on the other end, the brightness and warmth of the mortal world was a shock. I pulled my hand out of Tybalt’s and staggered away, gasping, to catch myself against the nearest wall. Ice had glued my eyelashes together, but I trusted him not to have dropped us in the middle of a street or something.
Faerie survives because humanity doesn’t know we exist. We have magic, sure; some fae could take out dozens, even hundreds of humans before they were overrun. But we don’t have the numbers, and our vulnerability to pure iron means humanity will always have the upper hand when we’re standing on their home ground. There are very few fae left in the former Kingdom of Oak and Ash, which consists of most of the land around the mortal city of New York. Once the iron makes it into the water, we’re done.
Tybalt is savvy enough to have gone this long without getting caught. So I took the time I needed to catch my breath, and when the ice melted enough to let me open my eyes, I turned to find him watching me with undisguised fondness that seemed strange only due to his currently human appearance.
“Where are we?” I asked. I was barely wheezing at all, and I was proud of that.
“Service alley about two blocks from your ex-boyfriend’s house,” he said. “The owner of the liquor store,” he indicated a door set into the brick wall in front of us, “keeps swearing he’s going to install security cameras, and keeps putting it off due to the expense. I’m sure that will change when he gets robbed again, and we’ll need to find a different path to visit this neighborhood, but the cats will keep me apprised.”
“Even when you’re not their King anymore?”
For a moment, Tybalt looked conflicted, unhappy and hopeful at the same time. Then he nodded and said, “Raj will rule them, but they will still respect my place as one of the Cait Sidhe, even as they respect his. I’ll know where it’s safe to travel.”
I had a lot of questions, like what he meant when he said Raj would rule “them” and not “us,” but for the moment, it seemed safer to let things slide. Tybalt was working hard enough to be okay with the changes in his life. They were necessary changes—he’d stepped down and allowed a regent to guard his throne for him because he needed the time to heal, not because I’d asked him to—but they were still an adjustment. For both of us.
“Come on,” I said, and motioned for him to follow me out of the alley. Looking relieved, he did.
San Francisco is an old city, which means it’s not as segmented as modern cities always seem to me. Small convenience stores and blocks of retail offerings are tucked into otherwise residential neighborhoods, making it possible for people to do most of what they need to do entirely on foot. That’s a good thing, considering how bad the parking situation is. I fully expect someone to get murdered over a good parking place one of these days, and go off to prison utterly content, as long as someone else stays behind to feed the meter.
Turning left, we climbed the short hill between us and the nearest of those residential streets. The shops dropped away, replaced by the tidy, pressed-together houses that had been all the rage after the Victorians but before the condos. The house Cliff shared with Gillian and Janet—whose real name he still didn’t know—wasn’t far.
His car wasn’t parked in the driveway. I felt bad about how relieved that made me. Still, the last thing I needed to add to an already-uncomfortable afternoon was trying to talk freely with my human ex-boyfriend sitting in the room.
Tybalt flashed me a quick, understanding smile. “It will be all right,” he said.
“It’ll be something,” I said as I climbed the steps and rang the doorbell.
Seconds ticked by, enough of them that I was considering whether it might be a good idea to ring again, before I heard footsteps on the other side. I took a deep breath. No matter who opened that door, they were family, and that meant that they were complicated.
“Coming!” The voice was Janet’s. I didn’t relax.
Janet Carter—currently known as “Miranda Marks,” thanks to both her assumed name and her marriage to Cliff—is human. Totally, completely, perfectly human. She’s also more than five hundred years old, thanks to a curse flung by Maeve after her Ride