One #2
Miranda is her own thing. There’s no human in her, I know that much, and while I can get a surface-level look at her heritage just by breathing in the scent of her magic, I can’t look much deeper without drawing blood.
I have no real interest in cutting my child in order to learn something that won’t mean anything until she starts to use her magic consciously.
But she was born fully fae, whether due to my magic seeing the mortality inherent in her human blood as a danger to my unborn child, or her own deciding that having me for a mother meant she had enough to worry about, and didn’t need to add humanity to the mix.
It doesn’t matter either way. When she’s older, we’ll find out whether she takes after her father—forgive me if I’m not super excited about the idea of my daughter turning into a cat to get away from me every time she doesn’t want to clean her room—or not. And we’ll love her either way.
We already know she’s Dóchas Sidhe enough to heal almost instantly.
She doesn’t have her father’s retractable claws, but it seems like all babies have razor blades for nails, and I’d seen her scratch herself, only for the marks to fade in seconds.
She wasn’t rolling yet, but she’d managed to poke herself rather solidly in the eye at least once, and even that had become a non-issue before she could quite get enough air to start crying.
There are worse things in this world than an indestructible child.
Having already experienced the joys of infancy and toddlerhood with a daughter who was less magically protected, I was looking forward to getting through the whole “learning to walk” process without feeling constantly judged by people who could see the bruises on my baby.
I paused, taking a breath to steady myself, and tried to refocus on the moment, on the room around me and the baby at my breast. This was the present. This was my life now. This was what mattered.
I loved Gillian desperately. I still do, and I always will.
She’s my daughter. But our time together was cut short by forces beyond our control, and she grew up being taught to hate me for leaving her.
She’s managed to forgive me, to a degree, but not entirely, and honestly, I don’t think she can fully forgive me.
That’s all right: she shouldn’t have to.
I’m content just to know that she’s safe and protected and part of Faerie, which isn’t always fair, but has a slightly better track record than the human world when it comes to taking care of me and mine.
My husband and Miranda’s father, Tybalt, is a Cait Sidhe, one of the faerie cats, a natural-born shapeshifter with a gift for traveling through shadows.
He’s also a King of Cats, even if the title is more honorary than anything else these days.
He’s all but abdicated the throne to his nephew, Raj, in order to focus on his family.
Protecting us is his primary focus, although he’d been trying hard to be better about not being smothering about it.
Learning that Miranda heals like me has helped a lot.
Not that he’s going to be happy if she’s also inherited my tendency to get stabbed on a recreational basis, but at least he can be sure she’s not going to take any lasting physical damage.
He’s a king, and I’m a knight errant and officially recognized Hero of the Realm, sworn to Duke Sylvester Torquill of Shadowed Hills but primarily in active service to Queen Arden Windermere in the Mists.
Miranda is … just Miranda, which suits me perfectly.
Neither my title nor Tybalt’s are hereditary, and I’d prefer my daughter be allowed to grow up in her own time and her own way, and decide what she’s going to be.
I’m not a big fan of inescapable obligations, and I know too many princes to feel like having a crown hanging over your head is a good thing.
Speaking of princes, I’ve managed to cover most of my immediate family, but the extended is still relevant.
We live in San Francisco, on the mortal side of the city, because nothing says “comfort and relaxation” like the constant fear of discovery, and we share the house with my sister—sort of—May, and her fiancée, Jasmine.
May’s a Fetch, a type of death omen created when one of the night-haunts tastes the blood of the living.
She carries the memories of every person she’s ever been a mirror for.
Most of those memories are faded and thin, distorted by lifetimes piled on top of them, but the last two people whose memories she shares are me and a changeling girl named Darice Lorimer, called “Dare.” Dare died to save me, and she died thinking of me as her hero.
Which is why the night-haunt she became chose to taste my blood and become my Fetch, hoping she could protect me somehow.
She’s protected me in more ways than I can possibly name, and I’m proud to call her my sister, even if our actual family status is a little too complicated to explain that easily.
