Rosemary and Rue

If I couldn’t trust the Queen, and I couldn’t turn to Sylvester, there was really only one place left that I could go. Devin. Devin, and Home.

Lips thinned with new resolve, I pulled out of the alley, heading away from the water and into the part of the city that smart people do their best to avoid after the sun goes down. I try to be smart when I can, and careful when I can’t, but at the moment, neither of those was going to work for me, because I was doing something I’d sworn I’d never do. Oberon help me, I was going Home.

A lot of changelings have fled the Summerlands over the centuries, building an entire society on the border between Faerie and the mortal world. The purebloods know—of course they do—but they don’t know what to do with their precious half-blood children when they turn into angry adults, and so they’ve never done anything to stop it. It’s a vicious, cutthroat place, where the strong feed on the weak, and it’s where changeling runaways always seem to end up.

I was twenty-five when I ran away from my mother’s household. I could barely pass for a young sixteen. I starved in alleyways, fled from Kelpies, and ran from the human police, and was on the verge of giving up and going back when I found what looked like an answer. Devin.

He took me in, fed me, and said I’d never have to go back there if I didn’t want to. I believed him. Maeve help me, I believed him. Even when I realized what he was doing—what the “little favors” and the increasingly bigger assignments would lead up to, even when he came to my room at night and said I was beautiful, that my eyes were just like my mother’s—I still believed him. He was all I had. I knew I couldn’t trust him, that he’d use me, and that he’d break me if I let him. I also knew he wouldn’t turn me away, because his place was Home, and Home was where everyone stopped. Home was where they didn’t care what color your eyes were, or that you cried when the sun came up, or that your hair was brown like your father’s when the Daoine Sidhe are supposed to be brightly colored and fair. Home was willing to have me, and I knew I could earn myself a life there, if I was fast, clever, and heartless. I could earn my own way.

If Devin had just wanted me for my body, he would have used me up and thrown me away, and no one would have been able to stop him. I’ve seen changelings better than me get destroyed by the border world. Mortal drugs don’t have anything on their fae equivalents, and Faerie offers a lot of ways for the innocent to get themselves killed. I was lucky; Devin wanted me for the cachet of having me. My mother wasn’t nobility, but she was a celebrity of sorts, the strongest blood-worker in the Kingdom, a friend to Dukes and more. No one ever thought she would bear a changeling. And Devin was the one who took me away from her.

I was his lover and his pet and his favorite toy, and he let me have my temperamental little ways, because it was all paid for when he got to walk into a pureblood party he’d bartered an invitation to attend with me on his arm. He gave me what I needed to survive on the outskirts of the mortal world; a birth certificate, lessons in mortal manners, a place to stay. I paid my keep with the shame I let him bring to the people who loved me, and I tried to tell myself it was worth it.

Maybe I was addicted to him; to the way he looked at me, and the way he touched me, and the way he made me feel like I was something more than just another half-breed. He hurt me, but everything I knew told me I deserved it. I never told him no. I never wanted to. Everything I let him do, everything I did, was of my own free will.