Two
FAE—MOST FAE—ARE nocturnal, making a four o’clock wakeup time not only reasonable but on the early side, the equivalent of humans who get out of bed at six in the morning even when they don’t have to.
Jazz, being a diurnal bird in her spare time, is one of the exceptions to the “nocturnal” classification, and she shares a room with May.
She normally left sometime around eleven to open her antique store, and so it wasn’t much of a surprise when we made our way down the stairs to the kitchen and May was already there, pulling a fresh batch of what looked like muffins out of the oven.
“Hey, May,” I said, heading for the fridge and pulling out a bottle of cranberry juice one-handed.
After four months of toting Miranda almost everywhere I went, I’d gotten pretty good at doing most things one-handed.
It’s a skill I’ve developed and lost several times over my lifetime, and I was proud of how quickly I had picked it up again.
By the time I got to the table, Tybalt had already gotten me down a glass. I flashed him a smile and sat.
“Good afternoon, all,” said May. She closed the oven, then turned and started toward me, hands already outstretched. “Gimme my niece.”
“She’s been up for about an hour. She’s been changed, but she’s also eaten, so she may need a fresh diaper soon,” I cautioned, and handed her over.
May immediately swiveled Miranda into a carrying position, carting her back toward the cooling muffins. Miranda, for her part, didn’t protest, just babbled and waved her hands amiably at the room.
“You can’t keep stealing my kid every time I leave the bedroom,” I said.
“Watch me. And you know you love it,” countered May. “Most parents would kill for a built-in babysitter who’s been keeping kids alive for centuries. Besides, she knows her Auntie May. She loves me, don’t you, kitten?”
Miranda babbled more. Whether she understood the words or not, she knew May had been helping to care for her since she was born.
Technically, May held her before I did, since I’d been busy bleeding out and trying not to die of iron poisoning when she’d made her grand entrance into the world.
In a world made almost entirely out of novelty, babies like familiar things.
I poured my cranberry juice, and a moment later, Tybalt joined me at the table, carrying two large muffins and a mug of what I presumed was tea.
We sat and just ate for a few minutes, only idly watching May cart Miranda around the kitchen.
May and I are almost identical physically, but not magically; not only does our magic smell different, hers cotton candy and ashes, mine fresh-cut grass and copper verging on blood, but the things we can do are different.
I work with blood and heal too fast to be reasonable.
She spins illusions and can’t be killed.
There are worse things in this world than an indestructible sister—or an unkillable babysitter.
“Where is everybody?” I asked, breaking off a piece of my muffin—ginger-pear and still steaming. I popped it into my mouth, swallowed, and eyed the counter, trying to figure out how many I could steal before May caught on and took the rest away.
“Jazz is at work, and Quentin spent the day at Dean’s place,” said May. “He’ll be home for dinner, and that probably means I’m feeding Dean as well. Is this an August night?”
“No,” I assured her. “She’s planning to come to court to help make the case for keeping Raysel here, and that means we don’t need to worry about feeding her tonight.”
May, who handled most of the cooking—by choice as much as by necessity; no one lets me cook if they actually want to eat—nodded. “Good. I only banked on two extra mouths for dinner, and Chelsea stayed over.”
I blinked. “Again?”
“Yup. Again.” May’s smile was smug enough to have belonged on a Cait Sidhe.
“… huh.” There was a time when Raysel had been showing every sign of having a crush on Quentin, who was in a pretty serious relationship already.
Still was, hence him staying the day at his boyfriend’s knowe.
And fortunately for all of us, Raysel had moved on after she’d started spending more time with Chelsea, daughter of her father’s seneschal.
The two of them were reasonably close in age, and more importantly, Chelsea had lived in the mortal world until she was in her late teens, while Raysel had grown up in a magical void, surrounded by absolute darkness.
Neither of them had a full understanding of Faerie, and their common points of alienation had made them fast friends.
Fast friends who went to the movies together, a lot, and took full advantage of the fact that they were young enough—functionally still teenagers, in fae terms—to have the energy to stay awake all day when they wanted to do things without annoying adults tagging along and telling them to be careful, wear sunscreen, and keep their human disguises in place.
