“I might have been willing to make the attempt, once,” he said uncomfortably. “Please, can we untie her?”
“Not quite sure that’s the term for taking off this much tape, and no,” I said. “Get her out of the trunk. We need to deliver her to the Luidaeg.”
August screamed. August shouted. August swore. She didn’t have a great grasp of modern profanity yet, but she knew all the traditional words, and she wasn’t afraid to mix and match them as necessary to suit her needs. Since apparently what she needed was to insult everything about the three of us, she was pretty well-equipped.
It should have been funny. Somehow, it was just sad. She was threatening us with her father’s vengeance, which would be swift and furious when it came, and Simon was looking more and more depressed, as if her words were barbs that cut and tore his skin. Even Quentin was starting to look distressed.
Gillian had always known who I was. Even when she was telling me to go away, screaming that she never wanted to see me again, she had known who I was. To have his own child reject him like this . . . it didn’t matter that it was all due to the Luidaeg’s spell. It still had to be killing him.
I walked ahead as Quentin and Simon carried August into the alley. The Luidaeg’s front door was set back into the wall, recessed, half-hidden, and entirely uninviting. She liked it that way. It wasn’t that she didn’t like company—one of the first things I’d realized once we started to become friends was just how lonely she was—it was that when she had company, it was because people were asking her to do things and, sometimes, she didn’t want to.
If I ever met Titania, we were going to have a little talk about laying compulsions on people. What she’d done to the Luidaeg wasn’t fair. There was nothing in the world that could have made it so.
The door swung open before I could knock, and there was the Luidaeg, back in her “cousin Annie” guise, all curly black hair and acne-scarred cheeks. Her ponytails were tied with strips of blue painter’s tape, almost matching the fabric of her denim overalls. Her feet were bare. Nothing about her screamed “all-powerful sea witch.” Nothing about her even screamed “old enough to drive.”
Nothing except her eyes. They were too old for her teenager’s face, and filled with the sort of shadows that no one should have to hold alone.
She raised an eyebrow at the sight of me in all my too-human glory before her gaze switched to August, who had gone very still on her chair. Apparently, the Luidaeg was menacing enough to shut up even my imperious sister.
“You found her,” said the Luidaeg. “You actually found her.”
“We did,” I agreed. “Can we come in?”
Her sigh was deep and almost pained. “I suppose you might as well. It’s not like you’re going to go away.”
She stepped to the side. I moved to step past her and she grabbed my wrist, stopping me, pulling me to stand beside her against the wall as Quentin and Simon carried a still-silent August into the apartment.
“Put her in the living room,” said the Luidaeg. “October and I will be right with you.”
Arguing with the Luidaeg was never a good idea. In my current semi-mortal state, it seemed like the sort of idea that could get me seriously hurt. I nodded to Quentin, signaling that it was okay, and stayed where I was. He looked unsure. He kept walking. Sweet Oberon, I loved that kid. Simon went with him. It was that or let go of August, and since he didn’t want to hurt his daughter, he didn’t really have a choice.
The Luidaeg waited until we were alone before she turned to me and asked, “What the hell happened to you?”
“August.” I spread my hands, using the gesture to indicate the full, virtually human scope of me. “Turns out Mom didn’t spend her entire life pretending she was Daoine Sidhe. August actually knows what she is, what she can do, and how to do it aggressively.”
“I should have warned you about that.”
“You think?” I shook my head. “It could be worse. It can always be worse. I’ll borrow Arden’s hope chest when this is all over, put myself back to normal.”
“Do you know what normal is anymore? This is much closer to the woman you were when you showed up on my doorstep for the first time.”
I paused. Finally, I said, “Back then, I was trying to be part of the human world. I thought that was where I was going to be happy. I know now that I was wrong. This is where I belong, and that means I can’t go back to being human and hoping Faerie will leave me alone. It’s never going to happen.”
“Good.” The Luidaeg looked relieved. I didn’t have time to examine that before she was saying, “Why did you bring her here? You found her. That’s what you promised to do. You won’t have to work for me. You can get your kitty back.”
“She still can’t find her way home.”
The Luidaeg stopped moving.
“Simon stands right in front of her and she doesn’t know who he is. She keeps telling him that her father is going to mess him up when he finds out what we’ve done. We’ve tried telling her that Simon is her father, but it’s like the words don’t make any sense to her.”
“Damn.” The Luidaeg tugged on the end of one electric tape-wrapped pigtail. “Sometimes I wish I weren’t so good at my job.”
“If we take her back to Amandine the way she is now, she won’t know who Mom is,” I said. “I don’t think that will end well for me.” Or for my people. Amandine had Tybalt and Jazz captive and at their most defenseless. A tomcat can do a lot of damage. So can an adult raven. But neither of them could unlock their own prisons, and without the freedom to use talons and claws, she could hurt them badly enough that I didn’t even like to think about it.
“No,” admitted the Luidaeg, lowering her hand. “Amy doesn’t like it when she doesn’t get what she thinks she deserves. She’s not going to want a daughter who doesn’t know her. She’s going to want a daughter who’s grateful to be home.”
“Luidaeg . . . I need you to return her way home.”
There was a long moment of silence, during which I watched the Luidaeg and she looked at anything but me. There wasn’t much to look at in the hallway: the walls, the floor, the clean mended fishnets she had hanging up as decorations. In the end, she had no choice but to return her attention to me.
In a very soft voice, she said, “I can’t.”
“What do you mean, you can’t?”
“I mean I can’t. I have to give people what they ask me for. If you say you want a pony, I have to give you a pony. But I can ask you to pay whatever I want, and the more I don’t want to give you a pony, the steeper that cost becomes.” Her mouth twisted in an unhappy line. “If you’re an asshole about it, I can even fuck with you after I give you what you asked for. Asked to have a pony, not be a pony, but hey, one’s essentially the same as the other, right? Looked at from the right angle.”