Ashes of Honor

  “About earlier…” I began, then stopped, unsure how to finish the sentence. The fae prohibition against something as simple as saying “thank you” can be clumsy sometimes. Like now. The gang of changelings would have stuck around to finish me off if Tybalt hadn’t stepped in. It was as if my ability to be careful had died with Connor, and I hadn’t figured out a way to resurrect it yet.

  “The house seems nice,” Tybalt said, tone neutral.

  I recognized the conversational save and grabbed it with both hands. “We’re almost unpacked. I’m getting used to it. It’s nice to have everyone in their own room, so I don’t trip over Quentin every time I go to get a cup of coffee.”

  “I’m glad Sylvester was able to arrange the move.”

  “Me, too.” My liege, Sylvester Torquill, had been trying to get me to move out of my apartment for years. When I gave up Goldengreen—the knowe that was briefly in my possession—Sylvester put his foot down, insisting that if I wasn’t willing to move into Shadowed Hills, I was at least going to move into a place where I wasn’t sharing walls with humans. I’d responded by saying I wouldn’t move out of San Francisco. It was the Queen’s territory, and it was a long way from Shadowed Hills, but it was home. After some arguing, he acquiesced, and I took possession of one of the many houses he and his wife owned the title to.

  The new house was on 20th Street, overlooking Mission Delores Park. It would probably have cost a million or more on the open market. Sylvester did all his real estate investment in that area over a century ago. All he had to do was hand me the keys, and suddenly we had as much room as we needed.

  Moving meant boxing up all the things Connor had accidentally left at my place: shirts and sandals, toothbrushes and half-finished paperbacks. I found them, boxed them, and took them with us. I didn’t know how to let him go. I don’t believe in ghosts, but there were times when I felt like I was being haunted. Worse yet, there were times when I didn’t know whether I minded the haunting.

  Tybalt cleared his throat. “Quentin’s studies are proceeding well?”

  “I think so. They seem to be. I’ve never done this before.” Quentin was my squire, making me responsible for teaching him how to be an effective knight of Faerie without getting himself killed. Mostly, this seemed to mean he was underfoot all the time, and Sylvester sent money to pay for feeding him. At least he had his own room now.

  “Raj is quite envious, you know.”

  I shot Tybalt a glance. “Really?” Raj was his adopted nephew and probable heir to the throne of the Court of Cats.

  “Really.” He nodded. “We have nothing so organized in the Court of Cats. No one teaches a King to be a King. You claim your position the day the old King no longer holds it.”

  “Because the new King has just kicked his ass?” I asked.

  The amusement faded but didn’t disappear. “In most cases, yes,” he said.

  We kept walking. It’s not far from the Mission Police Station to Mission Delores Park, but I wasn’t hurrying. It was a beautiful night, and I was too tired to hurry. I risked another glance at Tybalt as we walked. For someone who used to be one of my biggest—not enemies, exactly, but annoyances—he’s become very important to me. There have been times I was pretty sure I was important to him, too. Maybe I was right, but we’d silently agreed to let the issue rest after Connor died. We both needed some time.

  Tybalt managed to seem feline even wearing a human disguise; it was something in the way he moved, something that had nothing to do with the shape of his ears or the color of his hair. Cats have no stripes in the dark, after all. His jeans and flannel work shirt looked at once too mundane and exactly right for him. He was walking slowly to pace me, despite his longer legs, and was staying carefully outside my personal space.

  That’s something else that changed when Connor died. Tybalt used to take obvious pleasure in standing too close just to watch me squirm. As soon as I went into mourning, that part of his feline nature faded. He’s always been a contradiction that way, part arrogant feline, part genuinely compassionate man. It just took me a while to see the second side of him.

  As always, walking with Tybalt was strangely comfortable. This time, it came with a new feeling—guilt, as though I was betraying Connor’s memory by being comfortable with another man. Finally, to break the silence, I asked, “How did you know where to find me before?”

  “Ah.” Tybalt sighed. “It was, in a roundabout way, your squire.”

