.