He’d also let me down so hard, I’d barely been able to pull myself up out of bed that first day. But I’d done it. I’d grit my teeth, and made myself stand. Now I was ready to do more than stand, more than walk, more than run into battle.

  I was ready to fly.

  There’s something completely freeing about being decisive. I wasn’t sure if this was the right decision, but I’d finally broken free of the mental stasis that fear, and loss, and pain had chained me into.

  Not so long ago, Jinx had been my only friend. Hell, she’d become my entire family. Now I counted so many amongst my friends and allies. I was even working to repair ties with my mom, there was hope of reuniting with my father, and Ceff wanted to spend immortality together.

  None of those relationships were perfect, but they were mine. I hoarded and protected them greedily. I’d experienced so much loss and loneliness that the fear of reliving that pain had come to drive my every thought, my every move.

  But I finally had to make a choice. One that I’d known was coming ever since the changes that Faerie had wrought on me. I chose to embrace the truth of my fae lineage while remaining true to the morals that my life amongst humans had instilled. I’d been racing toward this moment all my life, and everything seemed clearer now that I’d made up my mind of how I was going to handle things.

  I chose to be me.

  This city was my home, and I valued the life of every person in it, no matter the blood, dust, or ichor that flowed through their veins. My time in Faerie hadn’t changed the fact that I was a hero of this city, one who had vowed to use her gifts to protect its inhabitants—all of her gifts.

  If using those gifts would save the city, then it was worth the fallout. And if some of my friends or allies couldn’t face the extent of my faeness, then perhaps they weren’t really worth having in my life after all. I think, for the first time, I was learning when it was okay to let go.

  Look at me adulting.

  I wore a deranged grin that made most of the men and women nearest me grab at their weapons. I’d made the decision to do everything possible to save Harborsmouth from any threat. Right now, that threat was the Wild Hunt. I was about to become Herne’s worst nightmare.

  Well, with the help of my friends, the Hunters’ Guild, and a gaggle of pookas. There was strength in numbers, and right now, we were legion.

  And we weren’t done assembling our ramshackle troops. There were a few more pieces to the puzzle, and the next move was Ceff’s. Until now, we’d both insisted on sticking together. But if our plan was to succeed, I needed to face down one more fear, and let Ceff go.

  “It’s going to get weirder,” I said to Torn. “You up for it?”

  “Does a bugbear shit in the woods?” he asked.

  “And you wonder why I chose the demon,” Jinx muttered, shaking her head.

  “Oh, I can think of numerous reasons, least of all the cat’s use of foul colloquialisms,” Forneus said, stroking a hand down her side to rest at her hip.

  Jinx shivered, and I sighed. If we weren’t on a tight timetable, I’d tell those two to get a room. There was nothing like a demon overdue for make-up sex to make a person crazy.

  “Are you certain you wish for me to leave your side,” Ceff said. “I can see the value in harnessing the strength of the water fae, but…”

  I held up a hand, and shook my head.

  “I wouldn’t ask you to go if I didn’t believe it could change the outcome in our favor,” I said.

  “Then I will feel your loss like a bottomless trench in my heart until we are reunited on the waves of battle,” he said.

  “I love you too,” I said.

  My smile became less manic as we said our goodbyes, but we didn’t touch. There was no time for kisses or an embrace. The moment our skin touched, I would be thrust into a sea of visions, and though I’d grown accustomed to much of Ceff’s past, the mental wounds of his recent captivity were still too raw. I needed to keep my head in the game, not lose my way inside someone else’s.

  “What now, Princess?” Torn asked as Ceff turned a corner and was lost from sight.

  I cast a look over my shoulder at the assembled Hunters, and that ridiculous grin once again tugged at my lips.

  “Now, we get into position for the fight of the century,” I said. “You coming?”

  The cat sidhe were fickle allies, so it was a valid question. Thankfully, I’d spent enough time with Torn to get the hang of cat sidhe psychology. For all his secrets, the man was an open book. Dangle a new experience in front of him, especially one rife with danger, mayhem, and possible death, and Torn went for it like catnip.

