Ashes of Honor: An October Daye Novel

The empty kitchen didn’t answer.

I scowled, for lack of any more definite reaction, and followed Tybalt’s path out of the room. Somehow, it wasn’t a surprise when he wasn’t in the living room. May and Quentin were, both of them watching me approach. Quentin looked confused. May looked oddly disappointed, as though she’d been hoping for some other outcome.

“Don’t start,” I told her, before turning to Quentin. “You have everything you need?”

“Coat, cell phone, emergency cab fare, knife,” recited Quentin.

“Good. Now make yourself presentable.”

Quentin nodded, the scent of steel and heather rising as he gathered the magic to weave himself a human disguise. I did the same, pulling strands of air toward me until all I could taste was copper, and the tingling itch of false humanity lay light across my skin.

May was still watching me with disappointed eyes when I finished. I sighed. “Call me if there’s any word, okay? Walther’s trying to get us a picture of Chelsea.”

“Be careful out there.” May paused, disappointment turning rueful as she added, “Not that you will be. I just have to say it, you know?”

“I know. Come on, Quentin.” My squire followed me out of the house. I paused only to retrieve my leather jacket from the rack by the door. Chelsea needed us. We needed to move.

Our house was huge compared to the San Francisco norm, since it was never reconstructed to suit modern standards. It also had something that elevated it from “nice” to “people would kill to live here”: a covered two-car parking area at the end of a short but private driveway. The neighbor to our right had been parking there for years while the house stood empty. He’d been offering me increasingly large sums of money to use the carport since we moved in. So far, I’d been able to keep rebuffing him—although I had a strong suspicion he was behind the noise complaints someone had phoned in to the local police. As if we’d be making inappropriately loud noises at seven o’clock in the morning? We were all in bed by then. Yes, I needed the money. But I needed not to have a random human in my garage even more.

Quentin waited patiently as I performed my customary check for intruders in the back seat—fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, not in this lifetime—before unlocking the doors. “Where are we going?” he asked.

“Berkeley,” I replied. “We’re going to walk to Chelsea’s high school.”

“Do we know which one it is?”

“No. But we know where she lives. If she’s being allowed to walk alone or with friends, she must be going to school within a mile of her house.”

“I don’t go to school within a mile of my house,” Quentin said, getting into the car.

I did the same on the driver’s side. “One, you don’t go to school at all, unless you count your lessons with Etienne. And if you’re counting those, you don’t walk to Shadowed Hills. Either I drive you or we put you on BART and make you get there on your own. Two, I don’t even know where your house is, beyond ‘somewhere in Canada,’ so I’m pretty sure you’re playing by a different set of rules.”

Quentin frowned. “I used to go to school.”

I paused. For a while, Quentin had attended College Park High School in Pleasant Hill, playing human and learning about the mortal world at the same time. That stopped when Blind Michael stole Quentin’s human girlfriend and brought his masquerade to a forced end. “True,” I admitted. “And when you did, you were going to a school within a mile of the knowe.”