Rosemary and Rue

SIX

MY CAR HADN’T BEEN DISTURBED. I dug the spare key from under the bumper and fumbled with the lock until I managed to stop the shaking in my fingers and get the door open. I climbed into the driver’s seat, nearly slamming the trailing hem of my dress in the door as I closed it and started the engine. Evening’s liege wouldn’t help me. This wasn’t a mortal problem. Mortal tools wouldn’t solve it, and my camera wasn’t going to save my ass this time. The police could study Evening’s “body” forever if they wanted to, but a lot of the fae don’t leave fingerprints. They’d never find anything, and that meant there wouldn’t be anything I could steal from them.

Slamming my human disguise back into place, so that I just looked like a hard-used brunette in a party gown, I slumped in the driver’s seat and scowled. I needed to look at things from a different direction. Maybe I couldn’t do anything as an investigator, but as a knight . . . there are resources in Faerie that don’t exist in the human world, and this was a faerie crime. I could solve it, if I found the right spells and called in the right favors. But still . . . I’m just a changeling. Evening was ten times more powerful than I’ll ever be. Whatever took her down wasn’t just lucky; it had to have been strong, too, or it wouldn’t have scared her that way. That meant I needed some power of my own, or I wouldn’t stand a chance.

Asking the Queen for help after she’d all but thrown me out of her knowe might be rude enough to get me killed. Dying wasn’t part of my plan for solving the case—it was bad enough that it might be the price of failure—and that meant our Lady of the Mists was actually a hindrance, because if I got in her way, I wouldn’t have time to run. There were other Courts and nobles I could go to, but only a few had the resources I’d need, and of the choices I had, only two didn’t leave me cold. I wanted to get out alive, and that ruled out both Blind Michael and the Tarans of the Berkeley Hills. I considered the Luidaeg, but cast that thought aside as quickly as it had come. Some things are worse than dying.

I couldn’t go to Lily. I just couldn’t. That wasn’t as self-involved as it sounds; Lily’s an Undine, and she’s tied to her knowe. Unless Evening’s killers sat in the Tea Gardens discussing what they were about to do, she wouldn’t be able to help me anyway.

Sylvester would help me if I went to him.Sylvester would insist on being the one to help me, and I couldn’t take it. I’d have to go to him eventually—he’d have to know that Evening was gone, and he was my liege; it was my duty to make sure he knew—but I couldn’t go until I was going to be able to say, “It’s all right, I have help, I don’t need you.” I could stand a lot of things, but I wasn’t ready for the idea of him being able to make me come back.

If I couldn’t trust the Queen, and I couldn’t turn to Sylvester, there was really only one place left that I could go. Devin. Devin, and Home.

Lips thinned with new resolve, I pulled out of the alley, heading away from the water and into the part of the city that smart people do their best to avoid after the sun goes down. I try to be smart when I can, and careful when I can’t, but at the moment, neither of those was going to work for me, because I was doing something I’d sworn I’d never do. Oberon help me, I was going Home.

A lot of changelings have fled the Summerlands over the centuries, building an entire society on the border between Faerie and the mortal world. The purebloods know—of course they do—but they don’t know what to do with their precious half-blood children when they turn into angry adults, and so they’ve never done anything to stop it. It’s a vicious, cutthroat place, where the strong feed on the weak, and it’s where changeling runaways always seem to end up.

I was twenty-five when I ran away from my mother’s household. I could barely pass for a young sixteen. I starved in alleyways, fled from Kelpies, and ran from the human police, and was on the verge of giving up and going back when I found what looked like an answer. Devin.

He took me in, fed me, and said I’d never have to go back there if I didn’t want to. I believed him. Maeve help me, I believed him. Even when I realized what he was doing—what the “little favors” and the increasingly bigger assignments would lead up to, even when he came to my room at night and said I was beautiful, that my eyes were just like my mother’s—I still believed him. He was all I had. I knew I couldn’t trust him, that he’d use me, and that he’d break me if I let him. I also knew he wouldn’t turn me away, because his place was Home, and Home was where everyone stopped. Home was where they didn’t care what color your eyes were, or that you cried when the sun came up, or that your hair was brown like your father’s when the Daoine Sidhe are supposed to be brightly colored and fair. Home was willing to have me, and I knew I could earn myself a life there, if I was fast, clever, and heartless. I could earn my own way.

