Five #2
“I swear, you are never a burden, beloved, but if I’m going to keep carrying you through the shadows, I need to start exercising more,” he said, winded, as he dropped onto the couch beside me.
I leaned over to punch him in the shoulder. “I’m happy to drive,” I said.
“Only until our girl is old enough to hold her breath on purpose,” he said.
“Do you think the Shadow Roads will be kind to her?”
“I hope so.” He sighed, looking up at the ceiling. “I can tell already that she is no Princess of Cats. The power isn’t there. Nor should it be, given that we don’t know whether she’ll be Cait Sidhe at all.”
“Isn’t that strange? I mean, we should know by now. I breathe in her magic all the time, and normally that’s enough for me to practically draw a pie chart. I know every inch of her, but I can’t tell what she is.”
“Maybe you’re not intended to.”
I blinked at him.
Tybalt shrugged. “I mean it. How long did it take me to determine that you weren’t Daoine Sidhe? My skill may not equal yours, but I know how to sniff out a changeling, and how to follow a bloodline. Yet I knew you for years before things became clear enough for me to understand them.”
“So what, you think it’s some natural Dóchas Sidhe camouflage thing?
” The idea was attractive, not least because it would mean that there was nothing wrong with my magic; it was just running up against Miranda’s, and without me being willing to cut her intentionally, it wasn’t able to quite overcome the resistance.
“Your descendant line does seem designed to blend into the background,” he said, twisting a lock of my near-colorless hair between his fingers. “We must each of us thwart nature’s design in our own special ways. You do it by becoming entirely impossible to overlook.”
“And you do it by what, being a total theater nerd when you were supposed to be a remorseless warrior king?”
I was teasing, but from the way he sobered, he didn’t take it that way. Tybalt looked at me gravely as he nodded.
“Something of that sort, yes,” he said. “Kings of Cats are determined by sheer power, not by lines of direct descent, all my father’s attempts at dynasty aside.
I was born with the power to rule, and so I must want nothing more than the throne and the crown and the flesh of any who oppose me torn beneath my claws.
Yet I was still a Prince when I discovered that I was far happier to lurk in the rafters watching Will’s men perform their paces than I would ever be upon a gilded cushion. ”
“I’m glad,” I said, touching his cheek with the tips of my fingers. “I’m not sure I would ever have come to love the king the way I do the theater nerd.”
He smiled, then leaned in and kissed me.
My lips were still cold from the shadows, but his were warm, and I melted into him, drawing out the moment for as long as I reasonably could.
May didn’t know that we were back yet: she still had Andi, and that meant we could take this opportunity to remind ourselves that we were adult people with adult desires.
Not that I was particularly in the mood to give Bridget what she was asking for.
Miranda was a wonderful baby, as babies go, reasonably good at sleeping, and willing to be passed off to May without any real complaint.
But my nerves wouldn’t survive another pregnancy this soon, especially not with the looming threats of Titania and Evening both still out there, waiting to crash down on us when we least expected them.
And Janet! She’d managed to escape after abducting May’s mannikin, thinking that she was stealing my actual child.
I’d always been on the fence about whether or not I needed to actually hate that woman.
She’d effectively taken my daughter away from me by worming her way into Gillian’s life and poisoning her against Faerie, yes, but she’d also been the woman who raised my little girl.
She was still the one Gilly cried for when she woke up from a bad dream in the middle of the day and just wanted her mommy.
Resentment was easy, but it was hard to look at someone Gilly loved that much and cross all the way to hate.
Faerie treated Janet badly. From the beginning, Faerie treated Janet badly. And she was my grandmother.
For a long time, I’d tried to let those two facts be enough to make me, if not like her, then at least tolerate her presence.
So much of this just wasn’t her fault, and it wasn’t fair to behave as if it was.
But then she’d dared to orchestrate a plan that saw a lot of people hurt—Quentin had almost died, and blood or not, he was my son, he wasn’t something she got to just risk—and ended with her walking away with what she believed to be my daughter, triumphant and unremorseful.
If I saw her again, I wasn’t going to play nicely.
She didn’t deserve that anymore, if she ever had in the first place.
