The Unkindest Tide (October Daye #13) - Seanan McGuire Page 0,175

be scared. We should just stop being scared.”

She looked at me like I’d slapped her. To be honest, I felt sort of like I had.

“Please, Helen,” I said, trying again. “The world is big and wild and dangerous and wonderful, and even though it’s never completely safe, it mostly doesn’t hurt us. I go outside every day, and this is the first time I’ve been hit by a car. I had to save Cal.”

“I appreciated being saved,” said Cal.

I ignored them. Helen, and that look on her face, was infinitely more important. “We can’t take the danger away. Not entirely. We can just learn how to live with it.”

“What if I don’t want to learn how to live with it?” Helen shoved herself off me, pushing me deeper into the couch and knocking the wind out of me when her hands pressed down on my bruises. “What if I don’t want the world to be dangerous? Huh? What then?”

“Helen—”

“You could have died,” she spat, and ran out of the room, her footsteps thundering up the stairs.

Slowly, I pushed myself out of the couch, groaning as my bruises complained. “I should go after her,” I said uncertainly. “That would be the correct thing to do. Wouldn’t it?”

“I’m not getting in the middle of this,” said Cal, putting their hands up in proactive self-defense. “I just met her and she already scares me. Maybe I’m glad I’m not your friend. All of your friends are scary. Like, super scary. I think your least scary friend is that Daoine Sidhe kid, and there’s something about the way he looks at me that makes me think he’s scarier than he wants anybody to realize he is. Like he’s secretly scary. Secret scary isn’t un-scary. It’s actually sort of worse.”

Quentin would probably laugh to hear himself described that way. I still looked at Cal in dismay. “I’m your Prince. One day I’ll be your King. You don’t get to tell me you won’t get in the middle of something. If I want you in the middle, the middle’s where you’re going to be.”

“Yeah, but you’re my Prince with a sitting regent, and she said to keep an eye on you, which means not getting myself murdered by your scary changeling girlfriend. I know what my job is right now. My job is you.”

I glared at them. They shrugged, unrepentant.

“If you don’t want someone else telling me what to do, hurry up and take the throne. Until then, you aren’t the one in charge.”

I started to object, then stopped, sighed, and stood. “Stay here,” I said. “As you said, you’re staying out of this.” I turned, not for the stairs, but for the kitchen.

Willis was at the stove when I stepped into the room, his attention primarily focused on the skillet of eggs sizzling away in front of him. He had a little bowl of grated cheese that he was sprinkling over the top of the pan. The burner wasn’t lit. Hob magic has its uses.

I frowned. “That looks like cast iron,” I said. “It isn’t, right?”

“Since I don’t want to poison myself or my daughter, or even you—not really—no, it’s not cast iron,” said Willis. “It’s granite.”

I didn’t know how cookware could be made of stone, and I had the feeling that if I asked, he would tell me, so I didn’t ask. “Oh.”

“I heard Helen’s door slam. She’s pretty mad at you right now. I expected you to be upstairs trying to apologize to her.”

“I can’t.”

“And why’s that, son? Keep in mind, she’s my beloved baby girl and the only thing I have left of her mother, and you’re the boy I sometimes allow into my home. Answer carefully.”

“Because . . .” I stopped, sorting through my tangled thoughts, and finally said, “I didn’t mean to get hit by that car. It hurt and I didn’t like it and I’ll try really hard not to let it happen again. But if I had to make the choice to save Cal or not right now, I’d still save them. I’m faster than they are. I’m stronger. I can survive it, and they probably wouldn’t have.”

“You’re willing to break my daughter’s heart over ‘probably’?” Willis gave the eggs a stir.

I sighed. “If this is enough to break your daughter’s heart, I may have to break it even worse because this isn’t going to change, and I can’t hurt her on purpose.”

Willis glanced over his shoulder at me, and for the first time in our acquaintanceship, I