She covered her mouth and giggled. That was what I loved about Lochlyn. Most people would be grossed out, but not my roommate. She found a severed vamp hand amusing. Not for the first time, I considered whether she might be slightly insane. I didn’t really care if she was. We meshed, and that was an extremely rare thing for me. We’d met when I was chasing down a vampire mark in the Nashville, Tennessee, bar scene. At the time, she was trying to get a record deal. She’d used her stage skills to stall my mark, ultimately helping me catch the young vamp woman. When I learned Lochlyn had recently lost her lease and was living out of her car, on a rare impulse I invited her to crash with me a while in Boise until she’d saved enough to return to Nashville. Not long after, we were looking for a two-bedroom place and became permanent roommates.
“What are you going to do with it?” she asked.
“Dehydrate it and wear it as a necklace.”
She snorted. “Please, please do that. And then let me borrow it.” Unfolding her long, slim legs, she rose. “C’mon, the bath is just about ready.”
She stood at my end of the sofa and held out both hands.
I painfully sat up and waved her away. “I’m okay.”
“Bullshit.” She grasped my hands and leaned back, straining to pull me to my feet.
Lochlyn was taller than me, but whereas she was all lithe ethereal legginess, I was solid muscle and outweighed her by at least twenty-five pounds. After she got me upright, she grabbed her phone and went to get mine out of my scabbard. I trudged into the bathroom, and she waited outside the door until I’d undressed, lowered myself into the tub, and pulled the shower curtain across before coming in and sitting on the toilet. Her hand appeared, holding my phone, which she set on the edge of the bathtub.
I let out a long groan as I sank up to my chin in the lukewarm water. My skin tingled with a prickling, electric sensation in the places where I’d used rock armor in the past couple of days. The feeling was strong enough to make me want to claw at it, but I clenched my fists and waited for it to pass.
Lochlyn snapped her gum, blowing bubbles and popping them loudly. Her phone was blipping and vibrating with messages and notifications. She was as social as I was solitary. It was rare to come home and find her as I had, alone and reading quietly. I suspected she might have been waiting for me, since we hadn’t crossed paths in a few days.
“So, what happened with the vamp?” she asked. “Start at the beginning.”
I told her about the visit to Morven. I started to recount the wrestle with the wraith, but she cut me off by whipping the curtain aside several inches to stare at me.
“A fricking wraith?” she asked, her cat-eyes huge and tense with alarm.
“Yeah. It was actually my second run-in with it. Earlier, it tried to kill me in the netherwhere.”
“Petra. This vamp’s so-called Fae companion has gone off the rails, commanding a wraith to murder you. You need to tell someone.”
“Who? The Faerie cops?” I asked sarcastically. There were no police in Faerie.
“Oh, I don’t know, Oberon? The High Court?” She shot back. She gave me a pointed side-eye and then let the curtain fall back into place.
She was right—I probably should have gone to the High Court and submitted my accusation to Oberon—but I really didn’t want to deal with it. I’d killed the wraith, after all. It wasn’t a problem anymore. Bryna needed to answer for sending it to kill me, sure, but the approach Lochlyn was suggesting would involve getting mixed up in court protocol and inter-kingdom drama. I preferred to deal with the offender directly.
“We’re putting a pin in this Bryna business,” Lochlyn said. “Now, tell me about how the vamp lost his hand.”
I raised an arm out of the water and waved it around dismissively. “Eh, fangs, sword, blah, blah. I have something more interesting to tell you.”
She snorted a laugh. “Okay?”
“I’m going with Maxen into the Duergar kingdom tomorrow to jail break my—” I cut off. My father had said to keep the secret, but I told Lochlyn everything. She was my only confidant in the world, loyal to a fault, and I knew I could trust her.
“Jail break your . . .” she prompted.
“My changeling twin sister from King Periclase’s clutches.”
There was a clatter that sounded like her phone hitting the tiled floor.
“You . . . your . . . what? You waited until NOW TO TELL ME THIS?” she thundered.
I was pretty sure she’d jumped to her feet and was trying to pace around the small bathroom.
“Uh, sorry,” I said. “I was getting to it, I swear.”
“You have a sister? A twin sister? A changeling twin sister?”
“Apparently,” I said.
I picked up my phone and flipped to the picture of Nicole that Oliver had given me. I shoved the phone around the side of the curtain so Lochlyn could see. She snatched the device from me.
I let my arm sink back into the salt water. “We’re not identical, obviously.”
“I’m going,” she said.
“Huh?”
“I’m going to the Duergar palace with you. This is huge, Petra. You need moral support.”
I smiled. I didn’t really need moral support, but I appreciated her sentiment, and I wasn’t at all surprised at her insistence. “I don’t think Maxen will—”
“Aw, you can persuade him,” she cut in. “Flirt a little. Make him think you want to clank rocks or whatever you New Gargs do when you have sex.”
I burst out laughing. It kind of hurt because it contracted muscles that weren’t really in the mood to do any work yet. But at the same time, it felt good to laugh.
“Clank rocks?” I asked, laughing harder.
“Whatever! That’s not the important point, here, Petra. You’re going after your sister. I want to be there to help if I can, and that’s all there is to it. You’ll just have to figure it out with Maxen. When do we leave for Faerie?” she asked, all business.
“I’m supposed to meet Maxen at the fortress at noon. I guess we have to do a bunch of nonsense to get ready, because we’re not actually slated to arrive at the Duergar palace until evening. Wait, don’t you need to work tomorrow night?”
“Uh, no.”
“Lochlyn?” I drew out her name in a low voice.
She sighed dramatically. “I may have . . .” She trailed off into mumbles.
“May have what?”
“Gotten fired.”
I groaned. “For the love of Oberon, what did you do?”
Remember how I said Lochlyn could scream like the half-banshee she was? Well, there was something about the cat-banshee combo that gave her a voice that was downright legendary. Think Fae skinny-model blond with the pipes of Etta James. Lochlyn’s voice had a rich, soulful, throwback quality that no one with her looks deserved. She’d recently scored a regular gig singing on a rotation in a very upscale chain of steakhouses sprinkled around the Pacific Northwest and northern California. She could pull off the geographical spread and cut the cost of travel by using the Faerie doorways to get to each location. Her agent, Rodney, had gone to great pains to set it up for her, and it was the highest paying gig she’d ever had. After only a few months, she’d even started chiseling away at her insane amount of credit card debt.
“I, um, may have missed my set,” she said. “Three nights in a row.”
“Lochlyn!” I sounded like a disapproving mother scolding her child for getting in trouble at school, but I couldn’t help it. I’d hoped she’d finally started to leave some of her flighty ways behind. She had an amazing talent that deserved recognition.
“I know,” she said, sounding genuinely miserable.