Ashes of Honor

FIVE

I WENT INTO THE KITCHEN to call Walther. I carry a cell phone these days—May and Quentin’s nagging wore me down—but I use landlines when I can. It feels more secure. April O’Leary insists the opposite is true, but April isn’t objective, since no one’s ever going to listen to one of her calls when she doesn’t want them to. Being able to control the phone lines has made her a little cocky.

Tybalt followed me. “As we are once again in a state of emergency, I assume we will not be discussing this evening’s events,” he said, without preamble. His tone was stiff, a sure sign that he was unhappy.

When did I start caring about his moods? “I don’t see what there is to talk about,” I said, taking the phone off the hook. “I appreciate you helping us look for Chelsea. I know Etienne isn’t a friend of yours, but we really need the help.”

“I have no quarrel with him,” said Tybalt, stiffness becoming sharpness. “October—”

“I need to call Walther.” I focused on the phone, dialing Walther’s office. Tybalt sighed, making no effort to conceal his irritation. I ignored him. Not the most mature approach to the problem, but it had been working so far. Why mess with a good thing?

Most members of the UC Berkeley faculty ended their office hours around six or seven, when the bulk of the student body was heading off-campus for dinner or back to their dorm rooms to pretend they remembered how to study. Not Walther. His on-duty hours started when everyone else was ending theirs, and he could usually be found in his lab late into the night, mixing chemicals with names I couldn’t pronounce for the pleasure of seeing whether or not the result would explode. Explosions seemed to occur more often than not.

“Professor Davies’ lab, Professor Davies’ mortally endangered graduate student speaking.” Jack sounded harried. That was nothing new. Jack usually sounded harried when Walther was playing with hazardous materials. The rest of the time, Jack sounded like someone had slipped sedatives into his mocha. To be honest, I suspected Walther of doing just that.

“Hi, Jack, it’s Toby. Is Walther in? I need to ask him something.”

“Toby!” Jack’s delight was unfeigned. “Are you calling because you’re going to take the Professor away for a little while? Because you would not be inconveniencing me in the least. In fact, I would probably be willing to pay you. Actually, take out the ‘probably.’ I’m supposed to have these papers graded by tomorrow, and he keeps making the lab smell like rotten eggs.”

“So why are you doing the grading in the lab at two o’clock in the morning?” I asked, curious despite my own better judgment.

“I share an apartment with three other grad students,” said Jack matter-of-factly. “It smells worse than the lab does. Would you like me to get the Professor for you?”

“Please,” I said.

“Just a second.” There was a scuffling sound as he put the phone down and moved away. I glanced up to find Tybalt watching me with a mixture of curiosity and irritation.

“Walther’s graduate student, Jack,” I explained. “He’s getting Walther for me.”

“How charming. Tell me, is he also in a position to get you a measure of common sense? I would gladly reimburse him.”

I glowered and was about to demand to know what his problem was when Walther asked, “Toby?”

“Walther, hey.” I turned away from Tybalt. “Are you alone?”

“From any other woman, I would assume that question was connected to my social life. From you…” Walther laughed. “Yes, I’m alone. I’ve sent Jack to get us something to drink.”

“What are you going to do when he graduates?”

“Find someone new to get my coffee. What do you need?”

I took a deep breath, unsure how to begin. Finally, I took the chicken’s route and asked, “Do you know Bridget Ames in the Folklore Department?”

“Sure,” said Walther. “She’s a nice lady. Single mother. Her students like her. Never yells at me for accidentally triggering the fire alarm.”

“How often does that happen?” I asked.

“Often enough that I may never get tenure.”

“Right.” I took another deep breath. This wasn’t going to get easier. “Have you met Bridget’s daughter, Chelsea?”

“I haven’t had the pleasure.” Walther’s tone turned suspicious. “Why are you asking?”

“She disappeared on her way home from school this afternoon. Quentin and I are about to go walk her route, see if we can find something that might tell us where she is.”

“I didn’t know you knew Bridget.”

“I don’t. I’ve never met her.”

“Then who hired you?”

“Chelsea’s father.”

There was a moment of silence as Walther thought about that. Finally, he asked, “What aren’t you telling me?”

“Her father is Etienne from Shadowed Hills. She’s a changeling, Walther. Bridget knows, and she’s managed to keep her hidden from us. And now she’s missing.”

Walther swore loudly in Welsh before demanding, “How did this happen? How was this missed?”

