BUT BY DEGREES #3
Raccoons probably had less to worry about than I did. Their knights never stopped trusting them. They never hated the man they saw in the mirror. It might be nice to be a raccoon. I might enjoy it, even.
Someone knocked on the window next to my head. I jerked upright, making a truly undignified squeaking sound, and twisted around to find the Luidaeg standing on the sidewalk outside the car, looking at me perplexedly. She had one eyebrow arched high, making her look like a deeply confused Vulcan.
I turned the engine back on long enough to roll down the window, keeping my eyes on her the whole time. “Hey,” I said.
“You didn’t call ahead,” she countered. “You’re lucky I was already up, although you missed the hurricane. She and the kitty-cat blew through an hour ago.”
“Narrowly missing them is the theme of the day,” I said. “I narrowly missed them at home too.”
“So you came here? Kiddo, are you feeling all right? Most people don’t react to being ditched by shoving their hands into a sea monster’s mouth.”
“I didn’t come here on purpose,” I said. “I just drove, and this is where I ended up. I can go.”
“You came all this way. You might as well come inside and have a cup of tea.”
It wasn’t an invitation. It wasn’t an order, either.
It might as well have been both. She turned her back on me, walking toward the apartment building without looking to see whether I was following.
She was the Luidaeg. Of course I was following, unless I was really interested in that whole raccoon thing.
I got out of the car.
The Luidaeg, also known as the sea witch, is the oldest daughter of Oberon, born to Maeve before most of Faerie had even been considered, much less created.
She’s immeasurably powerful, but contained by complicated geasa that prevent her from using most of her magic for her own benefit.
She knows what it’s like to get screwed over by Titania, in other words.
That might make her sympathetic to my situation.
It might also make her impatient, since what I’d faced was nothing compared to what she had suffered, and continued to suffer, and would continue to suffer for some unknowable length of time.
An impatient sea witch is a sea witch who thinks turning people into random animals is funny.
But she can’t lie, so I knew that if Toby or Dean asked what had happened to me, she’d tell them the truth. And in the moment, she was one of the people I trusted more than anyone else.
I didn’t bother locking the car behind me. No one would steal from the Luidaeg’s street—not successfully, anyway. It was a short walk to her apartment door, which she left slightly ajar, beckoning me inside. I followed her in.
Today the Luidaeg’s apartment was perfectly normal for her part of San Francisco, maybe a little larger than most of its kind, laid out in the Victorian style, with rooms bleeding into each other like they couldn’t fully decide what each of them was meant to be used for.
I paused, blinking. Normally, her place looked like it had just been stolen from the seventies, a slice of pastel-and-avocado paradise, all shag carpet and chrome.
Even more frequently than that, it looked like it had been abandoned since the seventies, mold and water damage on every surface. This quiet, antique elegance was new.
She stopped in the living room, out of place in her normal guise of a human teenager with a fondness for using electrical tape to tie off her pigtails.
Really, her dedication to looking not just harmless but mildly goofy—like the comic-relief neighbor on a slice-of-life sitcom—was an impressive thing in its own right.
It only became terrifying if you paused to think about how she felt like a human, too, something innocent and powerless and mortal.
There was no sign of the strength and terrifying magical reserves she actually possessed.
That’s the Firstborn for you. They can tuck their power so far below the surface that you’ll never see them coming, and oh, how I hate that I have to know that. The Firstborn are supposed to be lost and gone, monsters of the past, not terrors of the present.
The Luidaeg looked at me, her eyes slowly shifting from a bottomless black to a bright, clear green, like pieces of a broken glass bottle tumbled smooth by the sea. There was sympathy in her expression that I winced away from, not quite willing to face it directly.
“You brought yourself here,” she said. “You must have been looking for something.”
I opened my mouth to lie and stopped, considering. Lying to the Luidaeg felt like a bad idea, and maybe more importantly, I wasn’t sure I needed to lie to her. Instead, I pivoted, turning to look at the well-maintained redwood wall.