If Devin had just wanted me for my body, he would have used me up and thrown me away, and no one would have been able to stop him. I’ve seen changelings better than me get destroyed by the border world. Mortal drugs don’t have anything on their fae equivalents, and Faerie offers a lot of ways for the innocent to get themselves killed. I was lucky; Devin wanted me for the cachet of having me. My mother wasn’t nobility, but she was a celebrity of sorts, the strongest blood-worker in the Kingdom, a friend to Dukes and more. No one ever thought she would bear a changeling. And Devin was the one who took me away from her.

I was his lover and his pet and his favorite toy, and he let me have my temperamental little ways, because it was all paid for when he got to walk into a pureblood party he’d bartered an invitation to attend with me on his arm. He gave me what I needed to survive on the outskirts of the mortal world; a birth certificate, lessons in mortal manners, a place to stay. I paid my keep with the shame I let him bring to the people who loved me, and I tried to tell myself it was worth it.

Maybe I was addicted to him; to the way he looked at me, and the way he touched me, and the way he made me feel like I was something more than just another half-breed. He hurt me, but everything I knew told me I deserved it. I never told him no. I never wanted to. Everything I let him do, everything I did, was of my own free will.

When Sylvester got me knighted, leaving Home was part of the price. I agreed without hesitation, and I only saw Devin twice after that. Once on the day I told him I was leaving, and once . . .

I yanked my attention back to the road. The streets were getting worse as I drove, squalor giving way to decay. My destination was at the heart of the rot, in a place where only the people with nowhere else to go ever went. It wasn’t a place for children—it was never a place for children—and maybe that’s why we flocked there, gathering in a dying Neverland ruled by a man who was more Captain Hook than Peter Pan. “You’ll be back,” Devin said on the day I left him, with my wrists still scraped and my lips stinging, and he was right, because here I was. Coming Home.

The building I parked in front of looked abandoned, but was probably home to twenty people after the sun went down. The air seemed even colder now that I was inland. I gathered my damp skirts around myself, shivering as I locked the car door. Nothing had really changed. The wrappers in the gutter had different logos and the music thumping in the background had a different tone, but the eyes of the people who watched from doorways and windows, taking my measure as I passed, were just what they’d always been: hungry, angry, and hopeful. They all needed something, and every one of them was hoping I’d be the one to provide it.

Catcalls and insults followed me down the block to a tiny, nondescript storefront wedged between a crumbling motel and an all-night massage parlor. I paused, feeling like I was falling backward through time. It was all exactly the same, even down to the old miasma of pleasure, pain, and promises, as falsely alluring as a call girl’s perfume. There were no tricks required to get inside, because Devin wanted you to come in. It was getting out that would be the hard part.

The big front window was blocked off with graffiti-covered plywood, and a simple brass sign was mounted over the door. HOME: WHERE YOU STOP. That sign never tarnished or got dirty, and it served as the focus for a misdirection spell so powerful that I’d never seen a human glance toward the building, much less the door. Devin said he bought it from a Coblynau pureblood, trading the sign and its enchantment for nothing but an hour in his arms. I called him a liar the first time he told me that. Coblynau are ugly, lonely people who love metal more than they love air, and the promises you have to make to get a blade or bracelet of their crafting are dear enough that I couldn’t see him winning so much as a ring.

It didn’t take long for me to realize he hadn’t been lying. Casually turning someone else’s needs to his own advantage was exactly the sort of thing Devin did best. He stole whatever he wanted, sharing his ill-gotten gains with his children, the empty-eyed girls and damp-palmed boys who came to him praying he’d have the answers. Now here I was again, praying for the same thing.

I opened the door and stepped inside.

The main room at Home was large and square, littered with ancient furniture and lit by a scavenged electrical generator that powered two refrigerators and an antique jukebox as well as the overhead lights. Heavy metal blared from the jukebox at a volume high enough to almost vibrate the floor. The air smelled like smoke, vomit, stale beer, and yesterday’s desires; all the things I left behind when I went off to live in a different, cleaner world.

A handful of teens lounged around the otherwise deserted room like the casual ornamentation they were. I didn’t know any of them, but I recognized them on sight because they were Devin’s kids, and so was I. Our fellowship went deeper than our faces. It went all the way down to our bones.

How many of you is he fucking? I wondered, and was immediately ashamed. Front room duty was always the hardest. You had to stay alert without seeming to pay attention, and no matter how long you had to sit there, you didn’t dare fall asleep. I hated it. You were a visible challenge to anyone who felt like calling Devin out for some real or imagined sin, but you couldn’t say no and you couldn’t leave once you’d been told to stay.

