He’d died saving Gillian’s life, and while the skin she wore had never belonged to him, sometimes I felt as if it had. Lose one Selkie, gain another. That’s the way things had always worked for them. And I was going to be part of bringing that to an end. Their whole social structure, their way of life . . . it was about to die. I might not be the hand that killed it, but I was the weapon that hand was wielding.
Selkies were diurnal. Were Roane? Was Gillian about to find herself separated from her humanity for the rest of her long, long life, unable to keep her eyes open in the middle of the day, leaving her human father wondering what had changed?
Sometimes I felt like the person I really needed to apologize to was Cliff. He’d loved me once. He’d been a good man—still was, according to Gillian and Janet, who had never found themselves banished from the walled city of his heart—and he’d loved me, and what did he have to show for it? An ex-lover he thought of as a deadbeat, a daughter who couldn’t tell him why she was pulling away, and a wife who’d been lying to him since the day they met.
I grabbed clothes without paying attention to what they were, yanking them on and pulling my hair into a rough ponytail. It’s not that I don’t care how I look. It’s more that I’ve learned that the more attention I pay to my appearance, the more likely I am to wind up ruining something I actually like when I get covered in blood. Again. At least the blood is usually my own. I’m not sure why that’s better, but it is.
Tybalt remained on the bed, watching me dress. Finally, he yawned and asked, “Am I permitted to be your boyfriend on this visit, or must I play the acquaintance if your former swain is present?”
“I’m hoping Cliff will be at work this time of day, but even if he’s not, you can be my fiancé,” I said.
Tybalt blinked. “Really?” He sounded pleased.
Too pleased. I nodded firmly. “Really. I’m going to marry you. Cliff moved on a long time ago, and if he doesn’t like hearing that I’ve done the same, I don’t think I actually care.”
“You are an endless delight,” he said, and stood, retrieving his own trousers from the floor. He hummed to himself as he pulled them on. The smell of musk and pennyroyal gathered in the air, twining around him until my Cait Sidhe lover was gone, replaced by a human man who looked very much like him, even down to the delighted twinkle in his green eyes. He was wearing a T-shirt with Shakespeare’s face on the front, and his trousers had gone from linen to denim, but I would still have been able to recognize him in a crowd.
“No shoes?” I asked, amused.
“My own shoes can pass for mortal, and I refuse to appear before your ex-lover looking like the sort of man who wears sneakers,” he said. There was a faint, arrogant sneer in his voice, and I’d never been so happy to hear someone being a snob.
There was a time, immediately after his abduction, when I’d thought Tybalt’s arrogance might have been broken forever. There had also been a time, much earlier in our acquaintance, when I would have considered that a good thing.
Not anymore. He was my arrogant, smug, gloriously pointed King of Cats, and I wouldn’t want him any other way.
I found my own shoes while he dealt with his, strapped my silver knife to my belt, and grabbed a double handful of shadows, chanting, “Ride a black pony to Banbury Cross, to see a fine lady upon a white horse. With rings on her fingers and bells on her toes, she shall have music wherever she goes.”
The magic gathered and burst around me, drifting to floor level and leaving me garbed in a human disguise of my own, one that made me look like the woman who’d been Cliff’s lover and Gillian’s mother, brown-haired and blue-eyed and blissfully ordinary, unaware of the dangers ahead of her. Sometimes I miss being that woman, who never knew what she was capable of, who had never needed to know. She’d been ignorant in the most merciful of ways.
I looked at Tybalt, who was smiling at my transformation with simple affection, and thought I liked who I’d grown into being a whole lot better. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t feel sorry for the way the other me had ended.
“Are you ready?” he asked, stepping toward me with his hands extended, like he was going to escort me to a cotillion.
“I was going to drive,” I protested.
He snorted. “Please. And look for parking in this mess of a city? Allow me the privilege of saving us both the time.”
“You’re too good at getting your own way,” I said, and slid my hands into his.
Tybalt’s smile was a knife drawn in a darkened room. “I’m a cat,” he said, and stepped backward into the shadows, pulling me with him.
All Cait Sidhe have access to the Shadow Roads, the secret corridors and connections drawn between the dark places of the world. As a King of Cats, Tybalt’s connection and control are better than most. He’s strong enough to take passengers with him—which, at least in the last few years, has usually meant me.
It’s cold on the Shadow Roads. It’s cold and it’s dark and it’s airless, at least for me, because they can tell I don’t belong there. Like all the truly ancient passages through Faerie, like the knowes, the Shadow Roads are at least a little bit aware, and they can reject the things that shouldn’t cross their borders. Tybalt always comes out of the shadows chilly but not wheezing, and not covered in sheets of ice the way I do.
Well. Not always. There have been a few incidents where, for one reason or another, I was unable to run beside him and he had to carry me through the darkness, putting a heart-stopping strain on his system. With as often as both of us seem to wind up dead, we should really get a frequent-flier card for the underworld.
As long as there isn’t time for the night-haunts to be called for either one of us, I guess we’ll be okay.
He ran through the darkness, his hand tight around mine, and I ran beside him, closing my eyes to keep them from freezing, trusting him to know the way. Just the fact of that trust made the shadows feel warmer, although I still wasn’t going to risk trying to breathe there. No matter how much I learned to follow my lover through the dark, I would never be welcome enough for the roads to grant me oxygen.
When we stepped out of the shadows on the other end, the brightness and warmth of the mortal world was a shock. I pulled my hand out of Tybalt’s and staggered away, gasping, to catch myself against the nearest wall. Ice had glued my eyelashes together, but I trusted him not to have dropped us in the middle of a street or something.
Faerie survives because humanity doesn’t know we exist. We have magic, sure; some fae could take out dozens, even hundreds of humans before they were overrun. But we don’t have the numbers, and our vulnerability to pure iron means humanity will always have the upper hand when we’re standing on their home ground. There are very few fae left in the former Kingdom of Oak and Ash, which consists of most of the land around the mortal city of New York. Once the iron makes it into the water, we’re done.