“It’s not the worst one she’s ever had,” said Quentin, from the back seat. He was taking his exile well. It would have been difficult for him not to, considering the situation. If Mom had taken Dean, he would have been baying for blood as loudly as the rest of us, and their relationship wasn’t even that serious yet.
“Top ten,” snapped May. “You don’t know Simon like I do. You don’t remember what he did to us.”
“No, but I heard the stories, and I remember what he tried to do to Jazz when she got in his way,” said Quentin. “Sometimes the enemy of your enemy is your friend.”
“He’s not Amandine’s enemy! He’s her husband!” May twisted in her seat to glare at my squire. “This isn’t going to work.”
“The Luidaeg can’t help us, and I can’t think of anyone who’d know August better than her own father,” I said, tightening my hands on the wheel. A compact car zipped by, coming a little too close for comfort. I hit the gas harder. They couldn’t hit us if they couldn’t catch up with us. “We’re doing this.”
“I don’t like it, but I’m not trying to stop you, because you’re right,” said May. She twisted back into her original position, staring at the road ahead of us like a condemned woman. “We have to do the impossible and find a missing person who disappeared so long ago that the trail isn’t just cold, it’s fossilized. Refusing to let someone help just because they’re an asshole won’t do us any good. It won’t do Jazz and Tybalt any good, either.”
Quentin’s phone beeped. He picked it up, scanning the screen.
I glanced at the rearview mirror, watching him. “What’s the news?”
“Raj tracked Walther to his apartment and woke him up, and he’s got the countercharm. He’s taking the Shadow Roads, and he’ll meet us at Shadowed Hills.” Quentin paused before adding, “Walther says good luck.”
“We’re damn well going to need it,” I said grimly. “Is Raj still with him?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Let Walther know that we may still need him, and ask if he can head for his office. I’ll call him there if there’s something he can do.” I might have felt bad about my high-handed assumption that Walther would help, if the situation hadn’t been quite so dire—but then again, I might not have. As Walther himself has pointed out, more than once, I have a tendency to grab for whatever tools were handy when there’s a job to be done. Sometimes those tools are my friends. In my line of work, saving lives is more important than asking nicely.
Quentin nodded and resumed texting.
Walther Davies is a chemistry professor at UC Berkeley. He’s also one of the best alchemists I’ve ever known. That, combined with my freakishly precise ability to identify the magical signatures of the people around me, recently enabled him to do the impossible: he cured elf-shot. The spell that purebloods used for millennia to cast their enemies into centuries of sleep is no longer a binding sentence. Oh, elf-shot can still be used, and no doubt will be; it’s just a shorter term of slumber.
Or a quick and reasonably painless death, for changelings and mortals. Because even a cure can’t make Faerie become kind.
We were drag racing our way toward the mortal city of Pleasant Hill and the fae Duchy of Shadowed Hills for one simple reason: Amandine’s husband, my stepfather, Simon Torquill, was there. Sleeping. He had been elf-shot in the process of saving me from Evening Winterrose, also known as Eira Rosynhwyr, also known as “my mother’s oldest sister, who sort of wants me dead for reasons that I do not fully understand.”
Sometimes I wish my life came with a flow chart.
Simon was not my ally. Simon was not even my friend. Simon was the man who’d transformed me into a fish and abandoned me in the Japanese Tea Gardens to dream fourteen years of my then-mortal life away. Simon had done worse things than that over the course of his time in Evening’s service. How much worse, I didn’t know . . . but for much of that time, he’d been involved in some sort of relationship with Oleander de Merelands, an assassin and poisoner who had definitely killed Lily, the Lady of the Tea Gardens, and had probably killed King Gilad Windermere in the Mists, Arden’s father and our rightful King. Simon could have been complicit in all of that. There was no way to be sure, save for asking him.
Traditionally, once someone has been elf-shot, it’s a little difficult to have a conversation. My niece, Karen, is an oneiromancer, and could carry me into his dreams, but that wasn’t good enough. Dreams are funny things. Even lucid dreams, guided by an oneiromancer, could be more symbols and ideas than actual facts. I needed information. I needed guidance.
I needed Simon to wake up.
The parking lot at Paso Nogal Park was empty. It was also locked, with a heavy chain holding the lot’s wooden gates together. I stopped the car and glared at the chain, as if that would be enough to bust it open.
“What in the name of the root and the branch is that doing there?” I demanded.
“Parks Department,” said Quentin, unbuckling his seatbelt. “Kids from the local high school were driving up here at night to smoke and drink, so they started locking the gate again.”
“Park on the road,” said May.
“I’ve got this,” said Quentin. He got out of the car, walking to the gate, and produced a key from his pocket. It fit the lock exactly, and in a matter of seconds, we were driving through.
I took the spot nearest to the trailhead that would take us up the hill to the knowe. Quentin was standing next to the car when I got out.
“You have a key?” I asked.
“You’d have one, too, if you’d been here recently,” he said. “Etienne will probably give you one today.”
“Today” was the operative term. The sky was getting light; we had less than twenty minutes before the sun came up and all our illusions came tumbling down. The Parks Department would probably assume that one of their own had unlocked the gate, since the lock had clearly not been tampered with in any way, but they wouldn’t be nearly so accepting of a bunch of inhuman hikers found running around the place at dawn. We needed to get moving.
“Come on,” I said, and waved for May and Quentin to follow me as I turned and started walking up the trail. The gravel turned and shifted underfoot, adding gripping surfaces to what would otherwise have been a treacherously slippery climb. That was nice, while it lasted: in no time at all, we were scrabbling up the dirt hillside, grabbing at clumps of dew-slicked grass and fighting not to slide back down to the beginning, where we’d have to start all over again.