“The apartment doesn’t usually look like this,” I said.
“That’s because we’re not in the apartment,” she replied.
“Technically we’re just a few miles from the Norton house in Half Moon Bay.
I keep this residence for emergencies, and times when I need to get to the Selkies in a hurry.
I figured you might not want to deal with my roommates when you look like death warmed over. ”
“That’s … uncommonly considerate of you,” I said.
She snorted. “Careful, kiddo, you just walked right up to the edge of the abyss that is calling me a bad host, looked down into the deeps, and decided to take a step back before you poked the kraken. You’re normally better than this at the pointless etiquette.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, and let myself sag where I stood, no longer making an effort to keep my shoulders high or my chin up. “It’s been a long couple of months.”
“I’ll say. You haven’t been coming around the way you usually do. I got used to you. Time goes faster when I have company around.” The corner of her mouth twitched in the semblance of a smile. “It almost moves like it’s supposed to these days.”
“I apologize for my absence,” I said. “I’ve been adjusting to the changes in my home.”
“Raysel and the baby, right?”
I nodded.
“See, that’s the thing, though. I don’t really care much about the Torquill whelp—she’s just the latest by-blow of a line that’s caused me way too much trouble across the years.
If they hadn’t been necessary to get to October, I would probably have tried to trick one of them into making a bad bargain a long time ago, turn the lot of them into something with the sense to leave me the fuck alone.
But the baby, oh, I care a lot about the baby.
She’s my first grandchild in centuries, and it’s my job to take care of her, right up until I can’t take care of her any longer.
I’ve been by the house a whole bunch of times since she was born, and you know what I haven’t seen? ”
“What?” I asked, voice gone small.
“You.” She looked at me levelly. Her eyes were still green, which was a good sign.
She couldn’t be too angry with me if her eyes were still green.
“I come by in the morning, you’re still asleep.
I come by during the day, you’re out training or you’re just not available.
I come by in the evening, you’re out with Dean.
If you had any way of knowing when I was going to drop by the house, I’d think you were avoiding me.
But here’s the funny thing: no matter where Toby says you are, your car is almost always in the driveway.
It’s like she’s trying to cover for you.
Where ya been, kiddo? And don’t lie to me. You won’t like it if you lie to me.”
Her eyes didn’t change, but her hair, it writhed, the individual dark curls twisting around each other like eels. It only lasted for a moment. A moment was more than long enough to remind me of what a bad idea it would be to toy with the Luidaeg.
As if I’d ever needed the reminder. She’d been a monster out of a storybook when I was a child, and then she’d been the monster right in front of me, until somehow, one day, she hadn’t been a monster at all.
She’d been a friend and an ally, and respecting her role as a living nightmare had been less important than caring about her as a person.
The Luidaeg needed people who could care about her.
Thanks to Toby, I’d been able to do the job, for a long time.
There was a recliner behind me, polished hardwood and buttery brown leather, styled to look like something out of my father’s halls, rather than a piece of furniture that could have been sold in any modern showroom.
My knees were already shaking: it was no great trial to let them buckle, dropping me into the chair, where I folded double, my forehead against my knees.
I couldn’t lie to her. I couldn’t tell her the truth.
And with neither avenue open to me, I chose silence, the great aching stillness beyond all struggles.
My chest was starting to get tight again, and my throat felt like it was narrowing to the width of a straw, making it more and more difficult to breathe.
Almost abstractly, I thought I might be about to faint.
That would be something interesting added on to a day that was already more than interesting enough.
This feeling wasn’t fear, exactly, but it might be a close cousin; it stopped my ears the same way, making the world seem distant and unimportant.
Whatever it was, I hated it, enough that I tuned out the sea witch to focus on the feeling, and trying to make it go away.
Focus only seemed to make it worse. My heart started beating faster and faster, the sound of it reverberating in my ears like a distant drumming.