These new kids could so easily have been the ones I remembered, only changed by updates in teenage fashion. They were all changelings, and not one of them was wearing even the most basic human disguise. There was a calculated reason for that; seeing them as soon as you entered told you that when you were Home, you came as you were. It made the edges of my own illusion itch, like a coat that didn’t quite fit. I wouldn’t take it off yet, though. Not until I’d seen Devin.

Four kids were in view, which meant there were at least three more I hadn’t spotted. A boy and girl who looked too alike to be anything but siblings sat near the jukebox, their sharply pointed ears and glossy gold hair marking them as descendants of the Tylwyth Teg. A half-Candela girl with pale green eyes leaned against the wall by the door, juggling globes of dim light, and a boy with hedgehog spines instead of hair squatted in the corner, a clove cigarette dangling from his lips.

All four had turned to watch as I entered, an inquiring band of Lost Children studying the grown-up who had wandered into their territory. Maybe I used to be one of them, but they didn’t know me. For once, this proof of my escape didn’t make me feel any better.

“Nice dress,” said the Candela. The room erupted in snickering. I stayed where I was, waiting for it to die down.

Knowing Devin’s kids, they were all armed and ready to jump me at the first sign of trouble. That was fine. I hadn’t come to Home looking for a fight, but starting a small one would get me to Devin faster. Protocol said I should be polite: introduce myself, make nice, put up with whatever crap they handed me, and ask if I could see Devin before the end of the night. Maybe they’d even let me, if I was nice enough. But I was tired and Evening was dead, and I didn’t have the time or the patience to play at pleasantries.

The brother of the paired changelings looked like he was the oldest one in the room, if only by a year or two. That made him the point man. I walked toward the pair, and they looked back at me, expressions not betraying any interest in who I was or what I was doing there. Never be the first one to show that you care; that kind of weakness can get you killed.

“I need to see Devin,” I said. Now that I was closer, I could see that their eyes were the glaring neon green of pippin apples. Faerie is anything but stinting in the colors it uses.

The brother blinked, obviously expecting something subtler. Good. If he was off balance, he was more likely to give me what I wanted. Unfortunately, it was his sister who spoke, flicking her bangs out of her eyes as she announced, “That’s not gonna happen.”

Her accent was a mixture of inner-city Spanish and downtown punk so thick it verged on parody and a perfect complement to her overdone makeup, rat’s nest hair, and seemingly permanent sneer. She could have been pretty, if she’d been willing to gain twenty pounds and stop trying so hard, but as it was, she looked like a cross between Twiggy’s younger sister and every downtown whore I’d ever seen. There was no way she was more than fourteen.

Of course, that was looking at her from a mortal perspective. I looked sixteen when I came to Devin, and I always did my best to look even younger when I had to do bar duty. It helped if they underestimated you. So she might have been older than she looked . . . but I saw her as fourteen, and the way she held herself told me I was pretty close to right.

“Sorry, lady, but you can go home now,” she continued. “He’s busy.”

I sighed inwardly. I hadn’t been underestimating her; she was as young as she looked, and she had no idea what she was messing with. I narrowed my eyes, glaring, and she licked her lips, fixing me with what was probably meant to be a languid sneer. I managed not to laugh. Instead, I shook my head, and repeated, “I need to see Devin. Now, please.”

“So why do you need to see the boss-man?” she drawled. Her accent was starting to get on my nerves. “I don’t think he’s expecting you. I think you’re trying to sneak in while he’s not looking.”

Well, she was smart enough to guess my motives. Not that it was going to do her much good, since I wasn’t planning to let her stop me. “Does it matter?” I replied. “I need one of you—I don’t care which—to tell Devin that Toby’s here, and she needs to talk to him right away.”

The girl smirked, obviously thinking I would back down. “I think you should go sit down for a while.”

Was I ever that young or that stupid? That young. Maybe. “I think you should go tell Devin that I’m here.”

“Really? Because I’m thinking . . . no. I think you’re gonna sit, and he’ll see you in an hour. Two, maybe. It’s really no difference to him, lady.” She started to turn away. I grabbed her arm, twisting it up behind her back. She yelped, trying to wrench herself free. “Hey! Crazy bitch!”

Her brother tensed, but didn’t move to help her. Clever boy. “That’s right, I am a crazy bitch,” I said, tightening my grip. “Maybe we should start over. My name’s October Daye. Does that ring any bells?”

Her eyes widened. “Uh . . .” she said, in a voice that was suddenly much softer, and almost devoid of an accent. “Daye? Like the fish lady?”

