The Unkindest Tide (October Daye #13) - Seanan McGuire Page 0,161

called me a pig a few times because of that. I would always sniff and reply that I was a cat, and she would always laugh, no matter how many times she heard it. That was how I first realized that she really loved me. She’d never have put up with me if she didn’t.

Her face was sweet, pleasant, and kind; her eyes were brown. Her ears were pointed, although not as much as mine or Quentin’s, and stuck slightly out from her head, like the handles on a jug. Her hands were a little bit too large for her body, and thick-skinned enough that I’d seen her pick up burning coals without noticing the heat. They were still gentle, and sensitive enough that she could feel my lips against her palm.

I adore her. Call it selfish—I knew that I should peel myself away now, before things went any further down this road, which could never be ours to walk. Call it foolish and irresponsible. I don’t care. She’s the fire in my hearth and the heat in my home, and if anything is going to make me regret my eventual kingship, it’s her.

“You came,” she said, finally breaking off our kiss, if not our embrace. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes glittering, and she’d never been more beautiful. “I was afraid you wouldn’t be able to, with your uncle out of town.”

“My Regent saw the wisdom of granting me my freedom,” I said solemnly, and kissed her nose. “Want to go inside? I’m sure your dad’s ready and waiting to remind me that he can break bricks with his bare hands. He really, really likes reminding me of that.”

“He’s just trying to make sure you won’t hurt me. I can’t blame him for being overprotective.” A shadow crossed her face, there and gone quickly enough that I might not have recognized it if I hadn’t been so incredibly familiar with it. “He’s in the living room. You should say hi before we go to my room.”

“Lead on,” I said.

I don’t have my Uncle Tybalt’s skill with flowery, archaic declarations of love, a fact for which I’m genuinely grateful—sometimes listening to him is like listening to the audio version of some dreadful period romance, the sort of thing where the men are constantly losing their shirts and all the women keep swooning at the shameful sight of their exposed pectorals. Besides, I might not be as fancy as he is, but I’m good enough for Helen. She smiled, glancing up at me through her lashes, and grabbed my hand, dragging me with her into the house.

Dean is surprisingly fond of romantic comedies, artifice-filled narratives where boy meets girl—always boy meets girl, which is remarkably limiting and pedestrian for a genre supposedly built on the shoulders of love—through some contrived coincidence, structurally called a “meet cute.” Well, Helen and I didn’t “meet cute.” We met in blood and terror, when Blind Michael’s Hunt stole us from our beds and cast us, defenseless and unprepared, into the unending fog of his private domain.

Helen doesn’t like my friends. October frightens her, reminds her too much of those terrible days when we both believed our bodies would be forfeit to a Firstborn’s whims. Quentin is too imposing—and that’s without her knowing that he’s going to rule the whole continent when he’s older. She’s never met Chelsea, or April, or Dean. She prefers the safety of her home, the locked door, the closed window, an Internet connection keeping her tethered to the world. She’s a modern anchorite, unwilling to venture farther from safety than her porch.

I understand it, and I don’t. Blind Michael was able to take her from her bed, was able to take me from the Court of Cats, where I should have been safe even from Titania herself. A locked door could never have saved us.

Blind Michael is dead. October killed him with iron and with silver and set us free from the monster. She couldn’t free us from the memory. That will haunt us for all the long centuries of our lives, and we will never find comfort in a hunting horn or in the flicker of a candle’s flame. He stole us, and he stole from us, and sometimes when I look at Helen, I wonder whether he stole too much for her to ever recover.

The front door led into a small, brightly-lit living room, decorated in rich, warm colors, like we were stepping into a snapshot of the living

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