The doorbell rang again. This time, the sound was followed by footsteps—May’s, from the tempo of them. I resumed my lean.
My lips were about to touch Tybalt’s when I realized the house had gone silent. May wasn’t saying anything. The doorbell had stopped ringing; I’d heard her open the door. She should at least have said hello. But she hadn’t said anything.
Tybalt met my eyes and nodded. As quietly as I could, I climbed off him, wishing my knives weren’t upstairs in my room and my sword wasn’t in the trunk of my car. Only a few minutes before, going unarmed in my own house had seemed like the most reasonable thing in the world. Now, it felt like the sort of oversight that could get me and the people I cared about killed.
The hallway ran in a straight line down the length of the house. As soon as I stepped out of the living room, I turned to get a look at the visitor who had silenced May so conclusively.
May was between me and the open door, giving me an excellent view of her pink denim jacket and the bright red steaks in her otherwise colorless brown hair. My Fetch never met a garish color combination she didn’t want to put to use. She was standing rigid, her shoulders locked into a hard line, and every inch of her radiated fear and confusion.
The smell of pennyroyal and musk drifted from the living room. Tybalt had stepped into the shadows. If I knew him as well as I thought I did, he was using the Shadow Roads as a shortcut to my bedroom, and my knives. He didn’t like leaving me undefended. He liked me being functionally defenseless even less.
“May?” I called. “Everything okay?” I started toward her, doing a quick inventory as I went. Tybalt would be back in a few seconds. In the meantime, there was an aluminum baseball bat in the umbrella stand. Sometimes blunt-force trauma is a girl’s best friend.
May didn’t reply. May didn’t move. This was bad.
Anyone who could freeze my Fetch like that either wasn’t human or wasn’t going to live to see the morning. I didn’t bother recasting my illusions as I hurried down the hall, nudging her to the side in order to face our unexpected guest. “Can I help—” I began.
The words turned to ashes in my mouth. Serene to the end, my mother tilted her head, accenting the swanlike line of her neck. Everything she did was beautiful. Every move was designed to show her to her best advantage. I loved her. I wanted to impress her. I wanted her to be proud of me.
I wanted her to go away.
She wasn’t wearing a human disguise; she didn’t care whether my neighbors saw her. There was no car on the street. I had no idea how she’d reached the house. It didn’t really matter—she was there, whether I wanted her to be or not. Amandine of Faerie, Last among the First, on my doorstep.
There’s a reason humans called the fae “the Fair Folk” back when they admitted we existed. Some of us take beauty to the kinds of extreme that can be painful to look at. My mother put most of them to shame. She stood a few inches shorter than either me or May, her figure lithesome and flawless. Time had no hold over her: she was as beautiful now as she’d been when I was a little girl. I hadn’t seen her much since then. She had been slipping away from me for a long time before I’d disappeared, and even my return hadn’t been enough to bring her back. When my mother didn’t want to be found, no one found her.
She wore a dress spun from flower petals and sweet drifts of Queen Anne’s lace, still blooming and perfuming the air around her. Her hair was a cascade of white gold tumbling to her hips, held out of her eyes by a pair of thin waterfall braids that started at her temples and ran along the crown of her head, finally meeting at the back. Her skin was so pale that I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear she hadn’t seen the sun since her disappearance. Her face was still somehow accented by a faint dusting of freckles across the bridge of her nose. They weren’t imperfections: they were a reminder that she was real, and hence proof that no one else would ever be as flawlessly constructed as she was.
Her eyes were a foggy shade of gray-blue, like mist in the morning rolling across the San Francisco Bay. They weren’t human eyes. They never could have been. And they were so much like mine that it hurt. Without those eyes, it might have been possible to pretend I was a changeling in all senses of the word: not just part-human, but someone else’s child entirely, foisted on Amandine when she failed to prevent it. Those eyes . . . there was no way I could have belonged to anyone else.
There was a soft sound behind me, accompanied by the scent of pennyroyal and musk. Tybalt was back. Tybalt was back, with my knives, which she might take as either an insult or an attack, depending on what kind of mood she was in. Amandine was Firstborn. She could hurt him. I needed to stop this.
“Hello, Mother,” I said, loudly enough for Tybalt to hear.
Amandine’s perfect lips twitched at the corners, in what might have been the beginnings of a smile.
“Hello, October,” she said. “Aren’t you going to invite me in?”
THREE
THE URGE TO SAY “no” and close the door was so strong that I had to bite my lip to keep from blurting it out. My mother and I haven’t had a good relationship since I was seven years old and chose Faerie over the mortal world—not knowing, as a changeling child who just wanted my mother to love me, that choosing the other way would have meant her killing me on the spot. Apparently, choosing to live, however accidentally, was a crime in her world.
She’d been pulling away from me ever since. Oh, she fed me, housed me, and clothed me when I was a little girl and an adolescent. My adolescence had lasted well into my twenties, since we’d been living in the Summerlands. Time runs oddly there under the best of circumstances, and its oddness tends to become concentrated in changelings, who age slowly in Faerie, or in reverse, or not at all.
I suppose I was one of the lucky ones. I’d grown up enough to run away to the mortal world, where I could try to make a life for myself. Whether it had been a good life, or the right life, was irrelevant. It had been mine, and Amandine had had no part in it. She hadn’t wanted any part in it. Once I’d run away from her, I might as well not have been her child.
But the first time someone had decided to use elf-shot to get me out of the way, I had still been mostly mortal, and fully capable of dying from the poison. The arrow had pierced my skin and I’d fallen where I stood. My heart had stopped. Technically, I had died, maybe for the first time. And Luna Torquill’s rose goblins had run to find my mother and bring her to Shadowed Hills, so she could save me. She had saved me. I could still remember the way she’d smiled and called me her darling girl, and maybe it had all been an illusion and maybe it hadn’t, but she could have let me die, and she’d chosen to come when I needed her most.