A Local Habitation

“See you at breakfast.” He winked, turning to open the door behind him. “Ladies first.”


Laughing as I tried to sort through the spin of my emotions, I brushed past him into the most architecturally impossible hallway I’d ever seen. Real angles don’t bend that way. I looked back to Alex, who was barely managing to contain his look of anticipatory amusement.

So we were going to play it that way, were we? Putting on my best innocent expression, I asked, “So when were you going to tell us that we were inside the knowe?”

Alex’s amusement faded into surprise. “You knew?”

“Newsflash: you don’t usually find lace-o’-dreams flowers growing on mortal lawns. Plus? The sky was the wrong kind of blue.” I shrugged. “I’m guessing we crossed worlds when we came through the front door.”

He stopped, folding his arms. “Okay, how did you figure that out?”

“Air-conditioning’s turned too high. The first thing you notice is the cold, and that keeps you from noticing the shift. Estate?”

“Shallowing.”

“Thought so. I’m assuming the mortal buildings overlay the knowe?”

“Pretty much.”

There are two types of knowe. Some, like Shadowed Hills, are literally Summerlands estates connected to the mortal world by doors punched through the walls of reality. Nothing forces them to conform to mortal geography, and for the most part, they don’t bother. The Summerlands-side of the Torquill estate is all virgin forest and cultivated farmland, and it looks nothing at all like the land surrounding the city of Pleasant Hill. Shallowings, on the other hand, are little pockets carved from the space between worlds, not entirely existing in either one. Because they aren’t anchored entirely in Faerie, they rely a lot more on the actual geography of both realities. We’ve been banned from all the lands of Faerie but the Summerlands since Oberon disappeared, and Shallowings are getting more common as real estate gets scarcer.

“So what happens when you have human visitors?” In a way, it was a slightly more adult version of the question I’d asked Quentin earlier. Are you being careful?

“Well, we keep them to a minimum, but when we have to let them in, we buzz them through the gate under a different code and someone meets them at the parking lot. They’re led to the human-side cafeteria or server rooms. That’s why the buildings aren’t connected; as long as you don’t come in through the front door, you don’t get into the knowe, and you can’t see anyone or anything that’s inside it.”

There was a certain twisted logic to that idea. It was certainly no worse than the game of “ring around the poison oak” you had to play to get into the knowe at Shadowed Hills. “And there’ve never been any slipups?”

“One or two.” He opened another door. The hall beyond was carpeted in a bilious green, and the walls were studded with corkboards covered in comic strips and memos. The windows indicated that we’d somehow managed to reach the second floor without taking the stairs—cute. “Nothing major, and they’ve all been taken care of with no lasting harm done.”

“Meaning . . . ?”

“We had a Kitsune on staff until fairly recently.” Alex’s smile faltered, replaced by an expression I didn’t have a name for. “She made sure they didn’t remember anything.”

Not all Kitsune can manipulate memories, but the ones that can tend to be damn good. I nodded, almost grudgingly. “Good approach.”

“We thought so.” The expression I couldn’t name vanished as quickly as it came. “You don’t have a phone, do you?”

“What?”

“A cellular telephone?” He mimed talking into a receiver as he continued, “If you do, it’s going to be useless inside the knowe. If you want, I can have it modified.”

“Modified?”

“Gordan replaces the battery with one of her special ones, works a little voodoo, and gets the circuits realigned. She’s our hardware whiz.” He shrugged. “I just use the toys she makes.”