After which dawn? The human world and the Summerlands don’t always align perfectly where time is concerned, and deeper Faerie is even worse. It could have been days since we’d started down the Babylon Road. Our time could already be up, and we didn’t have August.
What we did have was a sobbing, shaking, seriously malnourished member of the SFPD. That would have been a problem no matter what the circumstances. People notice that sort of thing. Unfortunately for us, Officer Thornton had been working out of the Valencia Street station when he’d gone missing, which meant we had a sobbing, shaking, malnourished cop less than three blocks from a whole building full of people who would be very interested to hear what had happened to him.
I was trying to figure out our next move when the impossible happened: the candle went out.
That should have seemed like a small thing—candles go out all the time—but it wasn’t. This was a Babylon candle, designed to keep us on the Babylon Road, and it shouldn’t have gone out unless it had been dropped, or we had reached our destination. I looked wildly around, almost expecting August to step out of a mural. No such luck. No one else was here, not even a representative sample of the city’s homeless population.
“Well, crap,” I muttered, and handed the candle to Quentin before digging my phone out of my pocket.
“What’s going on?” asked Simon.
“Toby’s calling the Luidaeg because her candle went out,” said Quentin.
“Not quite,” I said, and raised the phone to my ear. It was ringing. That was a good sign; following the Babylon Road hadn’t drained my battery.
“Hello?” rumbled a voice like a mountain coming to life.
“Danny, it’s October,” I said. “I’m in an alley at Valencia and I think 17th. I have Quentin, Simon Torquill, and a traumatized mortal with me. Can you come pick us up?”
There was a pause while Danny absorbed all this. I stood silent and perfectly still, hoping that I hadn’t finally discovered the place where Danny’s amiable goodwill ran out.
I did a favor for Danny’s sister a long time ago, before the whole thing with the pond and the fourteen missing years of my life. He’s been trying to repay me ever since, despite my endless insistence that he doesn’t owe me anything. I try not to lean on him too heavily, but I also try never to forget that he’s there, because of all the allies I’ve made since my return, he was among the first, and he’s always been among the most dependable.
“I’m almost offended that you felt like you had to ask,” he said finally. “Your human, they going to be a problem?”
“Just spin a quick deflection over the cab, and I’ll keep him quiet,” I assured him. Officer Thornton was still clinging to me and crying. He might cause a scene if he realized we were back in the human world—but this was the best possible time to keep him from realizing that. There was no one else around. “Hurry.”
“I’ll break some laws,” said Danny, and hung up.
When I lowered my own phone, both Simon and Quentin were watching me, the first with wide-eyed dismay, the second with understanding. Naturally, it was Simon who spoke.
“We’re taking him with us?” he demanded.
“Yeah, we are,” I said, putting my arms protectively around Officer Thornton. He was a big man, even emaciated as he was: I felt like I was trying to use myself to conceal a wall, instead of the other way around. “It’s our fault he was there, and what happens if we give him back to his people in this condition? He could blow the whole ‘keeping Faerie secret’ routine just by opening his mouth.”
That wasn’t going to happen. I was raised to fear the human world becoming aware of Faerie’s existence, and sometimes the habits of paranoia were impossible to break. Sometimes I flinched away from people, even knowing that they were more likely to look at my ears and think “Star Trek fanatic” than “actual proof of inhuman intelligence.” But when I was being rational, I knew the former was infinitely more likely. If we dropped Officer Thornton on the doorstep of the SFPD right now, in his current condition, he wouldn’t betray the existence of Faerie. They’d blame a human cult, or a terror cell, or both.
And my name would be smack dab in the middle of it all, because I was the person he’d been investigating when he disappeared, and there was no possible way he wouldn’t name me when he started describing his rescue. They might dismiss his stories of magic and beautiful people with pointy ears as the ravings of a madman, but me? They knew I existed.
There was no way I could have left Officer Thornton behind a second time, not and live with myself afterward, but I wasn’t going to let him do what so many others had tried and failed to do. I wasn’t going to let him take away my mortal life. If the SFPD decided I was a person of interest in his kidnapping and subsequent return, that was exactly what would happen. Fae don’t do well in human prisons. Too much iron, not enough opportunity to hide.
Quentin’s don’t-look-here had dissolved somewhere along the Babylon Road. I grabbed a handful of shadows from the air, bearing down as hard as I could as I tried to hide us. The spell was slippery, trying to wiggle through my fingers and disappear, until a ribbon of smoke and spiced oranges wriggled past, not close enough to count as cast on me, but close enough for me to snatch.
The rot is fading, I thought, and wove Simon’s magic into my own, casting the net of my illusion over the four of us. It wasn’t quite a don’t-look-here; those take more finesse than I was currently capable of dredging out of myself. I was exhausted. I was done. Instead, this was a simple overlay, showing anyone who looked the unobstructed alley. As long as no one tried to walk through us, we’d be fine.
Officer Thornton wasn’t crying anymore. He was just slumped against me, barely moving. I resisted the urge to check his pulse. If he needed a hospital, I would feel compelled to take him to one, and that would end poorly for all of us.
“Quentin,” I said. “What day is it?”
My squire blinked at me, seemingly baffled, before his eyes widened in understanding and he pulled out his phone. It started to chirp and vibrate almost immediately.
“I guess going to Annwn put me in airplane mode,” he said. “I have like, three dozen texts from Dean, and he isn’t usually—oh.” He paled. “It’s been three days.”
“Not as bad as it could have been,” I said.
Quentin didn’t look like he believed me. It must have been nice, still being young enough to see losing three days as a bad thing. As long as it was less than a year, I’d take it.
“Three days gone leaves us with four days to find my daughter,” said Simon. “We can’t stand here guarding your misplaced mortal all day.”
“We won’t have to,” I said. “Danny’s on his way. He’s going to take Officer Thornton to the Luidaeg.”