Ashes of Honor: An October Daye Novel

He sounded so tired and so earnest. I worried my lip between my teeth before asking, “Does this have anything to do with what you told me before?”


Tybalt blinked. Then he snorted a brief laugh, and asked, “October, in the years since your return…has anything not been in some way related to what I told you before? You handed me a hope chest in a dark alley. You took my heart as collateral, and you’ve never returned it.”

Things always get messed up when I think about them too much. So this time, I didn’t let myself think. I took a few quick steps down, closing the distance between us, and planted a kiss on Tybalt’s mouth. His eyes widened in surprise. Just as he was recovering enough to kiss me back, I stepped away, and said, “I’m going to get changed. Go make sure May and Jazz go off with Danny, okay? I’ll be down as soon as I can.”

“Yes,” said Tybalt, sounding slightly dazed—and then he turned and went.

It wasn’t until I was in my room with the door securely closed between us that I realized that this was the first time I had kissed him. He’d kissed me, sometimes for show, sometimes because he truly meant it…but I’d never kissed him before. Things between us really were changing. With that thought weighing heavy on my mind, and the fate of Faerie potentially hanging in the balance, I went to get changed.





TWENTY


IT TOOK ME LESS THAN TEN MINUTES to strip off my shredded, bloody clothes and replace them with a clean black tank top and jeans. I wiped the worst of the blood off my face and hands with some wet wipes I’d snagged from KFC the last time I took Quentin out for junk food. By the time I was done, I looked, if not respectable, at least marginally less like I’d just survived one of May’s trashy horror movies. For a finishing touch, I brushed most of the blood out of my hair and skimmed it into a ponytail. Any Daoine Sidhe who got within ten feet of me would smell it, but most other people would assume it was a weird dye job and move on.

At some point during the process, I ate the first Pop-Tart and most of the second. It says something about how low my blood sugar was that I neither noticed nor cared what flavor they were. I shrugged my leather jacket back on, stuck the last piece of Pop-Tart in my mouth, and opened the bedroom door.

Tybalt was downstairs, leaning against the wall and looking at Cagney and Lacey, who were sitting by his feet with oddly dejected looks on their furry faces. All three of them turned toward me as I stopped on the bottom step.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Your resident felines were explaining how they could allow Samson to burst in without sounding the alarm,” said Tybalt. Catching my expression, he added, “There was nothing they could have done. I am reassuring them, not scolding them.”

“You know, every time I think my life can’t get weirder, it ups the ante.” I started walking again, heading for the kitchen. Tybalt paced me. I gave him a sidelong look. “Did May and Jazz leave?”

“Yes. Danny said hello and that he would have stuck around to talk to you himself, but he was sure you already had enough to worry about, and besides, the Barghests were almost certainly working on eating the backseat.” Tybalt’s pupils narrowed to amused slits as he spoke. “He seemed oddly…unsurprised…to hear that you were unable to greet him because you were upstairs changing into something less bloodstained.”

“I have my friends well-trained.” I opened the fridge, beginning to gather the makings for a ham sandwich. “Let me just get a little more food in me, and then we can get back to Tamed Lightning.” I paused. “Do you want a sandwich? You haven’t eaten anything all day, and you lost a lot of blood, too.”

“I would love a sandwich,” said Tybalt, with enough gravity to make it sound like a formal proclamation. Resolved: that we will have ham and cheese sandwiches.

“Just get the bread out of the cupboard, and I—”