So no. No more children until we had fewer enemies lurking out there in the shadows, ready to ruin absolutely everything.
Most pureblood fae don’t really use much in the way of contraception.
Their birth rate is so low that there isn’t really a point, and for a lot of them, that would seem like going against Oberon’s will in a way they just can’t wrap their heads around.
Tybalt and I hadn’t been planning on starting to try for kids until I’d been at the hero business a little bit longer, and could reasonably take a break from my duties to give birth and spend at least a few months just being a mom.
Not running around being a hero, not ending up in deadly danger, nothing.
Miranda had had other ideas, and now that she was here, I was both happy to have her and introducing Tybalt to the wonders of the condom.
He’d encountered such things before, but not in well over a hundred years, and had been delighted by how much the technology had advanced while remaining essentially the same.
While I was still partially human, it was a very necessary precaution.
Tybalt sank deeper into the couch, breaking the kiss, and gave me a lazy, heavy-lidded look, smiling. “Hello, little fish,” he purred. “Feeling friendly this evening, are we?”
“I’m always your friend,” I said. “At this point, I’d wager that I’m your best friend, given how much time you spend with me. You like me. You like being around me.”
“You like me liking you,” he countered. “And while your word play could use some work, I like how much effort you put into properly bantering with me. We’ll have you on Will’s level eventually.”
“I don’t make nearly enough dick jokes,” I said primly.
He was still laughing when a portal opened in the middle of the room and Chelsea stepped through, only pausing for a second to give us a sidelong look before she turned resolutely toward the door.
“I’m here, Simon’s home safe, I saw nothing,” she said.
“Nothing at all. You are both fully clothed grownups who are not doing anything at all that my delicate young eyes should fail to see.”
“Give it up, Chels,” I said, and threw a pillow at her. It bounced off the back of her head. “Couch makeouts don’t even qualify as sexy stuff that you aren’t supposed to see. How old are you, anyway? Twelve?”
“I’m twenty,” she said. “Still a full decade from my majority, and Mom says me getting an extra twelve years of not being an adult is the best thing about moving me to Faerie.”
“Mmm-hmm.” I could sort of see Bridget’s position, though. Teen pregnancy isn’t nearly as much of an issue in Faerie, and that’s not solely down to the lower birth rate. The fact that kids don’t become adults until they hit thirty seems to slow down their acts of teen rebellion, at least a little.
Also, in the human world, most teen pregnancies involve at least one person who’s already well into adulthood, and that really doesn’t happen in Faerie.
Age gaps like the one between me and Tybalt are common, but almost no one over the age of thirty is really looking at someone under that age as a partner, or if they are, they’re planning for the future, not for Friday night.
It keeps things a bit more under control, and I appreciate that.
A lot of things about Faerie are terrible. That one isn’t.
“I need to go check on Ray,” said Chelsea, and hoofed it out of the living room before I could throw anything else.
I looked back to Tybalt, but the moment had passed, and I was all too aware that my daughter was somewhere in this house, out of my sight. “I need to go check on the baby,” I said, and started to slide off the couch.
“We both do,” agreed Tybalt reluctantly, and followed me.
Chelsea was already gone by the time we made it to the hall, and the lack of her magic in the air told me she was looking for Raysel on foot, not portaling around the house.
That was a nice change. Since her magic unlocked, she’d been basically treating walking like it was something that happened to other people.
Instead, the hall smelled like fresh-baked cake.
I sniffed appreciatively, then made for the kitchen.
Miranda was sitting in her high chair—a relatively new development, since she’d only been able to sit up on her own for about a week, which was still an early developmental milestone—and trying to swallow her entire fist, while May was taking a cake out of the oven, preparing to place it on the cooling rack next to two others.
She lifted her head at the sound of the door, giving me a quick, assessing once-over. “I don’t see any blood,” she said. “It went pretty well?”
“It could have gone worse,” I said. “I sort of yelled at Sylvester. A lot.”
“Well, he’s sort of needed it for a while,” she replied. “How did he take it?”
“Surprisingly well,” I said. “I think there’s a chance he might actually listen, which would be amazing. If he does, then maybe we can get him back. I hate that he’s not really a part of our lives right now.”