BUT BY DEGREES #2
Visually, she was a mirror of the woman Toby had been when I first met her, features soft and rounded by mortality, ears blunted, hair still a background shade of brown, utterly ordinary and remarkably forgettable.
She streaked it with bright colors, neon shades, but they washed out, leaving brown behind.
Unlike Toby, she wasn’t a changeling, even though she looked more human than my knight did anymore; as a Fetch, she was fae from one end to the other.
She was just a perfect duplicate of Toby before she’d rebalanced her blood.
Fetches aren’t supposed to stick around more than a few days. They’re death omens. Well, this death omen baked a mean scone, and without her, the house would have devolved into chaos a long time ago.
Filling one of the larger coffee mugs almost to the top, I doctored it with whole milk and maple syrup—yes, it’s a stereotype, and yes, it’s delicious; I don’t understand why anyone would sweeten their coffee with sugar when maple syrup is an option—before walking over to the table and sitting down across from Jazz.
She gave me a sleepy nod and didn’t say anything.
May went back to kneading her dough. “You just missed Toby and Tybalt,” she said, casually, like it was no big deal.
I choked on my coffee. Coughing, I turned to face her.
She smiled serenely back at me, like she hadn’t just said something completely ridiculous.
Recovering myself, I sputtered, “No, that’s not possible.
They would have come to wake me up if they were back and then left again.
I’m her squire. She needs me to help her, and I need her to train me. ”
“Chelsea’s wound pretty tight over what’s going on with Raysel: she was already awake and insisting on going with them, and I guess Toby wanted to keep the group as small as she reasonably can.
Plus you haven’t been sleeping much lately, and I bet she thought it was better to let you rest.” May started talking faster as my expression fully registered and she realized her explanation was only making things worse.
“They’re basically done with the big stuff, this is just cleanup anyway.
They left for Shadowed Hills about an hour ago.
I know she didn’t mean to leave you out of anything and this is where I’m just going to stop talking. ”
Jazz shot me a sympathetic look.
I put my coffee mug carefully down. “My knight, the woman I have trusted my life to, took an untrained Tuatha de Dannan into a potentially dangerous situation, leaving me behind. She would never have done that before Titania, would she?”
“It’s Toby,” May protested. “She does stupid shit all the time. She might have—”
“She wouldn’t, and we both know it.” I stood, leaving my barely touched coffee behind. “I appreciate you letting me know.”
“Quentin…” said Jazz, her voice trailing off as she realized she didn’t know what to say.
“I’m fine,” I said. “My knight doesn’t trust me anymore, but I’m fine.
And maybe I deserve it, because all the choices I made inside Titania’s enchantment were my own.
She didn’t change my mind, only my circumstances.
Maybe this is for the best. I was worried about how I was going to force myself to go back to Toronto.
If Toby doesn’t want me here anymore, that gets a lot easier. ”
“You’re making some pretty big leaps here, buddy,” said May, stepping toward me. “Toby trusts you. Toby loves you. We all do.”
“I have to go,” I said, and turned, walking rapidly back to the door.
My chest felt tight as I stepped out into the hall, my heart beating too fast and my vision seeming to narrow to a thinly focused point.
I put a hand on the wall, supporting myself while I waited for the room to stop spinning.
Sadly, this sensation wasn’t novel anymore.
It had been happening more and more frequently since Titania’s version of reality dissolved, leaving us back in a real world that didn’t fit quite right anymore. Something was wrong with me.
When the bands around my chest began to loosen, I looked up the stairs, trying to assess my chances of getting in and out of my room without waking Dean.
Diva was presumably still asleep in the guest room, and I didn’t keep any spare clothes in Raysel’s room.
What I was wearing would have to be good enough for the day.
Fortunately, my shoes were on the rack next to the front door, and my car keys were on the hook where they belonged.
I retrieved both before grabbing a handful of air and twisting it tight between my fingers.
