One day in midsummer, Roiben took on a mortal guise and went to Moon in a Cup in the hope that Kaye’s shift might soon be over. He thought they would walk through Riverside Park and look at the reflection of lights on the water. Or eat nuts rimed with salt. Or whatsoever else she wanted. He needed those memories of her to sustain him when he returned to his own kingdoms.
But walking in just after sunset, black coat flapping around his ankles like crow wings, he could see she wasn’t there. The coffee shop was full of mortals, more full than usual. Behind the counter, Corny ran back and forth, banging mugs in a cloud of espresso steam.
The coffee shop had been furnished with things Kaye and her human friends had found by the side of the road or at cheap tag sales. Lots of ratty paint-stained little wooden tables that she’d decoupaged with post cards, sheets of music, and pages from old encyclopedias. Lots of chairs painted gold. The walls were hung with amateur paintings, framed in scrap metal.
Even the cups were mismatched. Delicate bone china cups sitting on saucers beside mugs with slogans for businesses long closed.
As Roiben walked to the back of the shop, several of the patrons gave him appraising glances. In the reflection of the shining copper coffee urn, he looked as he always did. His white hair was pulled back. His eyes were the color of the silver spoons.
He wondered if he should alter his guise.
“Where is she?” Roiben asked.
“Imperious, aren’t we?” Corny shouted over the roar of the machine. “Well, whatever magical booty call the king of the faeries is after will have to wait. I have no idea where Kaye’s at. All I know is that she should be here.”
Roiben tried to control the sharp flush of annoyance that made his hand twitch for a blade.
“I’m sorry,” Corny said, rubbing his hand over his face. “That was uncool. Val said she’d come help but she’s not here and Luis, who’s supposed to be my boyfriend, is off with some study partner for hours and hours and my scheme to get some more business has backfired in a big way. And then you come in here and you’re so—you’re always so—”
“May I get myself some nettle tea to bide with?” Roiben interrupted, frowning. “I know where you keep it. I will attend to myself.”
“You can’t,” Corny said, waving him around the back of the bar. “I mean, you could have, but they drank it all, and I don’t know how to make more.”
Behind the bar was a mess. Roiben bent to pick up the cracked remains of a cup and frowned. “What’s going on here? Since when have mortals formed a taste for—”
“Excuse me,” said a girl with long wine-colored hair. “Are you human?”
He froze, suddenly conscious of the jagged edges of what he held. “I’m supposing I misheard you.” He set the porcelain fragment down discreetly on the counter.
“You’re one of them, aren’t you? I knew it!” A huge smile split her face and she looked back eagerly toward a table of grinning humans. “Can you grant wishes?”
Roiben looked at Corny, busy frothing milk. “Cornelius,” he said softly. “Um.”
Corny glanced over. “If, for once, you just act like my best friend’s boyfriend and take her order, I promise to be nicer to you. Nice to you, even.”
Roiben touched a key on the register. “I’ll do it if you promise to be more afraid of me.”
“I envy what I fear and hate what I envy,” Corny said, slamming an iced latte on the counter. “More afraid equals more of a jerk.”
“What is it you’d like?” Roiben asked the girl. “Other than wishes.”
“Soy mocha,” said the girl. “But please, there’s so much I want to know.”
Roiben squinted at the scrawled menu on the chalkboard. “Payment, if you please.”
She counted out some bills and he took them, looking helplessly at the register. He hit a few buttons and, to his relief, the drawer opened. He gave her careful change.
“Please tell me that you didn’t pay her in leaves and acorns,” Corny said. “Kaye keeps doing that and it’s really not helping business.”
“I knew it!” said the girl.
“I conjured nothing,” Roiben said. “And you are not helping.”
Corny squirted out Hershey’s syrup into the bottom of a mug. “Yeah, remember what I said about my idea to get Moon in a Cup more business?”
Roiben crossed his arms over his chest. “I do.”
“I might have posted online that this place has a high incidence of supernatural visitation.”
Roiben narrowed his eyes and tilted his head. “You claimed Kaye’s coffee shop is haunted?”
The girl picked up her mocha from the counter. “He said that faeries came here. Real faeries. The kind that dance in mushroom circles and—”
“Oh, did he?” Roiben asked, a snarl in his voice. “That’s what he said?”
Corny didn’t want to be jealous of the rest of them.
He didn’t want to spend his time wondering how long it would be before Luis got tired of him. Luis, who was going places while Corny helped Kaye open Moon in a Cup because he had literally nothing else to do.
Kaye ran the place like a pixie. It had odd hours—sometimes opening at four in the afternoon, sometimes opening at dawn.
The service was equally strange when Kaye was behind the counter. A cappuccino would be ordered and chai tea would be delivered. People’s change often turned to leaves and ash.
Slowly—for survival—things evolved so that Moon in a Cup belonged to all of them. Val and Ruth worked when they weren’t at school. Corny set up the wireless.
And Luis, who lived in the dorms of NYU and was busy with a double major and flirting with a future in medicine, would come and type out his long papers at one of the tables to make the place look more full.
But it wouldn’t survive like that for long, Corny knew.
Everything was too precarious. Everyone else had too much going on. So he made the decision to run the ad. And for a week straight, the coffee shop had been full of people. They could barely make the drinks in time. So none of the others could be mad at him. They had no right to be mad at him.
He had to stay busy. It was the only way to keep the horrible gnawing dread at bay.
Roiben listened to Corny stammer through an explanation of what he had done and why without really hearing it.
Then he made himself tea and sat at one of the salvaged tables that decorated the coffeehouse. Its surface was ringed with marks from the tens of dozens of watery cups that had rested there and any weight made the whole thing rock alarmingly. He took a sip of the foxglove tea—brewed by his own hand to be strong and bitter.
Val had come in during Corny’s explanation, blanched, and started sweeping the floor. Now she and Corny whispered together behind the counter, Val shaking her head.
Faeries had, for many years, relied on discretion. Roiben knew the only thing keeping Corny from torment at the hands of the faeries who must have seen his markedly indiscreet advertisement was the implied protection of the King of the Unseelie Court. Roiben knew it and resented it.
It would be an easy thing to withdraw his protection. Easy and perhaps just.