  “Well, when you put it like that, how can I resist?”

  Chapter 13

  Movement in the sky had me jerking my head back and shielding my eyes with one gloved hand, the other already reaching for one of my silver and iron blades.

  I’d probably need to have new iron-free weapons crafted soon, but I’d keep using my old, faithful blades for as long as I could take the side effects of a growing iron allergy. Wearing leather gloves helped—for once my touch phobia was a blessing, giving me the advantage of having always trained with gloves on—but having iron strapped to my forearms, belted to my lower back, and stuck inside my boot made my skin itch, and left a sickly sheen of sweat on my brow. For now, the edge those iron weapons gave me against fae assailants was worth the mild discomfort.

  It was better than being dead.

  Speaking of which, a shadow fell over us like a shroud, and a chill ran up my spine. There were six gigantic owls circling high above our heads, and I doubted their arrival was a good thing.

  “Holy crap,” Jinx said, her eyes following mine. “Am I the only one who feels like we just stepped into the fire swamp?”

  “The what?” Forneus asked, eyebrow raised.

  “Princess Bride reference,” I said, keeping my eyes on the circling predators. “Rodents of Unusual Size, except in this case they have wings.”

  “Owls of unusual size,” Torn said with a grin. “That would be Herne’s minions. Interesting.”

  “Shit,” I said. “I didn’t know he had airborne forces. That complicates things.”

  I was hoping that our plan to stop the Wild Hunt would work, but if we failed, we’d have to rely on my original plan to get a piece of Herne for Kaye’s binding spell. Problem was, that plan relied heavily on pookas, pookas that would be bite-sized morsels those giant owls could pluck from the sky like moths.

  A pooka clan had helped me before in exchange for a home in my old, childhood treehouse. I’d sent Marvin and Hob there with a message for the pooka leader, a diminutive fellow who liked partying and screwing, not necessarily in that order. The pooka clan treated life like a perpetual rave, right down to the glow-in-the-dark condoms they wore on their heads and the psychedelic herbs they liked to smoke.

  So long as I let them live in the treehouse, which has become party central for the small fae who live out in the burbs, and brought them the occasional munchies, the pooka clan was usually willing to do the odd recon job. But they have sticky fingers and love a dare, especially a double-barghest dare, which is why I thought they’d be good for this mission.

  Until now.

  “It might be sensible to warn our new Guild allies of the arrival of Herne’s spies,” Forneus said.

  “Let me guess, Herne sees what they see?” I asked. “Like a witch’s familiar?”

  “Precisely,” he said. “At least they are at a disadvantage, for now.”

  “Right, ‘cause those sharp beaks, talons, and wings the length of baseball bats are total disadvantages,” Jinx said, rolling her eyes.

  “Aside from those notable attributes, Herne’s great horned owls, just like the rest of the Wild Hunt, are nocturnal,” Forneus said.

  “And this helps us how?” I asked.

  “For one thing, Princess,” Torn said, stepping from the shadows where he’d been once again meeting with one of his cat informant
s. “If we’d encountered those owls at night, you never would have seen them. The first you’d know of their existence would be the pain of their talons crushing your rib cage and piercing your heart.”

  Now that was a pleasant thought. Leave it to Torn to dredge up the most gruesome image possible.

  “You sound as if you speak from experience,” Forneus said, narrowing his eyes at Torn.

  “I’m on my ninth life, and I spent one of those entirely in cat form,” Torn said, showing his teeth. “So, yes, I know what it’s like to be attacked by a great horned owl. They’re not called winged tigers for nothing.”

  “Is that where you got your scars?” Jinx asked, eyes tracing the puckered flesh that lined his face, arms, and tattered ears.

  “A few of them,” he said, unlacing his leather pants. “Want to see where the bastard’s rear talon pierced my femoral artery?”

  He winked, and licked his lips as Jinx leaned forward, and I had to bite the inside of my cheek before I stepped between them and Forneus. The last thing I wanted was to stand any closer to a half-naked cat sidhe, but now wasn’t the time to make the demon jealous.

