Ashes of Honor: An October Daye Novel

I frowned, biting back further protest. “Okay. No. You never told me about her.”


“We met over two hundred years ago, in New York. Her name was Anne O’Toole.” His lips curved into a smile I’d never seen before, soft and wistful and almost longing all at the same time. “She was Irish when it wasn’t fashionable to be Irish, and a woman when that wasn’t fashionable either. She was all impulse and sharp words.” He opened his eyes, looking at me. “I think you would have liked her. You’re similar in some ways. Mostly in your habit of charging headlong into danger while swearing you’re doing no such thing.”

I looked at him but said nothing. After a moment he looked away, still smiling.

“We hated each other, of course. She thought I was arrogant and boorish. I thought she was common and dull, like every other human. But we…learned otherwise, and I loved her. She burned so bright—she raced through every day like she knew they wouldn’t last. She wanted me to remember her.” He stopped.

The cats yowled in the distance, marking out their territory. I brushed my hair away from my face with my free hand and asked, “Did she know?”

“That I wasn’t human? Of course she did. She wasn’t stupid.” The implied criticism of Cliff stung. “She knew before the first time she let me touch her. She said she loved me all the more for knowing I’d be here after she was gone. I was her immortality, she said. ‘The Sidhe have always been immortal for the sake of the Irish,’ that’s what she told me. And she laughed, and I laughed, because I was young and foolish and in love, and she was never going to die.”

“What happened?” The words seemed too bald, but I knew he’d never finish his story without prompting. We’d sit in silence until it was time to run again, and whatever demon he was trying to cast out with his recollection would stay with him.

“She died.” This time his smile was bitter. “She became pregnant, as women do, and it proved too much for her. Medicine of the time was…the human world lacked the skills she needed to survive. The Cait Sidhe have no talent for medicine, and I couldn’t find a healer among the Divided Courts who’d tend my ‘mortal slut.’ I begged. I bent my knee and I begged, like any penitent. And still they refused me.”

“I’m so sorry,” I whispered.

“Anne died in my arms, and the only mercy of it is that she was gone before she knew the baby wouldn’t live. I buried my wife and daughter, and I swore I’d never trust the Divided Courts again, or love anything that came from the mortal world.”

“Tybalt…”

“That’s why I hated the changelings for so long. It was a changeling that killed my wife, intentionally or not, and doubled that…that pain by leaving me alone.”

I started to pull my hand away, but he caught it, pulling me back. “I wanted to hate you. Amandine got to keep her mortal lover and have her mortal child, even if she lost them eventually. I wanted to hate you because you made me think of Anne.”

“What changed?”

“I fell in love.”

Four words, simply stated, and impossible to believe. “You can’t mean that.”

“Can’t I? It’s been a long time since I’ve loved someone, but I know what it feels like. When you turn from me, it hurts. When you think badly of me, I think badly of myself. When you do stupid, suicidal things, I want to slap you upside the head and demand to know how you can be so brilliant and so blind at the same time.” Tybalt’s expression was calm. “If that’s not love, what is it?”