  “Quentin?”

  “Yes. He told Raj, including a complaint that you were going to get yourself killed. Raj, naturally, assumed this was something I might like to know, and, well…” Tybalt shrugged. “I am sure you would have been fine without me.”

  “Oh, yeah. I just let you help so you wouldn’t feel useless.”

  Tybalt spared a small smile. “Quite kind of you.”

  “Don’t mention it,” I said. “So what was keeping May too occupied to come and get me herself? Not to sound like I’m whining or anything, but it’s not like I get picked up by the police every night, and it would have been nice of her to come down to the station.”

  Tybalt made a face.

  I sighed. “I meant on foot, like this. Not in the car.” May is possibly the worst driver in the world. If there are worse, I don’t want to know. I have enough trouble sleeping as it is.

  “You have company.”

  “Company? Please tell me you mean the pleasant kind of company, like Stacy brought the kids over, or even Danny and the Barghests.”

  “As opposed to…?”

  “The unpleasant kind of company. The kind of company that’s here to arrest and/or kill me. Or maybe kill me, and then arrest me, and then bring me back to life and kill me again.”

  “Ah. I don’t believe the current company falls into either category. It’s Etienne.”

  “Etienne?” I blinked at him. “Seriously?”

  Tybalt nodded. “Seriously.”

  Etienne is one of the other knights in Sylvester’s service. He’s a traditionalist, and I’m, well, not. We get along reasonably well—we’ve only ever attacked each other when we had really good reasons—but we’ve never been friends. I hadn’t even realized he knew where I lived, much less had any desire to visit. “Did he say what he wanted?” I asked. We were almost to the house, and suddenly, it seemed way too far away. “Is Sylvester okay?”

  “I knew you would ask that, so I made him reassure me that everything is fine in Shadowed Hills. The Torquills are well, and the court continues to thrive.”

  “So…what’s Etienne doing at my house?”

  “He wouldn’t tell me.”

  I sighed, turning the corner onto 20th Street. “That’s never a good sign.”

  Tybalt smirked. “So little is, when you’re involved.”

  I laughed and kept walking. The businesses of Valencia fell away, replaced by stately old Victorian brownstones. Most had long since been converted into smaller apartments, divided and subdivided until not even they remembered what they’d once been. A few, like mine, were lucky enough to have been in private hands since they were built, and remained spacious reminders of an earlier era. Most of the houses were dark, the gates separating their small yards from the street closed and locked. Tybalt and I kept walking until the light from my living room window told us that we’d reached our destination.

  It looked like any other house on the street from the outside. The tiny yard was a mix of heirloom rosebushes and easy-care groundcover, all of which was tended by the groundskeeper Sylvester paid to “protect his investment.” In daylight, the paint was maybe a little too bright, an eye-popping mixture of yellow, green, and electric blue. But at night, with the moonlight softening the colors, it was beautiful. Knowing Sylvester, I had faith that it was intentional. Fae eyes would see the house by night, so night was when the house would look its very best.

  I opened the gate and started up the path to the porch, pausing when I realized Tybalt wasn’t coming. I turned. He wa
s still standing on the sidewalk, watching me walk away. I blinked, once, and then smiled.

  Maybe I’d been avoiding him long enough. Maybe it was time to let my friends come in out of the cold. “Well?” I asked. “Are you coming?”

  Tybalt’s eyes widened, a smile blooming on his face. “If you insist,” he said, and followed me inside.

  THREE

  THE SOUND OF THE TELEVISION drifted quietly from the direction of the living room as I stepped into the house, moving to the side to let Tybalt follow. I shrugged out of my jacket, hanging it on the hook next to the door. “Want to take your coat off?” I asked.

  Tybalt looked amused. “Coats removed in your presence tend to disappear from my possession.”

  “Suit yourself,” I said, unable to keep myself from smiling.

  The entryway was narrow enough that having two of us there made it uncomfortably intimate. There was a small table next to the door, covered in junk mail, paperbacks, and less-definable oddities, hinting at the tightly controlled chaos to come. May’s a pack rat, and neither Quentin nor I are much for housework.

