Ashes of Honor: An October Daye Novel

“May usually is.” May stepped out of the kitchen, holding out a fresh mug. “Peace offering?”


“Accepted.” I exchanged my empty mug for her full one, taking a long drink of scalding coffee before I shouted, “Quentin! Wherever you are, stop being there, and get in here!”

“That bad?” asked May.

“Perhaps worse,” said Tybalt. I raised an eyebrow in his direction. He shook his head. “I’m not being flippant, October. As I said before, I heard enough.”

“That’s good. Can I assume you’re still here because you’re willing to help with this?”

“You can.”

May looked between us. “Is this the part where I start freaking out?”

“If you think it would help,” I said. Quentin emerged from the kitchen with Spike—the household’s resident rose goblin, a sort of animate cat-shaped rosebush with an unfortunate tendency to jump on my lap without warning—riding on his shoulder. I saluted the pair of them with my coffee mug. “Great, we’re all here. Follow me.”

I led the way to the living room, where I put my mug down atop the pile of papers that obscured our coffee table and turned to face the others.

“Here’s the short form,” I said. “Etienne had a relationship with a human woman while Luna and Rayseline were missing. It ended when his duties at Shadowed Hills became too pressing. He hasn’t seen her since then. Unfortunately, what he didn’t know was that Bridget was pregnant when they broke up.”

“Etienne has a changeling?” asked Quentin, tone both amazed and horrified.

“Yeah,” I said, looking at him levelly. “Is there a problem with that?”

Quentin started to reply. Then he stopped, took a deep breath, and said, “I don’t know.”

He looked utterly ashamed of himself, which said a lot about how far he’d come since we met. Quentin started out as your average pureblood, convinced that he was innately superior to the changelings and just as convinced that there was nothing wrong with that. I’d started slapping that attitude out of him almost immediately, and it had worked, sometimes surprisingly well—for a little while, he’d even had a human girlfriend. They didn’t have a happy ending. People who play faerie bride so rarely do.

“Her name is Chelsea,” I said. “There’s nothing wrong with the fact that she exists, but there’s something very wrong with the fact that up until today, Etienne didn’t know about it.”

Tybalt nodded; he’d already heard this much. Quentin gaped at me, shame melting into surprise. It was May who spoke, exclaiming, “WHAT?!”

“He didn’t know she existed. He hasn’t been monitoring her. And her mother teaches Folklore at UC Berkeley.”

Now it was Tybalt’s turn to stare at me. He’d apparently missed that part. “He was fool enough to court a folklorist?” he asked. “Did he wish to be the one to betray Faerie’s existence to the mortals?”

“I doubt he thought about it. People usually don’t when they’re in love.” I raked a hand through my hair again, this time pressing my fingers against the base of my skull. It wouldn’t stop the night I was having from giving me a headache, but it made me feel a little better. “Chelsea’s mother knows she’s not human. We can’t change that, although we’ll probably have to deal with it before this is over.”

“Wait—you mean that’s not the problem?” asked May. “Because call me na?ve, but that sure sounds like the problem to me.”

“It’s a problem, but it’s not the main problem.” I pulled my hand out of my hair, picking up my coffee cup. “Chelsea is missing. She disappeared earlier today, in full view of her mortal friends. They said she ‘just vanished.’”

“Sounds like she figured out how to teleport,” said May.

“Or someone figured out she existed and thought she’d be a great way of getting at Etienne,” I said. “Maybe I’m being paranoid, but after the last few years, I figure I’ve earned a little paranoia.”