banging on the door angrily, shouting at us to open up, saying that this was a public area. We had no right to do this.
Cameras were shoved in front of the glass so that the daylight was gone in a brilliance of flashes. I turned, shielding my eyes. Apparently, I'd left my sunglasses in the break area of the Fael.
The slender fey male with his Mohawk, who most would have thought in his teens, came forward. He made a rough bow. "Princess Meredith, may I get you a seat?" I looked into his slender face with its pale greenish skin. There was something about his face that simply wasn't human. I couldn't have put my finger on it, but the bone structure was simply a little off for a human. He looked like a pixie drawn to short human size by some mix of genetics. His pointed ears had almost as many earrings as Doyle's did. But the earrings in his lobes were dangling and had multicolored feathers brushing the shoulders of his leather vest.
"That would be lovely," I said.
He drew up one of the few small chairs and held it for me. I sank into it gratefully. I was suddenly very tired. Was it being pregnant, or was it the day?
Doyle went to the shopkeeper. "Where does the back way empty out to?" Not was there a back way, but where did it go.
A woman spoke as she came out of the back. "You'll not be getting out back there, I'm afraid, Princess and Princes. I had to bar the door to keep the hounds of the press from outflanking you."
At first glance she matched her husband, all soft folds and comfortable roundness, human, then I realized that she'd had the same kind of surgery that Robert at the Fael had had done, though she had only done enough to pass for human, not tried to make herself gorgeous. Pretty had been enough for her, and when she came around the counter and looked at me with those brown eyes, it reminded me so much of my grandmother that it made my chest and throat tight. I would not cry, damn it.
She knelt in front of me and put her hands over mine. Her hands were cool to the touch as if she'd been working with something cold in the back.
Her husband said, "Get up, Matilda. They're taking pictures."
"Let them," she said over her shoulder, then turned back to me. She looked up at me with those eyes that echoed Gran's.
"I'm cousin to Maggie Mae what cooks in the Unseelie Court."
It took me a moment to realize what that meant for me personally. Once I knew that I had no sidhe relatives exiled outside faerie, I'd not thought that there might be other relatives here who weren't sidhe. I smiled. "Then you're cousin to my Gran."
She nodded. "Aye," and there was an accent in that one word thick enough to walk on. "If it's a brownie from Scotland who came to the new world, then we're cousins. Robert down the way, well he's Welsh, so not related to me."
"To us," I said.
She gave me a brilliant smile that flashed teeth too white to be anything but dentist whitened, but then we were in L.A. "So you would own me as kin?"
I nodded. "Of course," I said. Some tension that I hadn't even realized just went out of them all, as if until that moment they'd been nervous, or even afraid. It seemed to free them all up to come closer.
"Most of the highborn like to pretend there's nothing but pure sidhe in their veins," she said.
"He doesn't pretend," the punk pixie said. He nodded toward Doyle. "Nice rings. You got anything else pierced?"
"Yes," Doyle said.
The boy smiled, making the rings in the edge of his nose and his bottom lip curl cheerfully with it. "Me too," he said.
Matilda patted my hands. "You look pale. Are you having a hungry pregnancy or a starving one?"
I frowned at the phrasing. "I don't understand."
"Some women are hungry all the time and some don't want to look at food when they carry babes."
The frown eased and I said, "I'm craving roast beef. Protein."
She flashed that brilliant smile again. "That we have." She called back over her shoulder to the man. "Harvey, get some roast beef for the princess."
He started to protest about the photographers and such, but she turned and gave him such a look that he just turned away and did what