“No,” I admitted. “Jazz isn’t a big fan of the Firstborn right now.”
“That’s going to make your wedding fun.” The Luidaeg cast a measuring, narrow-eyed look at Tybalt. “I assume I am invited.”
“We would no more dream of refusing you an invitation than we would of dancing naked through a storm of glass,” said Tybalt smoothly.
“Unless that was your way of asking whether the wedding’s still on,” I said. “It is. Cake and everything. We just need to figure out when the Mists can spare us both.”
“So next century; got it,” said the Luidaeg. Her expression sobered. “Fetch your boys.”
“Which ones?” I asked.
“All of them. This is relevant to all of them.”
Tybalt and I exchanged a glance before he stepped around me and offered the Luidaeg a shallow bow. “Shall I show you to the dining room? We have a few burritos and some salsa left from our dinner, and I would be delighted to fetch them for your consideration.”
“Sounds good,” said the Luidaeg. She swung her attention back to me. “Be quick. I have things to do tonight.”
“That’s ominous,” I said, and started for the stairs. When the Luidaeg says it’s time to hurry, I hurry. Anything else could be taken as an insult, and while I don’t actually think she’d hurt me on a whim, it’s better to be safe than sorry.
I met the Luidaeg when I was investigating the supposed murder of Evening Winterrose, her half-sister and—as it turns out—her direst enemy. It would have been nice to know that at the time. It would have been even nicer to know that Evening wasn’t dead but in hiding, healing and planning to come back and ruin absolutely everyone’s night. Too bad Evening has never been particularly interested in being nice.
That’s when I met the Luidaeg, but I’ve known about her since I was a child. She’s the bogeyman fae parents use to threaten their children, the terrifying sea witch who will spirit them away to where the bad kids go if they don’t eat their vegetables or practice their illusions or make their beds. Out of all Faerie’s monsters, she’s painted as the one with the sharpest teeth, the cruelest claws. I suspect that’s more of Evening’s work, because while the Luidaeg can be harsh, she’s rarely cruel. Her gifts come with a cost. That doesn’t make them evil. It just makes them expensive.
The upstairs hall was even quieter than the living room. I sniffed, detecting traces of multiple silencing spells. May and Jazz are usually considerate about that sort of thing. Quentin is less considerate than acting in self-defense, since I have a tendency to come to bed late, loud, and somewhat clumsy.
His bedroom door was closed. I knocked. There was no reply. I knocked again before I realized that if the silencing spell was good enough, no noise could get in or out. That’s the trouble with magic. It’s useful, but it isn’t always easy to adapt to mundane uses.
In some ways, the fact that the people living with me felt comfortable enough to use silencing spells on their bedrooms was incredibly flattering. They knew that if something went wrong, Tybalt and I would step in—and if I really needed them, I’d call. Not even silencing spells can stop a cellular signal from getting through.
With that in mind, I pulled out my phone and selected Quentin’s name from my contact list. It was already ringing as I raised it to my ear. I waited.
There was a beep. “Hello?”
“Why is there a silencing spell on your room so strong that you can’t hear me knocking?”
“Um.” I heard more than guilt in Quentin’s pause: I heard loud explosions, and the sound of Dean whooping with delight.
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “You’re playing video games with Chelsea again, aren’t you?”
“Raj has the best reflexes of anyone we know! He could go competitive if he weren’t—” Quentin caught himself and stopped mid-sentence.
“If he weren’t expected to take the throne soon; I know,” I said. “You’re going to have to tell Chelsea you’re sorry, but it’s time to log off. The Luidaeg is here. She wants to talk to all three of you.”
There was a long pause before Quentin asked warily, “Really?”
Smart boy. “Really,” I said. “I think Tybalt’s feeding her our dinner leftovers. Get downstairs as soon as you can.”
I ended the call and turned away, hesitating only long enough to glance one more time at May’s door, shake my head, and keep walking. May has a lot of my memories. She has a lot of my regrets. What she doesn’t have, thankfully, is my personality: she looked at the things that made me who I am and interpreted them in a whole new light, weighing them against the memories she’d brought with her from her previous existence as one of the night-haunts and deciding that what mattered wasn’t heroism, it was home.
She’s my sister—the only one I’m willing to acknowledge. And what she needed, right now, was to spend time with her girlfriend, who was finally remembering how to laugh, and not get dragged into some wildly dangerous quest. I’d tell her what was going on before I did anything as serious as leaving the house, but for right now?
She deserved to rest.
Tybalt and the Luidaeg were in the dining room. She had claimed both leftover burritos, split them open, and created a half-horrifying, half-aspirational plate of pseudo-nachos by dumping their contents on the remaining chips. She was seated at the head of the table and munching steadily away, as focused as if she hadn’t eaten since the last time San Francisco burned to the ground.
“I don’t think some of those flavors are supposed to go together,” I said, moving to stand next to Tybalt. He was leaning against the wall by the china hutch, which was really more of a “random mail and things we didn’t care about enough to put properly away” hutch, keeping a careful eye on the Luidaeg.
“All flavors go together if you’re willing,” said the Luidaeg matter-of-factly. “Didn’t you go to fetch the boys?”
“They’ll be right down.” I settled against the wall, folding my arms. “I’m guessing this isn’t a social call.”
“What was your first clue?” asked the Luidaeg.
“The part where you asked me to fetch the boys. Also the part where you don’t usually just drop by for no reason. Is something wrong?”
“You could say that.” She laughed, and the sound was mirthless, hollow; it was the rattle of bones across the bottom of the endless sea, and there was nothing in it that remembered what it was to forgive. “Something’s been wrong for a long, long time, and it’s finally time to make it right again, or as right as it can be. I’m not sure there’s any real fixing what’s been broken.”