“Etienne likes smart girls who know how to hide their kids from the faeries, I guess. Walther, she’s missing, and we need to find her. Is there any way you can talk to Bridget, one faculty member to another, and see if you can get us a picture of Chelsea?”

“Chelsea’s disappearance—you don’t think it was a normal kidnapping, do you?”

“When a teenage Tuatha changeling disappears in broad daylight? No, I don’t. Her friends told Bridget that’s what happened—Chelsea just disappeared. If we’re lucky, she finally hit the epiphany that unlocked her magic, and she teleported somewhere without knowing how to get back.”

“If we’re not lucky?”

“Then Etienne’s teenage daughter has been stolen by persons unknown, and I have no idea why. You’ll talk to Bridget?”

“I will.”

“Good. Call me if you learn anything. Open roads, Walther.”

“Open roads,” he echoed, sounding far more subdued than he had at the beginning of the call, and hung up.

I replaced the receiver in the cradle and turned to find Tybalt watching me. “What?” I asked.

“Are you sure this isn’t a matter better left to your liege?”

The question startled me. I’d been expecting another request to talk about what happened in the alley. We’d have to talk about it eventually, since it was clear that Tybalt wasn’t going to let the matter drop until we did, but I wasn’t ready. “Etienne asked for my help.”

“It’s true that retrieval of lost things—children, kittens, trinkets—has become a specialty of yours. But are you sure you’re prepared for this particular mission?”

“Tybalt…”

He sighed. “I don’t want to make you angry. I merely fear for your safety.”

“I can do my job.”

“Really. You can follow a teenage changeling, stolen from her mortal parent, kept from her fae parent, and feel no personal connection that might cloud your judgment?”

I took a sharp breath, forcing myself to count to ten. Finally, when I was sure I could speak without screaming, I said, “This is nothing like what happened with Gillian.”

“Isn’t it?” Tybalt asked. I wanted to read his tone as mocking, needling me about what happened when Gillian was taken. I couldn’t do it. Maybe I’d have been able to do it once, but now, after all we’d been through—after all the times he’d been there when I needed him—I couldn’t see his words as anything but what they were: concerned.

“Maybe a little,” I said, relenting. “But I have to do this. You know that. I can’t just hand this off to someone else and trust that they’ll take care of it. I have to bring her home.”

“Sometimes I wonder if it’s because you spent so long lost that you must insist on bringing every lost thing home.” Tybalt pushed away from the counter, covering the distance between us in a single fluid motion. He was still wearing his human disguise. I hadn’t noticed it before, not with everything else going on. The smell of pennyroyal radiated from his skin. “You can’t save everyone and leave yourself lost, October. It isn’t fair. Not to you and not to the people who care about you.”

“I’m not lost, Tybalt,” I said. It was oddly hard to meet his eyes now that they registered as human. His irises were supposed to be malachite green, not muddy hazel, and his pupils were supposed to be oval, not round. “I know exactly where I am.”

A smile crossed his face. “If I believed that, I would walk away and never darken your door again. I can forgive you your foolishness only because I know how lost you are. But one day, you’ll have to come back home. When you do, I hope you’ll find me waiting.”

He stepped back abruptly, turning and walking out of the kitchen before I could answer. I stayed frozen where I was, the scent of hot pennyroyal teasing my nostrils.

“What the hell just happened?” I asked.

The empty kitchen didn’t answer.

I scowled, for lack of any more definite reaction, and followed Tybalt’s path out of the room. Somehow, it wasn’t a surprise when he wasn’t in the living room. May and Quentin were, both of them watching me approach. Quentin looked confused. May looked oddly disappointed, as though she’d been hoping for some other outcome.

“Don’t start,” I told her, before turning to Quentin. “You have everything you need?”

“Coat, cell phone, emergency cab fare, knife,” recited Quentin.

“Good. Now make yourself presentable.”

Quentin nodded, the scent of steel and heather rising as he gathered the magic to weave himself a human disguise. I did the same, pulling strands of air toward me until all I could taste was copper, and the tingling itch of false humanity lay light across my skin.

May was still watching me with disappointed eyes when I finished. I sighed. “Call me if there’s any word, okay? Walther’s trying to get us a picture of Chelsea.”

“Be careful out there.” May paused, disappointment turning rueful as she added, “Not that you will be. I just have to say it, you know?”