  “Come on,” I said, starting for the dining room. That was where the clutter reached its peak, since it had bookshelves and a table to gather on.

  May was sitting at the dining room table, across from an uncomfortable-looking Etienne, when we entered. It was hard to say what accounted for his discomfort: the mess, my Fetch, or the simple fact of being in my house to begin with. I could tell that May had made an effort to clear the table before sitting down. To someone accustomed to the housekeeping at Shadowed Hills, it probably looked like the whole place needed to be condemned. They both turned at the sound of our footsteps. May smiled, clearly relieved. Etienne started to stand. I waved him down.

  “Don’t get up.” I kept walking, heading for the stairs. “Hi, Etienne. Nice of you to drop by. This is exactly what I needed tonight.” Etienne winced. I tried to dial back the sarcasm as I said, “I’m going to change into something less bloodstained and get some coffee. That should give you time to figure out what you’re going to tell me that you weren’t willing to tell Tybalt.”

  “Who you brought home with you,” said May. “Hi, Tybalt. Welcome back.”

  “May,” said Tybalt, with a courtly nod. “Etienne.”

  “Tybalt,” said Etienne neutrally. It’s not that Etienne dislikes Tybalt. Etienne just dislikes chaos, and Tybalt causes almost as much commotion as I do. Sometimes more, when he really sets his mind to it, although my chaos is a little more destructive, if I do say so myself.

  It says something about my life that this is the sort of thing I have to think about—and be proud of. “Be right back,” I said.

  “October—” began Etienne.

  I didn’t stop walking. “I just got home from the police station, and prior to that I was shot multiple times in an alley,” I said. “That means I get to put on clean clothes and make myself a cup of coffee big enough to give me caffeine poisoning before I have to have whatever serious conversation you’re here to have. Does anybody else need anything?”

  “I’m good,” said May.

  “No,” said Etienne.

  “I’d like some coffee,” said Tybalt.

  I gave him a sidelong look. “Since when do you drink coffee?”

  “Since I had to learn how to make it or risk your endless wrath.”

  I had to smile a little at that. “You can fix your own.”

  It only took me a few minutes to climb the stairs to my room, drop the disguise that made me look human, and shuck off my blood-drenched clothes, throwing them into the wastebasket next to the door. One more pair of jeans down the drain. I’d need to get one of the hearth-spirits I knew to do something about the holes in my leather jacket. I was willing to get rid of a lot of things, but not that.

  I washed the blood off my hands and face in the master bathroom. My reflection was overly pale, even for me; regenerating that much blood had done a number on my system. There was no blood in my hair, for once. I swapped my bloody jeans and T-shirt for clean ones that weren’t full of bullet holes. Then I went jogging back down the stairs and through the dining room to the kitchen, where Tybalt was watching with evident amusement as my half-Siamese cats, Cagney and Lacey, cornered Quentin.

  My squire was spooning wet food into cat dishes. He wasn’t doing it fast enough for their liking, because both cats were yowling. Cats are like that. Tybalt cleared his throat. Cagney and Lacey went silent. They turned to face their King and sat, wrapping their tails around their legs. Quentin looked up, relief written across his face.

  “Good one, Tybalt,” he said.

  “A cat may look at a King,” Tybalt replied, waving away Quentin’s almost-thanks without commenting on it.

  “Greetings, Squire,” I said, and ruffled Quentin’s hair. I didn’t have to get on my tiptoes, but it was close. After one more growth spurt, he’d be looking down on me. I guess that’s what you get when you take a teenage boy as your sworn squire. “Is there coffee?”

  He looked at me solemnly, doing an admirable job of concealing his annoyance over my hair ruffling, and said, deadpan, “We didn’t want you to kill us all, so May told me to start a fresh pot when Tybalt left to get you.”

  “I have the smartest Fetch in the whole world.” I snagged a coffee mug from the rack. “Do you have any clue what Etienne is doing here?”

