Once Broken Faith (October Daye #10)(12)
“Pureblood hospitality gives me a headache,” I grumbled, snatching another piece of gooey cereal.
May shot me a sympathetic look. “It’s designed to be learned over the course of decades and refined over the course of centuries. It’s not your fault that you don’t take to it naturally.”
“I wish you could go instead of me.”
“I’ll probably go in addition to you,” said May. I blinked at her. She shrugged, beginning to spoon her cereal mixture into a serving dish. “Apart from the fact that I was one of the people elf-shot in Silences, I have a long, long memory. None of the people whose lives I consumed had been elf-shot themselves, but some of them had lost friends and loved ones that way. One man, his wife was elf-shot and still decades away from waking when we came for him. He died with her name on his lips, and I put his face on to finish it. Elf-shot is supposed to be merciful, but I’m pretty sure it’s not. I want to see how this goes.”
“Oh.”
May was my Fetch: a night-haunt who had consumed the blood of the living and transformed into a duplicate of that person when the time came to play death omen. She’d expected her long, long life to end when she became my mirror, and she’d done it anyway, because the night-haunts lived vicariously through the people whose corpses they ate, and the last person she’d consumed had been a girl named Dare. Like me, Dare had been trained as a street thug by Devin, a modern day Fagin crossed with Peter Pan. Unlike me, she’d never been able to escape the gravity of his attention. Dare died thinking I was her hero, and that thought had been enough to influence the night-haunt who took on the bulk of her personality. She had chosen to die a second time, all for the sake of warning me that my own life was coming to an end.
Under normal circumstances, May would have appeared, I would have died, and she would have vanished, dissolving into mist and the smell of rain. Instead, my mother, Amandine, had intervened, changing the balance of my blood for the first time in my adult life. Somehow, that had cleansed the elf-shot that was killing me from my body, and transformed me just enough to break the tether tying May’s existence to my own. She was something unique now, a Fetch with nothing to bind her. And while the bulk of her memories were taken from either me or Dare, sometimes she’d say things to remind me that she was so much older.
I sighed. Speaking of things that were older . . . “Do you have everything under control down here? I think I need to give the Luidaeg a call, let her know what’s happening, and tell her the High King is in town.” She might already know. She was often surprisingly well-informed—or not so surprisingly, given that she was the sea-witch, Firstborn daughter of Maeve, and fully capable of grilling the local pixie population for news. Still, she’d appreciate hearing it from me, and it was always good to avoid getting on her bad side.
“Go, go,” said May, making a shooing gesture with her free hand. “I can control the ravening hordes for a while longer. I think they’re enjoying the lack of adult supervision.”
“You’re the best,” I said, and grabbed one more chunk of Rice Krispie treat before leaving the kitchen and heading up the stairs to my room.
San Francisco is one of the most expensive cities in the world, and getting worse as the tech boom moves more and more multimillion-dollar human companies into the business district. Jazz owns a secondhand shop in Berkeley. May works there occasionally, when Jazz needs the help, and spends the rest of her time doing whatever strikes her fancy. My PI work brings in a reasonable amount, although very few nobles ever think to pay me for knight errantry. Quentin mostly eats whatever appears in the fridge and spends his time learning how to be a better ruler. So how is it that we’re able to afford a two-story Victorian near Dolores Park, in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood?
Simple: my liege, Duke Sylvester Torquill, has been in the Bay Area for centuries, and owns enough land in San Francisco to make the snootiest of human tech millionaires sit up and salivate. We live rent-free, and the foundation he’d established to handle mortal upkeep of his properties paid the taxes. It’s a sweet setup. It would be even sweeter if I didn’t feel so guilty about it. Sylvester and I were . . . not estranged, exactly, but not exactly speaking to each other, either.
He’s my liege. He’s supposed to be straight with me. He’s supposed to be the person I could trust no matter what. And he’d destroyed that in the name of keeping a promise he’d made to my mother before I’d even been born. He hadn’t lied to me according to pureblood standards, which were often more fixated on the letter of the law than on anything else, but as far I was concerned, a lie of omission was still a lie. He’d withheld a lot of information from me—information that could have helped me understand my past and protect my future—and he’d done it because he cared more about his word to Amandine than about his word to me. Maybe I have trust issues. I think I’ve earned them. That doesn’t change the fact that Sylvester, who I had trusted with everything, had still been willing to betray me.
No matter how I currently felt about Sylvester, I loved our house. It was home. I’d been trying to find my way home for a long, long time.
My cats, Cagney and Lacey, and my resident rose goblin, Spike, were curled on the bed when I stepped into my room. Of the three of them, only Lacey bothered to open an eye, although she didn’t move. They had clearly fled before the onslaught of teenage invaders, and had no interest in doing anything that could bring them back into the line of fire. I smiled at them as I closed the bedroom door.