  “Lace ‘em up, Torn,” I said, holding a blade an inch from the bulge in his trousers.

  Our proximity made my hand shake, but it could have been worse. If I’d hesitated any longer, he would have been stark naked. Take it from someone who knows, stripping off leather is never easy, even if it’s cold out and you’ve coated the inside of your leathers with talc. I had a nagging suspicion that getting naked was some kind of cat sidhe super power. Or maybe it was just Torn. He was the kind of guy who would spend immortality practicing that trick.

  Jinx pouted until Forneus cleared his throat from over my shoulder.

  “If you are interested in scars, love, all you had to do was say so,” he said.

  I ratcheted my free arm behind me, aiming a blade at Forneus’ chest.

  “Don’t even think about it,” I said. “Whatever you have in mind, just don’t. You’re all making me want to puke.”

  We stood there in our awkward standoff long enough for my shoulder to begin to ache. Jinx looked amorously at Forneus until Torn broke the silence.

  “Did you know that owls regurgitate to feed their young, and that when they shit their turds are all hair and bone?” he asked.

  Jinx blanched, and I snorted. I’d actually heard that before. Unlike Jinx who was a city girl through and through, I’d grown up in the suburbs. There had been a small farm not far from my old elementary school, and the kids used to call the owl feces “squirrel loafs” for their furry appearance. I suspected that some of those squirrel loafs were made up of bunny parts, but I didn’t have any friends to share that with at the time, which was probably a good thing. The kids already thought I was a weirdo.

  “Charming, cat,” Forneus said.

  “That’s what the ladies tell me,” Torn said.

  “What can you tell me about Herne’s owls, aside from their excrement?” I asked.

  One of the owls swooped down to perch on the roof of a nearby warehouse. At this distance, the bird’s unusual size was impossible to ignore. While they’d been circling overhead, I’d imagined the owls to be about the size of a Labrador, but this thing was on par with a Tibetan Mastiff. If a regular great horned owl could crush a rabbit, what the hell was this creature capable of?

  I shivered, and Jinx shuffled her feet.

  “Can we stop talking about owl poop?” she asked.

  “Of course, but perhaps we should walk as we converse,” Forneus said.

  His meaning was made clear by Torn’s next statement.

  “There’s more than one reason Herne uses his owls as spies,” he said. “Most important is their keen hearing.”

  “Oh, right,” I said, a snippet of a nature documentary coming back to me. “They hunt by sound.”

  “Which means if we stand still beneath that one sitting on the warehouse, we might as well be talking to Herne on speakerphone, right?” Jinx asked.

  Torn made a strange series of hand gestures toward a nearby alley, and cats began to yowl and cry.

  “Good thinking,” I said, flashing Torn a rare smile. I was careful not to thank him for the cover sound he was orchestrating for our benefit. The consequences of thanking the fae were very real for me these days. I needed to watch my tongue, or I’d be in Torn’s debt. “But are your cats going to be safe out here with those owls flying around?”

  “Oh yes,” Forneus said, stepping forward. “Herne’s owls won’t bother with lowly street cats. Not when they have much more important targets.”

  Not for the first time, I had the unpleasant sensation of a having a bull’s eye painted on my back. I figured being pierced by those talons would be about as much fun as being pierced by the Moordenaar’s arrows had been.

  “I really hope you mean the Hunters in their shiny armor,” I said.

  “Not a chance, Princess,” he said, licking his lips and rubbing his hands together. “They’re following us.”

  Of course Torn would think being the primary target of some mutant, super-sized “tigers of the sky” was fun. Not to mention the fact that we were already up against Herne and his pack of blood-crazed barghests. Could this day get any worse?

  I should know better by now than to ask that question.

  “More specifically,” he said, tilting his head in my direction. “I think they’re following you.”

  Chapter 14

  “Haven’t you ever wondered why the Wild Hunt is here, in Harborsmouth?” Torn asked.

  “Sure,” I said, shaking my head. “But at first, I figured it was just our bad luck that they somehow followed us through the portal before it closed.”