Raysel’s crush on Quentin had faded without comment, replaced by an equally obvious crush on Chelsea.
I don’t know enough about modern dating—or dating at all, really, when you consider the fact that I’ve only had three really serious boyfriends, and I married the third one—to say whether her attraction was returned.
If it was, great, good for them. If it wasn’t, that was fine too, as long as neither of them got seriously hurt.
It would have been hypocritical of me to say Chelsea couldn’t sleep over, considering she’d been doing it ever since we’d met her.
Dean slept over, too, and Raj, when he could get away from his responsibilities.
Really, it felt like half the young adults in the Mists were in and out of my house like they lived here, and some of them actually did.
“She’s been staying here a lot lately,” I said, trying to cover the pause my surprise had created. “Has anyone talked to Etienne about it?”
“Sir Etienne is aware of his daughter’s visitations, and while he doesn’t encourage them overmuch, he knows the Duke takes some comfort in his awareness of his own daughter’s whereabouts,” said Tybalt.
I turned, squinting at him. “Excuse me, are you saying Chelsea is spying on our ward? Because I am not cool with that.”
“Neither was Chelsea,” he replied, with a flicker of amusement. “She is no more spying on Raysel than Quentin is spying on you. She simply enjoys her company. But her enjoyment comes with the benefit, for Sylvester, of confirming that Raysel remains safe.”
“I would tell him if anything happened to her,” I said, stung.
Sylvester is my liege, and has been since I first assumed my knighthood.
In practical terms, that means he’s the boss of me: he can order me to do just about anything he wants, and I have to listen, or risk being found in violation of my oaths.
As dukes go, he’s always been pretty cool about not asking me to do things he knows I won’t like, and we used to be close.
Like, really close. Like, he was the closest thing I had to a father figure close.
And then his wife, Luna, decided that my life was worth less than hers, and sent me off to die in order to save herself.
I lived, and she never quite got over the fact that I hadn’t been intended to.
Every time it looked like we might be moving toward some sort of improvement in our relationship, something else would go ruinously wrong.
Most recently, the “something else” was me insisting on claiming offense against Raysel—something that Raysel had asked me to do, but which Luna was insisting on treating like a kidnapping.
I hadn’t technically been banned from Shadowed Hills for some time, but the fact that he’d been willing to tell me to stay away in the first place—to stay away from the halls I was pledged to defend, from the demesne that was supposedly sworn to protect me at any costs—well, that stung.
And so I guess it was understandable to think that I might not rush to inform my liege if something went wrong.
But I’m a parent. Twice biologically, and at least that many times emotionally.
I could never withhold information about a child in danger, no matter how old they were.
Not unless they had reached the level of estrangement I was at with my own mother, who was legally no longer even related to me, thanks to the way Faerie handles divorce.
“I know you would, little fish,” said Tybalt, tone soothing.
“No matter how little he deserves it, I know you still love the man. I suppose you always must, after everything he’s been to you.
I do wish your affections were more easily guided down more-suitable channels.
If you could transfer that degree of love and loyalty to Prince Nolan, for example… ”
“Are you suggesting the prince because he’s effectively harmless, or because you want me to switch my alliance to Arden’s court?”
He shrugged. “Must a man do one thing or the other?”
I wrinkled my nose and was trying to think of a retort when the kitchen door swung open and a young woman in a diamond-patterned bathrobe stepped inside.
She had short black hair, normally sleek but currently rumpled and frizzy, and copper-colored eyes too metallic to have belonged to anyone human.
Since she wasn’t making any effort to hide her sharply pointed ears, I could tell she wasn’t expecting to find any humans in the house.
That wasn’t always guaranteed. When I’m not serving the crown as a knight errant, I do private investigative work for the city’s human population.
Lots of cheating spouses and custody debates.
The business isn’t as steady as it was before everyone had a camera in their pocket all the time, but it’s enough to keep me from feeling like I’m drowning in unpaid bills, and to put name-brand cereal in the cupboards. Sometimes it’s the little things.