  “I know as much as you do.” Quentin bent to set the cat dishes on the floor. “He just showed up saying he needed to talk to you, and he wouldn’t tell us why.”

  There was an anxious note in Quentin’s voice. I paused in the act of filling my mug, glancing back at him. “He can’t take you back to Shadowed Hills,” I said gently. “It’s against the rules, and if there’s one thing Etienne would never ever intentionally do, it’s break the rules.”

  “I know,” said Quentin miserably. “I just…”

  “I wouldn’t concern myself if I were you.” Tybalt plucked the coffeepot from my hand, topping off my mug before half-filling his own. “I’ve had sufficient dealings with the Divided Courts to know there would be much more pointless discussion before we reached that point. Unless she has been found guilty of some dire crime and has neglected to tell the rest of us, you can no more be removed from her custody than I can sprout wings and fly off to take tea with the Swanmays.”

  “Don’t say that where the Luidaeg can hear you, or she’ll take it as a challenge.” I got the milk out of the fridge. “Quentin, you have my word: I will be your knight until your fosterage ends or you’re ready to graduate to a knighthood of your own. And the only people who get to decide when that is are me, Sylvester, and whoever the hell your parents are.”

  “Yes, sir,” he said, smiling.

  I rolled my eyes as I dumped milk and sugar into my coffee. “Do the dishes,” I said and turned to leave the kitchen. Tybalt paused long enough to fill his mug the rest of the way with milk before following me, chuckling.

  When I met Quentin, he was a fourteen-year-old courtier in service to the Duke of Shadowed Hills. Since then, his association with me has gotten him shot, nearly marooned him in Blind Michael’s lands, and made him an accessory to jailbreak from the Queen’s prison. Somehow, this all made me the best choice to stand as his knight. He’s pureblood Daoine Sidhe—a fact his teen-heartthrob looks, bronze hair, and sharply pointed ears makes difficult to disguise even with magic—and he’s been sent to the Bay Area on a blind fosterage. That means I don’t know who his parents are, and he doesn’t tell me. If a couple of unfamiliar Daoine Sidhe ever show up on my porch and start throwing punches, I think I’ll have a pretty good idea why.

  May and Etienne were still at the dining room table when Tybalt and I returned with our coffee. “All right, then,” I said. “So what’s so important?”

  This time Etienne did stand. “I need to speak with you alone.”

  “Um, why?” I asked. “May lives with me. She’s going to hear whatever you say eventually.” Tybalt didn
’t live with me, but I had cats, and that was almost the same thing, as far as gossip goes. Anything Cagney and Lacey overheard would be carried straight back to their King.

  Etienne sighed. For the first time, I really looked at his face. I’d been right when I read his expression as discomfort, but I’d been wrong when I assumed he didn’t approve of our housekeeping. There was probably some of that in there, too, but it wasn’t everything. “I know you’ll tell your allies what we discuss,” he said. “Just, please. Let me tell you this alone.”

  “Sure, Etienne. Sure.” I turned to Tybalt. “Can you wait here until we come back down? I’d like to catch up a little.”

  “It would be my pleasure.” Tybalt smiled before taking Etienne’s vacated seat across from May. “I will remain as long as I must.”

  “Cool. I’ll shout if we need anything.” With a final nod to May, I beckoned for Etienne to follow me as I turned and left the room.

  Etienne remained silent as we walked up the stairs and down the hallway to the bedroom that served as my home office. I glanced back at him. “Are you okay?”

  “No,” he said, without hesitation. “I am a long way from ‘okay.’”

  “Oh,” I said, opening the office door. “Sorry about the mess.” I clicked on the light before taking a seat at the card table I was using as a makeshift desk. “I promise the chairs are safe. I mean, they haven’t broken yet, and Danny sat in one of them.”

  “Where did you find them?” asked Etienne, amazed disgust actually breaking through his shell of discomfort as he stared at the two rickety wooden camp chairs.

  “Girl Scout yard sale,” I said. “I’m going to replace them, I just haven’t been able to get to Ikea yet.”