“Yes, very much like the ‘fish lady.’ Exactly like the ‘fish lady,’ actually. Do you know what happens when you mess with someone who’s known your boss as long as I have? I worked for him before you were born. Do you think he’ll like hearing how much trouble I had getting in?” She paled, trying to yank away. I almost felt sorry for her—almost—but when you’ve just been dragged back into fae politics against your will, been cursed, and lost a friend all in one night, “sorry” isn’t high on your list of priorities. “I don’t think you’d enjoy his reaction. What’s your name?”

“Dare, ma’am, my name’s Dare,” she said, stumbling over her own words. She looked like she’d just stepped outside to find Godzilla on the lawn. I wasn’t sure which worried me more—that I’d made her look that way, or that I was enjoying it.

“Well, Dare, I have an idea,” I said, and released her arm. She backed out of reach. “You go tell Devin that I’m here, and I’ll forget about this little chat. Do you like that idea?” She nodded rapidly. I smiled. “Good. Run along, then. Shoo.”

She turned and ran for the back of the room, leaving a trail of glitter in the air behind her. It dissolved as it drifted toward the ground. I raised my eyebrows. Pixie-sweat. Some of Devin’s new flunkies had one of the pixie breeds in the woodpile; that was interesting. The Small Folk don’t interbreed much with humans, and their blood tends to run thin when they do. When you combined that with the Tylwyth Teg blood indicated by their hair and eyes, well, somebody in the family tree sure got around.

I breathed in quickly, “tasting” the wake of her departure against the innate knowledge of the fae races that I inherited from my mother. She tasted of Piskie. That made more sense; they were size-changers, after all, as well as being natural thieves, which would naturally have drawn their descendants to a place like Devin’s.

The brother was watching me, expression caught somewhere between awe and terror. I quirked a brow. “Yes?”

He flinched. I found that strangely satisfying. I guess having people die doesn’t bring out the best in me. “You’re October Daye,” he said. His voice was more lightly accented than his sister’s, reinforcing the idea that she was exaggerating for effect.

“Yes,” I said, resisting the urge to add anything else. Considering the look he was giving me, he might turn and run. That would upset Devin, and I didn’t need Devin mad when I was already in his domain uninvited, looking for favors.

“You knew the Winterrose,” the boy said, in an almost mournful tone.

I paused, reappraising him. He was taller than I was, with that thin, lanky teenage build that always seems to fill out while you aren’t watching. Overall, he looked like a movie producer’s idea of a street thug—too clean, with unnaturally golden hair bundled into a rough ponytail and his too-green eyes softened by an almost puppy dog expression. Only the pointed ears broke the image, making it seem more like he’d escaped from a game of Dungeons & Dragons than from the set of the latest teen drama. I wouldn’t have put him at more than sixteen, maybe seventeen, if you stretched the truth and squinted. “What’s your name, kid?”

He blushed under my scrutiny, but managed not to squirm as he said, “Manuel.”

“Is Dare your sister?”

“Yeah,” he said, looking embarrassed. Almost against my will, I found myself warming to him. “I’m sorry about how she talked to you. Sometimes she doesn’t do too well with people who aren’t . . . who aren’t from around here.”

“People who aren’t family” was what he meant, but I could tell he wouldn’t say it to my face. I upgraded my opinion of his intelligence a few notches, saying, “It’s not a big deal; I used to live here, and I’ve had more punks talk down to me than I can count.” He colored again, trying not to glare. The kid got points for that: even if your sister’s a brat, you should stand up for her. “Relax, okay? I said I wouldn’t tell Devin, and I meant it. She doesn’t deserve that sort of trouble just for mouthing off.”

Manuel smiled, and I smiled back automatically. He was going to be a heartbreaker when he finished growing up. “Th-that’s very kind, Ms. Daye.” Oh, he was young: I could hear the hastily avoided “thank you” in his stutter. It takes a while for certain rules to become instinctive, especially for changelings. We’re not born to them, and our mortal parents tend to drill basic manners into us long before the Choice rolls around.

I shrugged. “It’s not a problem. I screwed up, too, when I was her age, and if folks hadn’t been willing to give me a break once in a while, I’d be long gone.” I paused, choosing my words carefully before I continued. “You said that I ‘knew the Winterrose’ . . . who did you mean?” Silently, I added, And how did you know she was dead, kid?

“Countess Winterrose.” He brushed his hair out of his eyes with the back of one hand. “You’ve heard, right?” He sounded nervous again: he didn’t want to be the one who told me I’d just lost a friend. Or maybe he just didn’t want me to keep asking him questions.

