Rosemary and Rue

How many of you is he fucking? I wondered, and was immediately ashamed. Front room duty was always the hardest. You had to stay alert without seeming to pay attention, and no matter how long you had to sit there, you didn’t dare fall asleep. I hated it. You were a visible challenge to anyone who felt like calling Devin out for some real or imagined sin, but you couldn’t say no and you couldn’t leave once you’d been told to stay.

These new kids could so easily have been the ones I remembered, only changed by updates in teenage fashion. They were all changelings, and not one of them was wearing even the most basic human disguise. There was a calculated reason for that; seeing them as soon as you entered told you that when you were Home, you came as you were. It made the edges of my own illusion itch, like a coat that didn’t quite fit. I wouldn’t take it off yet, though. Not until I’d seen Devin.

Four kids were in view, which meant there were at least three more I hadn’t spotted. A boy and girl who looked too alike to be anything but siblings sat near the jukebox, their sharply pointed ears and glossy gold hair marking them as descendants of the Tylwyth Teg. A half-Candela girl with pale green eyes leaned against the wall by the door, juggling globes of dim light, and a boy with hedgehog spines instead of hair squatted in the corner, a clove cigarette dangling from his lips.

All four had turned to watch as I entered, an inquiring band of Lost Children studying the grown-up who had wandered into their territory. Maybe I used to be one of them, but they didn’t know me. For once, this proof of my escape didn’t make me feel any better.

“Nice dress,” said the Candela. The room erupted in snickering. I stayed where I was, waiting for it to die down.

Knowing Devin’s kids, they were all armed and ready to jump me at the first sign of trouble. That was fine. I hadn’t come to Home looking for a fight, but starting a small one would get me to Devin faster. Protocol said I should be polite: introduce myself, make nice, put up with whatever crap they handed me, and ask if I could see Devin before the end of the night. Maybe they’d even let me, if I was nice enough. But I was tired and Evening was dead, and I didn’t have the time or the patience to play at pleasantries.

The brother of the paired changelings looked like he was the oldest one in the room, if only by a year or two. That made him the point man. I walked toward the pair, and they looked back at me, expressions not betraying any interest in who I was or what I was doing there. Never be the first one to show that you care; that kind of weakness can get you killed.

“I need to see Devin,” I said. Now that I was closer, I could see that their eyes were the glaring neon green of pippin apples. Faerie is anything but stinting in the colors it uses.

The brother blinked, obviously expecting something subtler. Good. If he was off balance, he was more likely to give me what I wanted. Unfortunately, it was his sister who spoke, flicking her bangs out of her eyes as she announced, “That’s not gonna happen.”

Her accent was a mixture of inner-city Spanish and downtown punk so thick it verged on parody and a perfect complement to her overdone makeup, rat’s nest hair, and seemingly permanent sneer. She could have been pretty, if she’d been willing to gain twenty pounds and stop trying so hard, but as it was, she looked like a cross between Twiggy’s younger sister and every downtown whore I’d ever seen. There was no way she was more than fourteen.

Of course, that was looking at her from a mortal perspective. I looked sixteen when I came to Devin, and I always did my best to look even younger when I had to do bar duty. It helped if they underestimated you. So she might have been older than she looked . . . but I saw her as fourteen, and the way she held herself told me I was pretty close to right.

“Sorry, lady, but you can go home now,” she continued. “He’s busy.”