BUT BY DEGREES #7
“I had a feeling,” I admitted. “I knew how much I needed a hug, and I just saw Dean a few hours ago. If I needed a hug that much, you had to be way worse off than I was.”
“Get out of here, kid,” she said, taking a playful swipe at my shoulder. She failed to connect, and it wouldn’t have much mattered if she had, since her hand currently looked as human as the rest of her. She was genuinely being playful, not trying to hit me.
Maybe I wasn’t that bad after all, if I made the eldest of the Firstborn remember how to play. There had to be something redeemable about me if I could do that.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll go talk to somebody else, and leave you to do whatever it is you do when we’re not bothering you.”
“And thus do you prove once again that you’re one of my favorites,” she said.
I laughed, and she walked me to the door, opening it before I could.
That made sense: whatever magic was connecting this place to her doorway in San Francisco would be easier to maintain if she was the only one who touched it.
If I opened the door, there was really no telling where I might come out.
Although Half Moon Bay seemed like a reasonable bet.
With Diva asleep back at Toby’s place, I was unlikely to get a very warm welcome from the Roane remaining at the Ryan house.
Gillian was probably there, and she would not be thrilled to see her mother’s squire showing up for no good reason.
And I’d have to call Danny to get home, which would give us plenty of time to talk, sure, but wouldn’t really be a good move, given that he still thought Toby was incredibly pissed off at him.
That was something he and I had in common, although he had more recent reasons to think that than I did.
I was still running off of Titania’s illusions.
He was dealing with the fact that he’d been there when we got drugged and abducted, and hadn’t realized what was going on.
Not that he’d had any reason to expect that was going to happen, and not like it was his job to protect his local hero, but still, he felt pretty bad about it, and in true Toby fashion, she wasn’t in any hurry to unsnarl the situation.
Maybe I’d learned some of my borderline-avoidant behaviors from her.
When the Luidaeg opened the door, it was on the San Francisco street where she’d originally found me, and I stepped out into the brisk, cool air of the morning, the fog now long since burnt away.
“Have a good day, kiddo,” said the sea witch, closing the door behind me.
I knew even without testing the theory that if I knocked, there’d be no answer, because I’d be knocking on a door that didn’t lead to wherever she currently was.
If she didn’t want to be bothered, she wouldn’t be there to bother.
It made good sense, if you looked at it from the right angle.
Feeling substantially better than I had when I arrived, I turned to walk back to my car.
As I had expected, it was untouched, protected by the same subtle illusions that made this one of the safest streets in San Francisco, no matter what it looked like.
No one got hurt here, not with the Luidaeg to take care of them.
I slid into the driver’s seat, resting my hands on the wheel, and took a deep breath.
The Luidaeg was right: I did need to keep talking to people.
I felt better, but I also felt like I was going to be violently ill, like I had lanced an infected wound but not yet expressed all the septic material that had been gathering under the skin. I needed to finish pressing it out.
Dean and Diva were both asleep, and Chelsea was off chasing Toby—something that only made me a little jealous.
Yeah, I was normally the one dogging my knight’s footsteps, but if it had been Dean in danger, I would have bitten anyone who tried to stop me.
Given that it was Raysel who’d disappeared, I could understand Chelsea’s insistence on going along, and I didn’t blame her.
Still, it meant she wasn’t really an option right at the moment.
Neither was Danny, or anyone at home, or Marcia—no one too much older than I was. They were all more confident in who they were, and their places in Faerie. I needed to talk to someone who understood how uncertain my footing was anymore.
Once again, the Luidaeg was right. I needed to talk to Raj.
The Court of Cats has many entrances. They’re hidden all over the city, tucked into back alleys and behind buildings, sometimes behind literal dumpsters.
They seem a little redundant, since all Cait Sidhe can access the court by walking through the shadows, but they serve a purpose all the same.
The entrances are places where the shadows have been intentionally thinned out and carved away, allowing the cats already inside the court to hear people who come begging for their attention, or their aid.
