again, captive of his own inner demons, bound by a bargain he’d made with the Luidaeg to save his biological child.
I was going to find a way to save him. I was. I was just going to focus on saving the people closest to me first. You can’t bandage someone else’s wounds while you’re bleeding to death from your own. It never works out the way you want it to.
Tybalt gave me a wounded look. I would have called it making puppy-dog eyes if he weren’t literally a cat. “No,” he said. “Money is no object. October, do you honestly think me such a churl that I would intend to live in your home in perpetuity, eat at your table, and not provide for you or your household in even a small capacity?”
“It never came up.” I picked up my own burrito—basically everything I could convince them to encase in a single flexible tortilla—and produced the second bag of chips from beneath the table before plopping myself down in a chair.
“I’ve brought groceries,” he protested.
“Yes, and I didn’t ask about where they came from, because if you were enchanting some poor clerk into letting you shoplift, I didn’t want to know.” The fae attitude toward property can be, well, flexible, especially when the property in question is in the hands of humans. Purebloods mostly don’t steal from each other unless they’ve got an army behind them. Everyone else is fair game.
“You used to work at Safeway, right?” asked Jazz.
I nodded. “I did, before May showed up and started helping cover the rent. That’s when we were in the old apartment.” The timeline there was skewed and simplified, but it was close enough to accurate. Sometimes things have to be condensed if they’re going to make sense.
That’s the history of Faerie in a nutshell, really. When you’re talking about people who live for literal centuries, entire dynasties can wind up shortened to a sentence tucked away in a paragraph about how nice the flowers look when the spring returns. Legends are true. History is a lie. Everything old comes around and becomes new again, and people who’ve witnessed linguistic and continental drift firsthand are standing right there to give their opinion on it.
“I bought the groceries,” said Tybalt, sounding only faintly offended. “I bought them with legitimate human currency, and did not rob anyone to get it.”
I blinked at him. “How did you—?”
“I arrived in the Mists over a century ago, when there was no indication that this small, provincial kingdom would become such a hotbed of activity,” said Tybalt. “I was in Pines before that, living among the mortals with my Anne.”
“Oh.” Anne, his first wife, had been a human woman. She died in childbirth sometime in the early 1900s. The local fae courts had been unwilling to step in and help her or their child.
It was because of that reluctance that Tybalt had disliked changelings for so long. A changeling took his wife away, even if it hadn’t been intentional or malicious. I’d known things between us were never going to be the same when he’d finally broken down and told me about Anne. That was when he’d let his grudges go. That was when he’d admitted that he loved me.
Life is never simple. I’d say “when Faerie is involved,” but I don’t think I need to. Life is never simple, period. All we can do is hang on and hope for the best.
He smiled, finally picking up his own burrito: chicken, pork, beef, cheese, and sour cream. “Anne was quite annoyed when I took things from local merchants without proper payment, and I’ll admit, I had a bit of a prior inclination toward paying, born of my time in the Londinium theater. It’s better to pay people for the things they make, assuming you want them to keep working. I’ve never been inclined toward learning a mortal trade, but I did odd jobs enough to keep her fed and healthy, and I learned your banking system well enough to acquit myself.”
I blinked at him slowly. “Tybalt. You didn’t understand what a car was until I started making you ride in one. You’d never been on a bus before.”
“Neither of those things is a requirement of banking, little fish. Money has many uses, and not all of them are related to transportation.”
“I don’t . . .” I pinched the bridge of my nose. “I don’t know what to do with this. You have money?”
“Yes.”
“How much money?”
“Sufficient that I can