The smell of steel and heather rose around me as I recited, “In Norway there lived a maid, bai-loo my baby, she begins…”
My magic gathered, swelled, and burst, leaving me draped in a perfectly human disguise, street clothes, rounded ears, and everything.
I glanced down at myself, nodded satisfaction, and left the house with the confidence of someone who knew damn well his illusions could stand up to the sun.
What was the point of all that training with Etienne if I couldn’t at least run away from home with conviction?
What was the point of any of this? Really, why was I still bothering to try?
If Toby didn’t trust me anymore, there was nothing left but to head back to my parents and hope they could forgive me for being so eager to stay in the Mists.
I could be the good little crown prince they’d been hoping I would become when they sent me into fosterage—even though the boy they’d sent away had been well on his way to growing into the arrogant asshole Titania had shaped me into.
My parents had known he was a possibility, and they’d still wanted me to come home, even if I came home as him.
They wouldn’t look at me like I was a stranger, I was almost sure of it. They would welcome me with open arms.
And somehow, the idea didn’t make me feel any better.
Instead, it made me feel like I would be running away, refusing to take responsibility for my own actions.
No matter what had inspired them, they’d still been my own.
I would always have to live with the memory of my hands on Toby’s back, pushing her for nothing more than the mean joy of making life worse for someone I had seen as below me.
I would always know that I could be that person.
I slid into the driver’s seat of my car after checking the back for unwanted guests—one more habit I’d picked up from Toby, keeping myself alive with a patchwork of skills she’d given me—and started the engine, pulling out of the driveway. I needed to think. I couldn’t do that at home.
Not anymore.
San Francisco is not a soothing city to drive idly around in.
For one thing, it’s made almost entirely of hills.
For another thing, half the people foolish enough to drive there are from out of town, meaning they have no idea how to handle the hills which are, again, most of the city.
Parking is rare, and when you can find it, it’s either expensive or at the kind of slant that tests the skills of drivers far more experienced than most of our tourists.
Really, it’s a miracle that more people don’t get wrecked just trying to make their way from one end of the city to the other.
I learned to drive from October—one more knightly duty she had performed without complaint before the enchantment—and she grew up driving in San Francisco.
I won’t claim to be an expert at dealing with the hills, but at least I wasn’t terrified of them, and as long as I took things slowly, was able to get around with minimal abuse of my brakes.
I drove in circles for an hour or so, watching the city slide by outside my windows and listening to the beating of my heart as it slowed back to something more common and comforting.
It was early enough that fog still clung to the streets nearer the bay, and I found myself following it, sliding into the gray and letting it wrap the world in comforting quiet.
Fog can’t really muffle sounds, but it can seem like it does, blunting everything in a way that soothed my jangling nerves.
There was no point where I consciously decided where I was going, or that I was going anywhere.
I just followed the fog as it rolled back toward the water, until I was driving through a shabby, dangerous-looking neighborhood, surrounded by apartment buildings with boarded-over windows and corner stores whose signs hadn’t been updated since the late nineties.
I turned another corner and paused as I saw a familiar building ahead of me, still half-shrouded in the fog.
Somehow, my idle turns had carried me straight to the lair of the sea witch.
As was frequently the case, there was a parking space open directly in front of her building. I turned toward it, sliding in between a rusty old junker of a pickup truck and a newer Toyota with one window replaced by cardboard and duct tape. You know, real classy.
I turned off the engine, looking toward the Luidaeg’s apartment building.
It looked like any of the others around it, with peeling paint and water damage staining the foundations.
But the sidewalk out front was uncracked and intact, and there were no broken windows.
It was like only entropy was allowed to touch the place, and none of the signs of societal neglect could matter.
That was her influence. She’d been living there basically since San Francisco was settled, had watched the city grow, burn, and grow again, and she didn’t like moving without good reason.
So her residence remained essentially untouchable, a monument to an unknowable presence living among the humans who called the city their home, and anyone who thought too long about breaking one of her windows was likely to learn what existence was like as a raccoon.