Ashes of Honor: An October Daye Novel

“I get that,” I said wearily. “I have two questions before I decide what happens next.”


“Ask away.” Tybalt tilted his head to the side, regarding me calmly with his bizarrely human eyes. The Tybalt I know has eyes the color of malachite, with all the deep, banded shades of green the comparison implies. This Tybalt’s eyes were simply green. I would have found them attractive on a human man. On him, they were just wrong.

“Is there really coffee?”

“I assure you, October, while I might tease about many things, I value my life too much to hang my jests on coffee when you are involved.”

“You know, a simple ‘yes’ would have sufficed.”

Even the human disguise couldn’t dull his feline grin. “Yes. There’s coffee.”

“Okay. And the second question…Rand?”

Tybalt’s grin dulled, but didn’t die. “It was my name, once. It seemed less likely to inspire human curiosity than ‘Tybalt.’”

“This is San Francisco. I wouldn’t be so sure.” I stepped past him, through the open kitchen door. The kitchen itself smelled like fresh coffee and, more faintly, the mingled scents of pennyroyal and musk. The remains of the spell Tybalt had used to cloak himself. “I didn’t expect the save. You have good timing.”

“I was listening from the moment you left.” He stepped through the door behind me, releasing his human disguise at the same time. The smell of pennyroyal and musk intensified, and my shoulders unknotted a little. Seeing Tybalt as a human was just bizarre. “Had things gone badly…”

“Then they would have gotten really bad, because you can’t knock over a police officer and snatch me away to the Court of Cats. Not with Bridget involved.” I walked over to the coffee maker, grabbing a Thermos from the counter on the way. I was going to need more coffee than I could reasonably stand here and drink. “One way or another, the mortal authorities are going to stay on this one.”

Tybalt sighed. “You say the most charming things.”

“I’m a realist.”

“Of all the labels I would think to hang on you, that has never come anywhere near the top of my list.” Tybalt picked up a plastic bag from the kitchen table, holding it up for me to see. Ham sandwiches. “I have food.”

My stomach rumbled, reminding me of the calories I hadn’t consumed before the police showed up. “Gimme,” I said. Tybalt raised an eyebrow. “Please,” I amended.

He handed me the bag.

I was midway through the first sandwich, barely tasting the ham, cheese, and odd mixture of condiments—who uses steak sauce and strawberry jam on a sandwich?—in my haste to get something into my stomach before Tybalt spoke again.

“If you can focus, would you release your illusions?” he asked. “I’d rather avoid the masks when possible.”

I swallowed the bite I’d been chewing and waved my hand through the air, snapping the thin web of magic that held my human disguise in place. It wisped away into the smell of cut grass and copper, leaving us both exposed as we really were, bloodstains and all. I kept eating, too anxious for food to stop and ask him why he’d wanted me to do that.

Besides, if he felt anything like I’d felt when I saw him in a human mask, I already knew why he’d wanted me to do that. I still wasn’t sure what I thought about this new development—half of me wanted to jump up and down and punch the air, while the other half counseled caution, reminding me of dead loves and the dangers of the world I lived in. There would be time to think about that later. I hoped.

The second sandwich was gone before my stomach stopped growling. I straightened, and realized that the spinning had finally stopped: my body was done ordering me to keep still. “Are you ready to move?” I asked.