“Yes. I’ve heard.” How did this kid know Evening? She would never have come this far into the changeling slums fourteen years ago. Then again, even purebloods can change. It just takes them time; maybe a decade and a half was long enough.

“I’m sorry.”

“Join the club. How did you find out she was dead?” The words were out, cold and flat between us.

To his credit, he met my eyes as he said, “News travels fast. A Glastig that lives in her building told us—Bucer O’Malley? He saw the police going into her apartment. He listened long enough to find out what was going on and he came here and told us.”

“Bucer lived in her building? How the hell did he afford—never mind. It’s not important.” I remembered Bucer. He was never one of Devin’s kids, but he’d done piecework for Devin from time to time. If he thought there was a profit in it, he would’ve carried the news of Evening’s death Home as fast as he could. “Do you know where he was going from here?”

“To the Queen’s Court, he said. To tell her.”

I grimaced. “Lovely.” That was one lead down: after he’d spoken to the Queen, there was no way Bucer would speak to me.

Manuel frowned. “If you haven’t seen Bucer, how did you . . . ?”

“I just know. All right?” I knew it all: every little detail, from the way it felt when the blood started filling her lungs to the bite of iron against her skin. I knew everything except for who did it, and that was the thing I needed to know more than anything else.

“I’m sorry,” said Manuel. “I should’ve known you’d know. They always know up there.” Up there. So they were still using that charming euphemism for the pureblood holdings in the city, were they? I hadn’t liked it when I was living in the changeling slums, and now that I was doing my best to abandon fae society altogether, I still didn’t like it. It’s not hard to marginalize people when they’ve already done it to themselves.

I came back from pondering that reminder of my roots just in time to hear him finish, “... but she was good to us, and we’ll miss her. We’ll always miss her.”

My dislike of his language slipped into my tone, making me sound harsher than I intended when I said, “We’re talking about the same Evening here, right? Daoine Sidhe, dark hair, didn’t give a damn about anything she didn’t own?”

That seemed to galvanize him. He straightened, eyes narrowing to slits. Insulting Evening was apparently worse than insulting his sister, and I once again found myself doing some rapid rethinking about someone I thought I knew. What could Evening have done to inspire that reaction in a back-street changeling kid who probably hadn’t seen the inside of a school since he was eight?

“The Winterrose was a friend of the boss. She did many things for us here . . . ma’am.” He used “ma’am” like it was a dirty word. Only the barest of margins saved it from being an insult, and that gap was shrinking.

“Cool it, Manuel,” I said, raising my hands. “I didn’t mean to piss you off. Evening and I were friends for a long time, even if we didn’t always act like it. I’m going to find out who killed her, and they’re going to pay.”

The anger in his eyes faded, soothed by the promise of revenge. “I just wish we’d known sooner. If someone had told us . . . we could’ve saved her.” He sounded so sure of himself, secure in his misplaced faith. Part of me wanted to shake him, but the rest of me wanted to swaddle him in cotton and hide him somewhere where the world would never take that faith away from him. The world isn’t a nice place—ask anyone.

Ask Evening.

“It wouldn’t have done any good,” I said. I hated myself for the words, but I wasn’t willing to lie to him, not even by omission. Not about this. “We couldn’t have saved her.”

“We could have kept her alive, gotten her to someone . . .”

“She was killed with iron.”

He froze. “Iron?”

“Yes, iron. We couldn’t have saved her.” The sound of the door opening saved me from his response, and I turned, painfully glad for the distraction. Maybe he was going to grow up someday; that didn’t mean I needed to watch.

Dare stood in the doorframe, trying to look cocky and unconcerned. She was failing. Maybe it was the red welt on her cheek that spoiled the effect, already darkening around the edges toward the bruise it would become. “The boss-man says he’ll see you now, but you better hurry if you want him to keep on waiting.” There was a panicky look in her eyes: those were Devin’s words, not hers, and she expected to be the one that got punished for them. The old bastard never changed.

Maybe that’s why I loved him for so long.

“Great,” I said, and stood, pushing past her into the back hall. The door swung shut behind me, but not fast enough to keep me from hearing Manuel start to cry. Damn it.

He would have found out eventually: if he had been Evening’s pawn, someone else was bound to grab him and keep using him in the great chess game of faerie society. Any piece, however small, is too valuable to be allowed to just walk away. Hope isn’t always an easy thing in Faerie, but I wished him what hope I could—that he would find his feet before the world found him, and that his new master would be as kind as his old one. Evening was a lot of things, but she was never cruel, not even to her puppets. Her hands were always gentle on my strings.