The Unkindest Tide (October Daye #13) - Seanan McGuire Page 0,158
own, but I am a Prince of Cats born and raised, and I’ve always been aware of my own power,” I said. Once again, I regretted my lack of a tail. It would have been nice to have something to lash. “I’m not in the habit of taking anyone with me when I go to visit my friends.”
I left unmentioned the fact that once, I would have been. Before Blind Michael—before the terror and the trauma, before the fear that I would be lost forever to the dark, before October, and Quentin, and Helen, had come crashing into my life and forced me to reshape it—I would no more have left the Court of Cats without a full escort than I would have supplicated myself before the Divided Courts and offered my services as a ratcatcher. I was spoiled and small in those days, content to live in a narrow world until the time came for me to take my rightful place upon the throne. It took a kidnapping to show me that a gilded cage was a gilded cage. It took imprisonment to tell me how much I wanted to be free.
Perhaps I would have been a better King if I had never changed. I would certainly have been a more willing one. It’s difficult to see one’s freedoms as limited when one fails to understand what they are, or what they have the potential to eventually become.
Ginevra looked unsure. I decided it was time to offer her the greatest incentive I had left.
“If you allow this,” I said portentously, “I will give you the password for the Wi-Fi.”
Ginevra blinked, her pupils expanding to swallow her irises whole. If her ears had still been feline in form, I had no doubt they would have been pressed flat against her skull. “What did you just say?”
“I have the password for the Wi-Fi. I’ll give it to you.”
“We’re in the Court of Cats,” she said. “There’s no Internet here!”
That would have been true once, before Quentin befriended April O’Leary, the cyber-Dryad sometime-Countess of Tamed Lightning. April has a certain understanding with electrical systems. She understands that she wants them to do what she tells them, and they understand that it’s best not to argue with her.
Since April entered the questionable orbit of my life, many things have gotten better. Mostly our phones, but also the availability and stability of wireless Internet in places like the Court of Cats.
“It’s not the best Internet,” I said. “I don’t recommend trying to stream something while also downloading something. And it’s terrible for gaming. I do all my gaming at Quentin’s place. But yes, there’s Internet, and I control it, and I have the password.”
“I’m your regent,” she said. “I could order you to tell me.”
I nodded. “You could. Shall we find out together how well that works?”
Ginevra glared, and I smiled at her. It’s always nice, the moment when I know I’ve won. It’s always something to savor.
TWO
The air outside was all the sweeter for having been so skillfully bargained for. I walked with eyes half-closed, enjoying the scents and sounds of the midnight air.
Helen’s family lived near the Castro, in a residential neighborhood that had been new when her fae father decided he was ready to settle down. His neighbors would probably be way more pissed about how little he’d paid for his home than they were by the fact that he wasn’t human. If anything, they might take his fae nature as another statement on the gentrification of the city. Can’t live here unless you’re rich or supernatural.
They’re not as wrong as they would have been, once. The Court of Cats has swelled incredibly over the last several years as stairways and rooms and paths once inherently connected to the city’s shape have been lost, cast away by the humans dedicated to remaking the place in a shiny new image. It’s nice to know such things can be preserved, and yet it stings to know they must be lost in the first place.
A twig snapped behind me. I kept walking, but stopped sniffing the air for the sheer joy of it, and began sniffing for some sign of who was following me. Ginevra wasn’t completely wrong about the city’s dangers, annoying as that was to admit; muggings do happen, and a slim, relatively slightly-built teenage boy walking alone down darkened streets could be said to be inviting trouble.
Any human thief who tangled with me would find themselves facing more trouble than they