As to what people might need their help with, there are a remarkable number of situations that can be improved by cats.
My life has definitely been improved by cats. There are Cait Sidhe in Toronto, of course, but I never had much to do with them, and there weren’t many Cait Sidhe in Shadowed Hills while I was there—or now, as far as I knew. They just didn’t keep company there. And yet.
Raj was the best friend I’d never realized I was missing.
A Prince of Cats in his own right, he was entirely unimpressed by either my title or the crown I was set to eventually inherit.
He had a title and crown of his own, and since his belonged to a cat, they were clearly better than anything I might be intending to have, so why should he care about my stinky old nobility?
That was exactly how he described it the first time the topic came up, too.
He’d never been impressed by me, never treated me like I deserved more respect than I had earned on my own, but he also never acted like he needed to prove that he was better than I was.
He knew he was better than me, and since he had nothing to prove, he was content just to be my friend.
He was sweet and he was fun and he was funny, and we might have thought about dating if not for the fact that he had a girlfriend, Helen, to whom he was ridiculously devoted.
I say “ridiculously” as a good thing: he would move the heavens themselves for that girl if he ever felt like he needed to.
She’d been a captive of Blind Michael’s lands along with him, and while they’d been traumatized there, they had also bonded so tightly that their relationship was still going strong several years later.
She seemed to be good for him. I didn’t know for sure, because we’d only managed to meet a few times: she had severe agoraphobia, something she was working on with Dr. Voss, and didn’t get out very much.
Apart from that, we both knew from the start that we had titles and responsibilities waiting for us.
He was going to be King of Cats in Tybalt’s place, and I was going to be High King of the Westlands, ruling an entire continent as best as I possibly could.
That didn’t leave a lot of room for the two of us to court properly, and the conflict of interests between our two courts would inevitably have torn us apart.
Really, we were better off loving other people and staying friends forever.
I drove deeper into the city, heading for Japantown.
Once there, I turned toward the Japan Center, a shopping complex with its own parking garage.
Parking is key to getting anything done in San Francisco, and the less time I have to spend chasing it down, the better.
A quick incantation and twist of magic and I was safely beyond the barriers, tucked invisibly into an unreserved space that I would mysteriously not be expected to pay for when I left.
I checked my human disguise in the rearview mirror, pleased to see that it was holding up, and got out of the car, walking toward the rear exit.
The front would let me out near shopping and colorful street displays, designed to catch the eyes of passing tourists and entice them to spend more money before they moved on to other amusements.
The back fed into a narrow alley lined with dumpsters, where the air always smelled of half-rotten food and human urine.
An odd destination for a prince, but the right one.
No one watched as I stepped through the door and out into the alley.
The stink was just as bad as I had expected it to be.
I breathed shallowly through my mouth, stopping my nose to block the smell as much as I could, and walked past the dumpster, heading for the point where the alley came to a dead end.
As I had hoped, there were a few apparently stray cats there, lounging around the dumpsters on beds of cardboard and torn upholstery foam.
“Hello,” I said, with as much conviction as I could manage. “My name’s Quentin. I’m a friend of your prince. Can one of you please let Prince Raj know that I’ve come to humbly request an audience with him?”
The cats looked at me, eyes half-narrowed in that companionable way that cats have, the one that says you’re beneath them but might be tolerated if you have chicken. One, a lanky tabby, yawned enormously enough to show me a full complement of very sharp teeth. I sighed.
“I’m not going to leave,” I said. “So you can either be the awesome, attentive subjects who told your prince that his friend was here, or the irritating subjects who left his friend to stand in an alley for Oberon knows how long before he figured it out on his own. The choice is yours.”
The cats exchanged a complicated four-way look before rising, stretching languidly, and slipping behind the nearest dumpster. Three of them didn’t return. The fourth returned as a lanky teen with pale, striped skin, who slouched against the wall and eyed me with vague disdain.
“Cal,” I said, nodding politely. “You might want to consider a human disguise. It’s daylight.”