The Unkindest Tide (October Daye #13) - Seanan McGuire Page 0,166

occupied. My heart sank.

When I was a child, Uncle Tybalt used to take me to the animal shelter, using my small stature and silence around humans as a mask while he claimed to be looking for the perfect pet for a young boy. We would walk along the rows of cages, sniffing out any captives with fae blood, and return for them after night fell, stepping through the shadows and into their places of imprisonment. The air there always smelled very similar to the air here, disinfectant and damp litter and misery. Despair has a scent. It cakes the nostrils and dizzies the senses, and if I never had to smell it again, I wouldn’t complain.

Night after night, we’d gone to the shelters, returning home with thin-blooded kittens, with halfbloods whose fae gifts didn’t include the ability to change their shapes—once, even, with a pureblood whose wife had died and who had retreated so far into feline form that she no longer remembered what it was to walk on two legs, to reach for things outside a housecat’s grasp. We had carried them back to the Court of Cats, and some of them lived there still, content with their second chances.

Once, just once, we had arrived to see a family in the process of finalizing the paperwork to adopt their new companion. He had been a tabby-striped tom, cradled in the arms of a little human girl who gazed at him with all the adoration and wonder in the world, and he had been half-fae at the very least. I had started to move toward them, automatically, thinking the rescue of the kitten to be a vital part of our mission, when Uncle Tybalt’s hand had tightened on my shoulder, holding me in place.

That night, rather than returning to the shelter, we had gone to an apartment, stepping out of the shadows behind the television. The kitten had been waiting for us, his tail curled around his haunches, his eyes bright and alert.

“My mother warned me of the cats who move like men,” he had said, before either of us could utter a word. “She said that one day you might come for me, as you came for my father. She said if I refused you, you wouldn’t take me. I refuse you. Go away. My pets are sleeping, and I’ll not have you waking them.”

The language of cats isn’t that grammatical and doesn’t sort itself so neatly into sentences and phrases, but I thought more like a person than a feline, most of the time, and the translation had been automatic. I had frowned, looking to Uncle Tybalt.

And Uncle Tybalt had bowed.

“Take good care of them, brave one, and remember that the Court of Cats is yours,” he’d said, and drawn me back into the shadows.

When we had emerged into the Court of Cats, when I’d tried to pull away, he’d placed his hands on my shoulders and said, voice solemn, “The world is hard for our kin. They fight all their lives for a place to belong, a warm spot to sleep, a meal to fill their bellies. All too often, they find hands raised against them and hatred in the hearts of those who should be kindest to them, who should remember that without men, there would be no cats, but without cats, there might well be no men. Do you understand?”

“No.” I had been a kitten then, sullen and full of pride at my own potential. I had been a fool.

Uncle Tybalt, though . . . if ever he had been a fool, it had been long before I came into his life. He had looked at me with understanding and said, “There were cats in the world before there were Cait Sidhe. We exist to help them when we can, and to be honored to have the opportunity; we are kings and queens among our kin. But we do not exist to command them. We do not exist to make their lives more difficult. Death follows them all the days of their lives, and it needs only catch them once. The very hands that feed and stroke them are too often raised against them. They are temporary, and we are not. We owe them our respect.”

I hadn’t fully understood, not then. Now, as I looked at the empty cage, with no way of knowing whether its occupant had been released to their loving owners or whether their body was in a box nearby, consigned to