One Salt Sea: An October Daye Novel

“Right.” I put the sour cream and one of the mugs in front of the Luidaeg, indicating the salt shaker with a wave of my hand, and turned to start fixing my own coffee. “So why are you here? You haven’t exactly been social lately.” That was putting it mildly. I’d seen the Luidaeg exactly once since Lily got sick, when I went to her and demanded to know what I really was. She’d put a name to my mother’s bloodline—Dóchas Sidhe—and then she’d kicked me out.

She wasn’t there when I was pardoned. She didn’t answer her phone, and when I went looking for her apartment, I couldn’t find it. Now she was in my kitchen, and maybe I’m paranoid, but I didn’t trust the situation one bit.

“Getting down to business already?” She poured salt into her coffee. “Are you going to ask how I’ve been?”

“Why should I?” I finished sugaring my own coffee and sat down in front of her. “It’s not like you’ve been terribly concerned with my well-being since Mom played with my genetic code.”

“So you’re being sulky, is that it?” The Luidaeg shook her head. “You didn’t need me, Toby. There was nothing I could have done that you weren’t already doing. I knew Sylvester would take care of you.”

“That makes it okay for you to just disappear?”

“You have no idea what I’ve been doing since you last saw me.”

“Should I care?” I realized the answer was probably “yes” as soon as the words left my mouth. They don’t come much bigger or badder than the Luidaeg. If she’d been too busy to deal with me, it wasn’t because she’d been vacationing at Disney World.

“About something nasty enough to keep me distracted? Yes, October, you should care, if only because you don’t like people breaking your toys.” The Luidaeg touched the surface of her coffee with the tip of one finger, watching the ripples spread through the liquid. “You owe me.”

I wasn’t expecting that. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting . . . but that wasn’t it. “What?”

“You owe me.” She raised her head. “I showed you the way to my brother’s lands, twice; I broke his Ride for you, and I helped you kill him, if only by getting you there. I did it because you asked, but I don’t work free. I don’t even work cheap. I told you that. You said you didn’t care.” The color was draining from her eyes, leaving them as pale and unforgiving as sea foam. “There are debts between us, October, daughter of Amandine, and it’s time for you to start paying your bill.”

I stiffened. “We were never friends, were we? You were just protecting your investment.”

“This isn’t the time. Believe me, I wish I could sit here and argue about your deluded ideals of friendship, but I can’t. The hour is far too late.” She picked up her coffee. “I’m sorry I haven’t been here. I had things to take care of that were a little more important than a few problems I knew you could handle without me.”

I stared at her. A few problems? Lily died. So did more than a dozen Cait Sidhe. I nearly died, and my survival meant giving up everything I’d believed I was. Unable to stop myself, I demanded, “What the fuck could you have been doing that was more important than being here?”

There was something satisfying about using human profanity on someone as inhuman as the Luidaeg—even if she wasn’t above using human profanity herself, from time to time. My brief flare of satisfaction died when she implacably answered, “I’ve been trying to prevent a war.”

It took a moment to find my voice again. Half-stammering, I asked, “Prevent a war? What war?”

Fae society divides itself along feudal lines—kings and queens, dukes and duchesses and knights and ladies and all the other things mortals romanticize and call “chivalry”—but we don’t go to war without a reason. As far as I knew, no one was currently invading anyone else. Even Dreamer’s Glass, with its paranoid, expansionistic Duchess, was quiet; they were too busy waiting for Tamed Lightning to explode to bother harassing the rest of us. There was always the possibility one of the other Kingdoms had decided to invade, but raising an army to threaten a throne is a tricky business that requires time, troops, and a lot of resources. We couldn’t have missed movement on that sort of scale.

“How much do you know about the Undersea?”

“What, we’re about to be attacked by mermaids?”

The Luidaeg looked at me flatly.