Page 5 of The Brightest Fell

Arden walked over, offering an awkward smile and a fist-bump to the shoulder, which was about as close as the two of us were prepared to come to hugging. “I need to get back,” she said. “Nolan gets anxious if I leave him alone for too long.”

Nolan is her younger brother. He’s technically Crown Prince in the Mists now that she’s Queen, and most importantly, he’s awake. That part’s new. He spent more than eighty years asleep, courtesy of the usurper who’d been sitting on his family’s throne. He’s a nice guy. A little flustered-looking every time I’ve seen him so far, but that makes sense, given how dramatically things have changed—both in the mortal world and in Faerie—during the years he missed.

“May invited him,” I said. “We would have been happy to have him.”

Arden’s laughter was bright and sincere. “Oh, no. He’s not ready for The Mint. I’ll try him on a piano bar first, someplace nice and calm where they serve wine and sing old standards. We’ll get there. It’s just going to take time.”

“Well, I’m glad you came,” I said.

“Me, too.”

Madden was less restrained. He walked over and hugged me hard, the action lifting my feet off the ground. “Bye, Toby,” he said.

“Good-bye and put me down,” I replied.

He laughed.

That was enough to break the seal on the party. Arden and Madden walked around the corner of the nearest alley; the scent of redwood sap and blackberry flowers drifted through the air, erasing the normal mortal scents of gasoline and stale beer, and I knew they were gone. Danny loaded Kerry, Stacy, and Cassandra into his cab, promising to get them home safely, all while trying to lure me into the cab for a ride that I neither wanted nor needed, but appreciated all the same. Dianda, still in her sequined cocktail dress, ruffled Dean’s hair, waved to me, and started walking down the street toward the Bay, her shoes dangling from her hand.

Quentin stepped up next to me. “She’s going to get mugged,” he said.

“And that will be very educational for the muggers,” I agreed. Dianda fought to win. Anyone who tried to get in her way was going to have a bad night indeed. “Dean coming home with you?”

“Not tonight.” Quentin yawned. “He has stuff to do at Goldengreen, so he’s escorting Marcia home. Bridget parked there.”

“Then it’s down to family.” That was nice, too. There’s something to be said for returning to a quiet house after a night out with friends.

May and Jazz waited a few yards away, arms around each other. I waved to the remaining party-goers one last time before walking over to join them. May smiled at me.

“I told you you’d have a good time,” she said.

“Yes, you did,” I agreed. “Let’s go home.”

Walking through San Francisco after last call is like stepping into a different world. Sure, there will be a few drunks on the streets, but they tend to disappear once the bars close, retreating to their homes or slipping into the nearest alley to look for someone who can provide them with a drink. It was late enough that the homeless population had mostly pulled back into the parks and their tent cities under the freeway overpasses, trying to get a good night’s sleep before the day people woke up and started complaining about them ruining property values by daring to exist.

Humans can be surprisingly cruel to their own kind sometimes. The fae may be terrible, but at least we largely don’t pretend otherwise.

“We.” That’s an interesting word choice. My father was human: my mother is fae. Not just fae, but Firstborn, barely removed from Oberon himself. That makes me a changeling, and for years, my human heritage was the only thing I wanted to acknowledge, like the things I’d inherited from my mother were just inconvenient tweaks of biology that would eventually go away.

They haven’t gone away. They’ve gotten stronger, thanks to my talent for winding up in situations where blood is the only answer. I’ve been sliding farther and farther from my humanity, burning it out of myself one drop at a time in exchange for the power I need to survive. Coffee used to wake me up. Alcohol used to stay in my system for more than fifteen minutes. I used to stay hurt, instead of healing so fast that my skin has been known to heal around the weapons used against me. My body has become a locked-room mystery only I can solve, and every time I feel like I’ve figured it out, something else changes.

The commercial streets dropped away, leaving the four of us to wander down residential streets, past quiet brownstone homes with their Victorian facades and tiny, artfully tended gardens. This was the old San Francisco, far-removed from the tech boom consuming downtown. Most of the people who lived here had been in the city for generations, clinging to their family homes with all their might, refusing to let go, refusing to be moved, despite increasing pressure to sell to millionaires who liked the idea of living in a classic home.

Some of the millionaires are baffled by how hard it is to buy into this neighborhood. They keep accusing tenants of collusion, of conspiracy, of snobbish insistence that only the “right” people should live in the area. They’re sort of right. There is a conspiracy to keep them out. It’s just that the conspiracy is a lot less human than they assume. Fully half the rental properties in the neighborhood are owned by fae landlords like my liege, Duke Torquill, who bought them for a song when they were newly-constructed and still smelled like fresh wood and paint.

Pureblooded fae have a thing about land. They like to own it. In the Summerlands, the last of the fae realms accessible to us, the king is the land, and a demesne will thrive or fail based on the health of its ruler. They like owning land more than they like having mortal money, especially when owning the land makes them rich without needing to do anything more than refuse to give it up. Those tech millionaires could offer forever, but the fae landlords of San Francisco would never sell.

Sylvester and I have had some rocky spots recently, starting when he lied about some life-changing details of my mother’s past and progressing from there. I’m working on forgiving him; he’s working on being honest with me. But even when things were at their worst, he’d tried to look out for me the best way he knew how; that much, at least, has always been true. Among other things, he’s the reason my little band of weirdoes has a place to live in one of the most expensive cities in the mortal world. The tech millionaires might not know how to get into this neighborhood. All I’d had to do was ask.

Our house is one of the few on the block that was never split into a duplex. It’s painted in eye-searingly bright colors that seem garish and aggressive during the day, but are beautiful at night, which is when fae eyes are most likely to see them. I smiled wearily as we started up the walkway to the front door, already digging in the pocket of my leather jacket for the keys.

Quentin stopped one step from the top. May and Jazz stopped below him, and I took the last step on my own, raising my hand to tap the air in front of me. It flashed red, a tingle running through my fingertip as the wards reacted. I relaxed a little. Nothing had tried to break in while we were all out of the house.

“Not to rush you, but some of us need the bathroom,” said May.

“That is rushing me,” I said. I tapped the air again, and chanted, “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage.” The wards flared more violently before dissolving into the smell of cut-grass and copper.

May wrinkled her nose as she pushed past me, snatched the keys out of my hand, and unlocked the door. “Most people don’t use Macbeth to seal their wards, you know.”