  I’d become used to seeing monsters and villains wherever I went. It was an occupational hazard. When the Wild Hunt had followed us into the human world, I hadn’t given why much thought. I needed to protect innocent people. It must be a day that ended in the letter Y.

  “Yes, but what if this wasn’t simply a case of Herne being an opportunist?” he asked. “What if he had help?”

  I nodded.

  “The thought crossed my mind,” I said with a frown.

  It wasn’t a pleasant thought. I hated to think that Herne had help since that meant we had more enemies out there somewhere, but it was damn likely. Master Janus had made a similar assumption.

  “You’re implying that the Wild Hunt’s arrival was orchestrated by someone on the other side of the portal,” Forneus said. “Someone in Faerie.”

  “About that,” Jinx said, pulling me back to the present. “I’d still like to hear that story. You’ve managed to dance around the topic like a spider on a hot skillet, but I will get the truth about your ‘vacation’ and what the hell you were secretly up to the past few days.”

  I winced.

  “I couldn’t tell you about our plans because it would have put your life in danger,” said. “I still can’t share with you how we got there, but I promise to tell you the rest as soon as this is all over. Okay?”

  There was a lot about meeting my uncle and discovering that I was Mab’s biological daughter that I needed to work through. Talking it out with Jinx would help us both heal, if we lived that long.

  “Okay,” she said.

  I nodded, and focused on Torn who was watching us in amusement. My fingers drummed along my thigh as I thought about the possibility that someone had helped Herne escape Faerie.

  “Who would benefit from the Wild Hunt coming to the human world?” I asked.

  “In my experience, most things are motivated by greed, lust, or revenge,” Forneus said. “But I fail to see how lust could be a factor in this scenario, and aside from your witch friend’s desire for revenge against any barghest that enters this city, I’ve seen no evidence of revenge being a factor.”

  I reached into my leather jacket and pulled out and flipped open the notepad that had somehow made it through my journey to the Otherworld and back again. It was b
eat up, and curling on the edges, but it would do. When working a case, taking notes often helps me sort through the details, and determine what is relevant and what is the extraneous flotsam of a person’s life.

  I forced myself to think back to the events just before our departure from Faerie. My uncle’s betrayal, our visit to the Unseelie Court, their verdict against him, and their ruling to absolve me of being a traitor to the fae had been so all-consuming that I hadn’t spent time focusing on much else beyond getting the assembled fae to allow our use of their secret portal to the human world.

  I’d wanted so badly to go home. I hadn’t even asked questions when our guide to the portal had been reluctant to follow the path into the woods, just assuming he was afraid of the Forest of Torment’s bloodthirsty trees. He’d remained behind at the castle while I’d rushed headlong toward the portal, thinking of nothing but my friends and longing for my own bed. I cursed my own stupidity. It was exactly the kind of situation an unscrupulous member of the Unseelie Court might take advantage of. Had I walked blindly into a trap?

  I hadn’t been paying much attention during our short stay in the winter castle, but that didn’t mean that I’d been oblivious to my surroundings. I was a detective, and that meant collecting even the smallest of details was second nature. I closed my eyes, hoping that my skills hadn’t grown too rusty while I’d been away.

  “The clipboard…” I said, closing my eyes and pinching the bridge of my nose.

  “What, Princess?” Torn asked.

  “Give me a minute,” I said.

  When the giant yetis guarding the entrance to the winter palace had opened the frost gates, we’d stepped into the frozen palace courtyard and been quickly surrounded by curious fae. A goblin female with a clipboard had been the first to approach us directly, but when I’d announced that I was the daughter of Mab the Queen of Air and Darkness, the faeries had fled inside the castle.

  I remembered the goblin woman’s bulbous nose bouncing as she turned and ran, but more importantly, I recalled her clipboard and stylus falling from shaking hands. It was the clipboard that interested me. As I’d stepped over it with blood and snow covered boots, I’d read a list of agenda items. Knowing what was on the Unseelie Court’s docket seemed like a good idea at the time, but I’d soon been consumed with my own troubles, and cast the mental list aside.