“I know. Come on, Quentin.” My squire followed me out of the house. I paused only to retrieve my leather jacket from the rack by the door. Chelsea needed us. We needed to move.

Our house was huge compared to the San Francisco norm, since it was never reconstructed to suit modern standards. It also had something that elevated it from “nice” to “people would kill to live here”: a covered two-car parking area at the end of a short but private driveway. The neighbor to our right had been parking there for years while the house stood empty. He’d been offering me increasingly large sums of money to use the carport since we moved in. So far, I’d been able to keep rebuffing him—although I had a strong suspicion he was behind the noise complaints someone had phoned in to the local police. As if we’d be making inappropriately loud noises at seven o’clock in the morning? We were all in bed by then. Yes, I needed the money. But I needed not to have a random human in my garage even more.

Quentin waited patiently as I performed my customary check for intruders in the back seat—fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, not in this lifetime—before unlocking the doors. “Where are we going?” he asked.

“Berkeley,” I replied. “We’re going to walk to Chelsea’s high school.”

“Do we know which one it is?”

“No. But we know where she lives. If she’s being allowed to walk alone or with friends, she must be going to school within a mile of her house.”

“I don’t go to school within a mile of my house,” Quentin said, getting into the car.

I did the same on the driver’s side. “One, you don’t go to school at all, unless you count your lessons with Etienne. And if you’re counting those, you don’t walk to Shadowed Hills. Either I drive you or we put you on BART and make you get there on your own. Two, I don’t even know where your house is, beyond ‘somewhere in Canada,’ so I’m pretty sure you’re playing by a different set of rules.”

Quentin frowned. “I used to go to school.”

I paused. For a while, Quentin had attended College Park High School in Pleasant Hill, playing human and learning about the mortal world at the same time. That stopped when Blind Michael stole Quentin’s human girlfriend and brought his masquerade to a forced end. “True,” I admitted. “And when you did, you were going to a school within a mile of the knowe.”

“It still might not be universal. Some people came from farther away. They’d transferred from other schools in the district, or their parents moved after they started and didn’t want to make them switch schools.”

He had a point. “Okay. You’re right. It’s just…the rules are different for humans. Human parents like to know where their children are all the time, especially when they’re school age. Chelsea’s sixteen. That means her mother isn’t going to want her walking very far.”

“Katie’s mom was like that,” allowed Quentin. “Humans are weird.”

“You have no idea,” I said, and started the engine.

Quentin was sent to Shadowed Hills by his parents around four years ago. To be honest, every time something went wrong, I expected his parents to summon him home. The fact that they didn’t meant one of two things. Either they were incredibly determined to stick by whatever principles caused them to have him fostered in the first place…or they didn’t care. I honestly hoped it was the first. I couldn’t imagine sending my child to live with strangers the way they had, but that’s because so much of my upbringing was human. Fostering is common among the fae. It’s what keeps us from stagnating—and hell, when you and your children can reasonably expect to live forever, what’s wrong with missing a few years of teenage rebellion? Quentin mostly seemed to be doing his rebelling by refusing to be left behind when I charged into danger. That was hazardous to his health but probably easier on his parents’ nerves than his constantly slamming doors and shouting about how much he hated them.

My teenage years were spent in my mother’s shadow, a half-human wraith haunting the Summerlands and praying for a way out. There are worse things than a blind fosterage. If Chelsea’s mother wanted to be protective, let her. More parents should get to have that choice.

I realized my thoughts were trending toward Gillian and tried to pull them back, to no avail. Thinking about my daughter was too easy these days, especially after what had been done to her—what I had done to her. Sometimes when I slept, I still saw her in a meadow that never existed, split into three people, one human, one fae, one the changeling girl I carried inside me for nine months. In my dreams, she said “human,” and I ignored her, shoving her into an eternal life she’d never asked for and wouldn’t know how to handle. Anything so I wouldn’t have to dream giving her up over and over again.

Quentin was silent as we drove, not even fiddling with the radio. I could feel the weight of his gaze, his concern practically becoming a third passenger in the car. He was as worried about me as May and Tybalt were. He just didn’t know how to go about expressing it. Maybe that was why, of the three of them, he was the one I had the easiest time dealing with.

