Tybalt. My friend, who was never really my enemy, even when I’d believed him to be; my lover; my betrothed; and another victim of my mother’s petty determination to have her eldest daughter back, no matter how many people were collateral damage. Tybalt had been King of Dreaming Cats long before he’d been foolish enough to get involved with me. Now, thanks to my mother, he’d stepped away from his throne, allowing the daughter of an old friend to stand regent in his stead while he tried to put himself back together. Cait Sidhe choose their rulers based on raw strength and the ability to protect the Court. By admitting he was too damaged to rule, even for a short time, Tybalt might have lost his throne forever.
I’d never considered myself a person worth losing a throne for, but Tybalt thought I was, and I’ve learned not to argue with him about that sort of thing. Instead, I was doing my best to live up to what he saw when he looked at me. That seemed better for both of us. Healthier.
Footsteps thundered in the hall behind us. Tybalt laughed again, drawing me even closer.
“Prepare yourself,” he said, and the teenage wave descended.
Quentin Sollys, my sworn squire, who also happened to be the Crown Prince of the Westlands—meaning he’ll be High King of the fae kingdoms of North America one day—ducked past me to grab the burrito with the “Q” on the side, tossing me a jaunty wave before he snatched the entire bag of tortilla chips and took off running.
Raj was close behind him, taking one of the unmarked burritos and two containers of salsa before chasing after Quentin and the chips. At least he slowed down long enough to offer a quick, distracted wave, which was honestly more than I’d been expecting. I grinned, leaning against Tybalt.
“Try not to get salsa on the ceiling this time, okay?” I called after Raj. “My hearth magic isn’t good enough to deal with tomato juice on plaster.”
“No, but May’s is!” Raj shouted back, and was gone.
Dean was the last of our resident teenagers to reach the table. He hesitated, looking at the three remaining unmarked burritos.
Normally, we take a hands-off approach to feeding the teen swarm—leave the food unattended and they’ll take care of themselves. I stand in loco parentis for Quentin in many ways, but I’m not his mother, and as long as he doesn’t starve or get scurvy, I’ve done my job.
Dean, though . . . sometimes it’s necessary to intervene a little with him. He’s the Count of Goldengreen, not technically a teenager anymore—he’s a year older than Quentin, who turned nineteen on his last birthday—and raised in the Undersea by his Merrow mother and Daoine Sidhe father. Dean isn’t the youngest Count I’ve ever heard of, although he’s one of the youngest without a Regent to massage his decrees into something more palatable for the local nobles. His reign has been—quite literally—sink or swim, since he started it with no idea how things were done in the land Courts, and was given his position almost entirely to prevent a war.
But he’s done okay. His seneschal, Marcia, who was my seneschal when I was Countess of Goldengreen, has worked hard to steer him away from the nastier dangers of his position, and Goldengreen has always been mostly a show County, consisting of a knowe and a household and not much more. He doesn’t have land to protect or official duties to perform.
He also, from the way he was looking at those burritos, didn’t have much of an idea of how to deal with cylinders of food wrapped in nicely concealing layers of foil. I smiled, trying to seem encouraging rather than mocking.
“The narrowest one is vegetarian, the fattest one is chicken and rice, and the one in the middle is steak,” I said.
He shot me a startled look which quickly turned thankful. “Quentin says I need to eat more mortal food, since there’s going to come a time when Marcia is unavailable and I’m starving,” he said. “That doesn’t make it easy to understand the way they label things. Or don’t label them, as the case may be.”
“Well, I’d take the chicken and rice, since that’s sort of a good starting point for the whole concept of ‘the Mission Burrito.’ Quentin has pork and way too many bell peppers, and Raj took the chicken supreme. Get them to give you bites, figure out what you think you might like, and I’ll add your order to the list.”
Surprise melted into genuine delight. “You’d be willing to do that?”
“Sure.” I shrugged. “You’re pretty much part of the family. We feed the family.”
His smile was heartbreakingly bright. He grabbed the burrito I’d indicated and hurried after the others, back to Quentin’s room and whatever terrifying mischief three boys with noble titles and the anticipation of the weight of the world on their shoulders could get up to. As a rule, I don’t ask, and they don’t tell me. It’s safer that way.
With the teenage stampede finally out of the way, Tybalt removed his arms from around my waist and went to claim his own burrito. “I trust your evening’s work went well? I think I like it when you do human detective things. You come home to me not having bled on anything at all, and it’s delightfully novel.”
“It also pays for these burritos, which is a nice change.”
Tybalt sniffed. “Money is no concern.”
“It is when you don’t want to use fairy gold on the nice man at the taqueria.” I’d been there once with Simon, my stepfather. He had charmed the counterman with his breezy manner and fluency in Spanish. I still got asked about him when I went to order food. It was nice, in a way, to deal with someone whose only impressions of Simon were positive ones.
Simon Torquill has been married to my mother since long before I was born, even if I didn’t learn that fun fact until comparatively recently. He was, for a long time, my biggest bogeyman: the man who transformed me into a fish, abandoned me in a pond, and caused me to lose my entire mortal life. He’d taken everything I’d ever thought I wanted away with a single casual spell, and as far as I’d been able to tell, he hadn’t lost a minute of sleep over it. I had been nothing to him. Just one more inconsequential changeling.
Only later I’d learned that he’d done it to protect me from a much bigger threat: his liege lady, Evening Winterrose, more accurately known as Eira Rosynhwyr, Firstborn of the Daoine Sidhe. I’d learned a lot of things too late for them to do either one of us any good, and now Simon was lost again, captive of his own inner demons, bound by a bargain he’d made with the Luidaeg to save his biological child.
I was going to find a way to save him. I was. I was just going to focus on saving the people closest to me first. You can’t bandage someone else’s wounds while you’re bleeding to death from your own. It never works out the way you want it to.
Tybalt gave me a wounded look. I would have called it making puppy-dog eyes if he weren’t literally a cat. “No,” he said. “Money is no object. October, do you honestly think me such a churl that I would intend to live in your home in perpetuity, eat at your table, and not provide for you or your household in even a small capacity?”