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"Is that likely?”
"I must confess to a good deal of self-loathing." He smiled.
"I was thinking of opening a coffee shop," Kaye said quickly. "In Ironside. Maybe help people with faerie problems. Like Luis does. Maybe even help faeries with faerie problems.”
"You know I just made a very advantageous bargain predicated on the fact that no faery wants to live in the city." He sighed and shook his head as if he'd just realized that arguing with her was useless. "What will you call your coffee shop?”
"Moon in a Cup," she said. "Maybe. I'm not sure. I was thinking that maybe I could move out of my grandmother's—spend half my time working in the shop and half my time in Faerie, with you. I mean, if you don't mind me being around.”
He smiled at that and it seemed like a real smile, with no shadows at the edges. "Like Persephone?”
"What?" Kaye leaned in and skimmed her hand under his coat, tracing the vertebrae of his back. His breath hitched.
Roiben let his hand fall lightly, hesitantly, across the wings of her shoulders. He sighed like he'd been holding his breath. "It's a Greek story. A human one. The King of the underworld—Hades—fell in love with a girl, Persephone. She was a goddess too, the daughter of Demeter, who controlled the seasons and the harvests.
"Hades stole Persephone away to his palace in the underworld and tempted her with a split-open pomegranate, each seed shining like a ruby. She knew that if she ate or drank anything in that place she would be trapped, but somehow he persuaded her to eat a mere six seeds. Thereafter, she was doomed to spend half of each year in the underworld, one month for one seed.”
"Like you're doomed to spend half your time dealing with the Bright Court and half with the Night Court?" Kaye asked.
Roiben laughed. "Very like.”
Kaye looked at the far shore, where fireworks still heralded the New Year above the jagged teeth of buildings, and then toward where Corny and the others blew noisemakers and drank cheap champagne from plastic goblets.
She slid out of Roiben's arms and whirled on the sand of the beach. The wind blew off the water, numbing her face. Kaye laughed and spun faster, gulping the cold briny air and smelling the faint firework smoke. Pebbles crunched under her boots.
"You still haven't told me," he said softly.
She stretched her arms out over her head, then came to an abrupt halt in front of him. "Told you what?”
He grinned. "How you managed to complete the quest. How you claimed to be able to lie.”
"Oh. It's simple." Kaye lay down on her back on the snowy beach, looking up at him. "This is me," she said, her voice full of mischief as she reached out with one long-fingered hand. "See? This is me lying.”
>"If you knew my brother," Luis said, his hand visibly shaking, "you probably already have your own opinions about him. And I guess they're all true, but there doesn't have to be only one truth. I'm going to choose to remember David as the kid who found the two of us a place to sleep when I didn't know where to go, and as the brother that I loved.”
Luis opened the tin of ashes and dumped them. The wind caught some and lifted them into the air, while the rest filled the hole. Corny wasn't sure what he'd thought they would look like, but the dust was gray as an old newspaper.
"Happy New Year, baby brother," Luis said. "I wish you could drink with us tonight."
Roiben stood by the water, swigging out of a bottle of champagne. He'd loosed his salt white hair and it covered most of his face.
Kaye walked over to him, pulling out a noise-maker from her pocket and sticking it in her mouth. She blew and the long checkered paper tongue unfurled with a squeak.
He smiled.
Kaye groaned. "You really are a terrible boyfriend, you know that?”
He nodded. "A surfeit of ballads makes for odd ideas about romance.”
"But things don't work like that," Kaye said, taking the bottle from his hand and drinking from the neck. "Like ballads or songs or epic poems where people do all the wrong things for the right reasons.”
"You have completed an impossible quest and saved me from the Queen of the Faeries," he said softly. "That is very like a ballad.”
"Look, I just don't want you to keep hiding things from me," Kaye said, handing him back the bottle, "or hurt my feelings because you think it's going to keep me safe, or sacrifice yourself for me. Just tell me. Tell me what's going on with you.”
He tipped the champagne so that the liquid fizzed on the snow, staining it pink. "I taught myself to feel nothing. And you make me feel.”
"That's why I'm a weakness?" Her breath came out like a cloud in the icy air.