Traffic was light this late at night, and we made it from San Francisco to Berkeley without delays. Bridget and Chelsea actually lived in Albany, a small suburb far enough from the university that housing was almost affordable. I navigated the twisting side streets sprouting off Solano Avenue like the roots of a tree. Their house was easy to spot: it was the only one on the block with the lights on. I wondered how nocturnal Chelsea was and how much Bridget had been able to adjust her schedule to accommodate her daughter. Chelsea was attending a human high school, but that didn’t mean much; teenagers show an amazing capacity to function while sleep-deprived, whether they’re mortal, fae, or somewhere in-between.

I drove about a block farther along the street before finally snagging a parking space. I pulled into it, stopping the engine, and turned to Quentin. “It’s going to be a little weird that we’re out here, but I don’t want to throw a don’t-look-here if it means we might miss any traces Chelsea’s magic left,” I said. “If anyone asks, I’m your aunt or something.”

Quentin looked at me, clearly amused. “What, you’re not my mother?”

“Thankfully, no.” We looked oddly similar with our human disguises on—we both had blue eyes, although his were dulled down from his true appearance, while mine were oversaturated compared to their natural colorless gray. His dishwater blond hair was lightened from its natural bronze, while mine was barely changed. As long as we looked human, we looked enough alike to pass.

“Okay, big sis.”

“Don’t push it.” I climbed out of the car. The air was warmer than it was in San Francisco, but not by much; the smell of the sea and the eucalyptus trees was replaced by freshly mowed grass and wood-burning fireplaces. Everything was silent. This was suburbia, and it was a whole different world from the one we were used to.

“We passed a high school about a mile back,” I said. “Think we should check it out?”

“Are you going to care if I say ‘no’?”

“No.”

“Then yes.”

“Good squire. Come on.” We walked down the sidewalk, stepping over cracks and around broken pavement where tree roots had managed to break through. There was something comforting about the silence between us. It was free of subtext and accusations and expectations. Quentin just wanted me to be there for him. So far, I was managing that much, if not much more.

Of course, I wouldn’t have been managing anything if Tybalt hadn’t interrupted those drug dealers. Maybe Tybalt was right when he said that we needed to have a conversation about the way I’d been acting lately. Maybe—

The lingering scent of magic in front of the Ames house hit me so hard that I stopped, staggering backward as if someone had punched me in the stomach. Quentin stopped in turn, his expression broadcasting confusion and alarm. “Toby?”

“Hang on.” I raised a hand to quiet him, taking deep, slow breaths as I tried to figure out what I was standing in the middle of. He stopped talking but didn’t move away.

My mother, Amandine, raised me as one of the Daoine Sidhe. I didn’t find out until recently that she was lying the whole time. She was Firstborn, the daughter of Oberon and an unnamed woman, and I was the first of a new race of fae—the Dóchas Sidhe. Exactly what we were for was yet to be determined. But if there was one thing we were made to do, it was blood magic, and the unique scents that accompany each person’s spellcasting are fundamentally tied to who and what they are—their blood.

Etienne’s signature was cedar smoke and lime juice. This scent was similar enough that I would have known the caster was related even if we hadn’t been looking for his daughter. Not cedar smoke, though; this was sycamore smoke. It was covered by a delicate veneer of calla lily flowers, softening and sweetening it. The trace was complicated, and got more complicated as I looked deeper. Some of it was fresh, but some of it was old—months, even years of little spells overlaying this one spot. Chelsea had been coming into her powers for a while before she disappeared. That wasn’t a good sign.

“Oak and ash,” I breathed.

“Toby?”

I shook my head. “We’re on the right track. This is the way she walks to school.”

“Yes, it is,” said a voice behind me—female, with the faintest trace of an Irish accent, as though the speaker had been away from home for so long that her roots were just another story. “Now would you like to tell me what you’re doing out here, or shall I be calling the police now?”

There are times when I think the universe is only happy when it has an excuse to make me miserable. “We’d rather you didn’t do that, if you don’t mind,” I said, turning. The woman on the sidewalk about six feet away was wearing a blue bathrobe and holding a cast iron frying pan in one hand. “Is there a problem?”

“Etienne sent you, didn’t he?”

I couldn’t keep myself from flinching. My reaction was slight, but it was enough. Her eyes narrowed, and she brandished the frying pan at us like a weapon.

Slowly, enunciating each word with great care to be sure I couldn’t misunderstand her, Bridget Ames said, “Give me back my daughter right now, or I swear to God, I’ll kill you.”

Oh, great. It was going to be one of those nights.