Ashes of Honor: An October Daye Novel

“You and me both,” I said and knocked again.

This time, we heard movement on the other side of the door: feet, shuffling down the hall. I lowered my hand, and the door swung open, revealing a sleepy-eyed, apparently human woman with tousled brown hair, tan skin, and freckles warring with the ghosts of teenage acne scars for ownership of her cheeks. She was wearing a blue bathrobe over a floor-length white cotton nightgown. She looked like she couldn’t be more than a few days over seventeen.

I knew better. “Hello, Luidaeg,” I said. “Can we come in?”

The Luidaeg blinked. “Toby?” She glanced to my companion. “Quentin? What are you two doing here? You didn’t call.”

“We were going to, but I had car trouble, and it sort of slipped my mind. It’s why we didn’t bring donuts. Please can we come in? There’s something we need to talk about, and I’d rather not do it standing on the porch.”

The Luidaeg looked at us again and then looked back over her shoulder at the hallway. The door blocked whatever she was looking at. Finally, she sighed. “All right, you can come in—but don’t you dare say a word about the condition of my apartment. I didn’t have time to get ready for company.”

Considering that the Luidaeg’s apartment normally looked like a cross between a compost heap and the dumpsters behind a Goodwill, that was a terrifying statement. “Sure,” I said. “We won’t say anything.”

The Luidaeg scowled at me. “Yeah, you will,” she said. Then she turned and retreated into the hall, leaving the door open so we could follow her inside.

I stepped over the threshold and stopped. Quentin froze beside me, the two of us staring wide-eyed at something even more unexpected than a monster sleeping on top of my car.

The hall was clean.

The carpet—visible for the first time in the years that I’d been visiting—was the color of fresh kelp. The walls were cream-colored, decorated with a few judiciously placed fishnets. They filled the air with the pleasant scent of fresh seawater, salty without being briny.

“Toby…”

“Yeah, kid. I see it, too.”

The Luidaeg stopped at the end of the hall, turning back to scowl at us. “Are you going to come inside or not?”

Quentin and I exchanged a look before stepping into the hall. The door swung shut behind us, and we walked down the hall to the pristine living room. The couches—which had always been splotched with patches of muck and mold before—were clearly antique but well cared-for. There were even a few pictures on the walls, all images of oceans. I recognized one of them as having been taken at Half Moon Bay, near the home of Connor’s family. The Luidaeg has an…interesting…relationship with the Selkie families. They owe her their existence. She’s planning to call in that debt soon, and I’m pretty sure it’s going to involve me.

“What the hell happened here?” I asked, looking toward the Luidaeg.

“Like I said, the place isn’t ready for company. If you’d called first…”

The Daoine Sidhe are illusionists. Maybe that’s why Quentin was the one to say, indignantly, “You mean you’ve been pretending this place was a pigsty all this time?”

“I never said ‘this place is a pigsty,’ did I?” asked the Luidaeg. “I never lied to you. I’ve never lied to either of you. I just let you think what you wanted to think. If you’d ever asked…”