Jasmine—Jazz—is a Raven-maid, a type of skinshifter.
They’re distinct from shapeshifters like Tybalt in that they keep their magic in an external object, which can be stolen.
In Jazz’s case, it’s a feathered headband.
There aren’t many types of skinshifter in Faerie.
With the Selkies almost gone, the Ravens and the Swanmays are the only ones that I can think of.
Jazz runs an antique store in Berkeley, and May keeps the house from descending totally into chaos. Her cooking is actually edible, and her cleaning leaves the living areas in better shape than when she started. The same cannot be reliably said about me.
Apart from May and Jazz, we have Quentin, my squire, which means I’m responsible for his care, feeding, and education.
He’s twenty-one now, legal by human standards, but still nine years away from his majority under the laws of Faerie.
Which means I have nine years left to convince him that he needs to go home to Toronto and take his place as next High King of the Westlands, a birthright he seems less and less likely to willingly accept.
Because, y’know, having me as his primary adult role model was guaranteed to craft him into a respecter of the rules.
Mistakes were made, is all I’m saying here. Mistakes were definitely made.
But I don’t regret them. Quentin’s been with me for six years, and in that time, he’s become closer than blood. He’s my son in every way that matters, and lucky for me, he feels the same. He’s a good kid. Among the best I’ve ever known.
The last current resident of our house is my liege’s daughter, Rayseline.
We mostly call her Raysel, both because she prefers it, and because “Rayseline” is too many syllables for everyday use.
She’s with us on a temporary basis, having joined our household after I claimed offense against her for things she actually did do to me and the people I loved.
In her defense, she was having a mental breakdown at the time, one exacerbated by the physical strain of living in a body that was trying to destroy itself.
At the same time, she tried to kill my daughter and my stepbrothers—it’s a long story—and “Sorry, I was having a bad mental health day” doesn’t excuse everything.
Still, her stay with us has been less about punishment and more about giving her the room to recover.
Not that she’d been able to spend the whole time recovering, not with Titania crashing the party before she’d even been given a chance to settle into the guest room May had prepared for her.
Titania’s arrival had kicked off an enchantment large enough to consume Faerie as we knew it, replacing it with a parallel reality in which Raysel didn’t, and couldn’t, exist.
We’d been trapped in that enchantment for four months, living different lives and grappling with different memories.
And Raysel had spent that time trapped in her grandfather’s skerry, wandering a world of dark forests, endless night, and terrible hunts that would have happily confined her to their stables, to be transformed into something other than herself.
Not exactly conducive to an easy recovery.
And sure, we’d all managed to make it home in the end, and Raysel’s time in Blind Michael’s lands had given her the opportunity to start building bridges with Dean Lorden, who had been one of her victims, but those four months would have been better spent in therapy.
Well, she was in therapy now, and had been for the better part of eight months. According to Dr. Voss, she was making great progress.
Also according to Dr. Voss, the worst possible thing we could do right now would be returning her to her parents, and to Shadowed Hills.
Much of her trauma was rooted there, and sadly for everyone involved, her father shared a face with her abductor …
who happened to be my father, because Faerie is nothing if not awkward for everyone involved.
She wasn’t actively afraid of Simon, but she was afraid of her own father, who could potentially take her back to her mother, and that made her feel terrible every time she saw either one of them. As for her mother …
Let’s just say that I don’t get along very well with Luna these days, either, and leave it at that for as long as we can.
Unfortunately for all of us, but most unfortunately for Raysel, her term of offense was going to end in another three days, and the only way we’d been able to come up with to get out of it involved convincing the Queen we should be allowed to extend our claim due to Titania’s interference.
It was an unlikely maneuver, and even if it somehow worked, it would only buy us four months.
Worst of all, even if it was going to work, she wasn’t holding court again for another two days, meaning we had to wait until Raysel’s parents were virtually on our doorstep before we’d have our answer.