Ashes of Honor: An October Daye Novel

880 between Berkeley and Fremont is always a mess. Most people change lanes frequently, trying to win those few extra seconds. All of them were behaving normally…except for the neutral-looking white sedan following us at the exact recommended legal distance. He’d been there long enough that he should have passed me, or at least changed lanes when he realized I was never going to speed up. Instead, he was just tooling along down the road, following at an unvarying distance.

“I don’t know.” Quentin looked at the rearview mirror rather than twisting in his seat. I was proud of him in that moment. There was a time when he would have turned his whole body around, telling our tail—if it was a tail—that we suspected we were being followed. “Want me to cast a don’t-look-here on the car?”

“Too risky. If he is following us, he’s going to notice us vanishing, and we don’t know if he’s human or not. Do you think you can manage a hide-and-seek?” Hide-and-seek spells are what come after the don’t-look-here in the arsenal of magic aimed at hiding in plain sight. They’re a bitch to cast, but when they work, they’re almost impossible to notice.

I can cast hide-and-seek spells if I have to, but they take a lot out of me, and they’re not the sort of magic you should attempt while driving. Quentin, on the other hand, is Daoine Sidhe. The spell would be easier for him, and there wasn’t the additional risk of him losing control of the car. With a hide-and-seek, anyone who was looking at the car would continue to see it…right up until they lost sight of us for some reason. It didn’t matter if they looked away or we went around a curve, the end result would be the same: we’d vanish, and we wouldn’t be visible to them again until the spell was broken. It wasn’t a perfect solution, but if we were actually being followed, it was better than leading our pursuer straight to Tamed Lightning.

Quentin closed his eyes, the smell of heather and steel gathering around him as he ducked his head. He sang six bars from the song we’d been listening to earlier—the one about the man and the boat—and the magic burst around us, leaving the car smelling like a Bath and Body Works air freshener. I glanced his way and decided that was one comparison I wouldn’t make out loud. He wasn’t in a position to appreciate it.

“Now what?” he asked, slumping in his seat.

The sedan was maintaining the exact same following distance. “We stop for coffee,” I said, and shifted over a lane. The sedan did the same thing. We were definitely being followed.

Not for long. The exit to downtown San Leandro involved going around a wide curve, and we were blocked from view several times before we reached the surface street. I promptly pulled off to the side, twisting around to see the other driver’s reaction to our disappearance.

He hit the gas as soon as he saw that we were “gone,” accelerating toward the street up ahead. He must have thought he could catch up with us. I watched intently as he blew by. For one second, I had a clear view of his face. I froze.

It was Officer Thornton from the SFPD.

“What the fuck is he doing here?” I whispered.

“Toby?”

I shook my head, looking back to Quentin. “That guy was one of the officers on duty when I got picked up the other night.”

Quentin frowned. “Why would he be following us now? And to Fremont?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea. But I do know one thing.” I started the car again. “I really, really need a cup of coffee.”