Page 7 of The Brightest Fell

Kissing Tybalt is an activity I used to fantasize about, back when repression and denial were my only bedfellows. These days, it’s something I get to do, and reality has never disappointed. He kissed me slow and languid, like he was in no hurry, like there was nothing in the world he would rather be doing. I knew that wasn’t entirely true—there were plenty of things he liked to do with me that didn’t involve kissing, largely because our mouths were otherwise occupied—but that sort of focus was undeniably exciting. I shifted in his lap, pulling myself closer, easing my arms around him, until we were necking on my living room couch like a pair of teenagers.

That was nice, too, and definitely a point in favor of my increased alcohol tolerance. In the old days, I would either have passed out already, or be nursing my third cup of coffee as I attempted to combat the impending hangover. Instead, I was awake, alert, and raring to go.

Tybalt was smiling when he broke away, leaning forward just enough to rest his forehead against mine. “I take it the party went well?” he asked.

“The Luidaeg showed up.”

He blinked. “That raises more questions than it answers, I think.”

“She sang. It was possibly the weirdest thing I have ever seen. But she was pretty good. It was fun. I wish you could have been there.”

“The entire point of the bachelorette party is for the bride-to-be to get out and explore the nightlife without her betrothed on her arm. My presence would have confused the issue. Besides, I have no doubt your lovely Lady Fetch would have demanded I sing also, and I had no desire to make a public spectacle of myself.” He settled back into the cushions, smiling at me languidly. “Well, then, bride-to-be? Did you find yourself a finer suitor during your night of freedom? Am I to be cast aside, never again to know the safe haven of your arms?”

“You’re a nerd,” I said, and swatted him in the arm. “You seemed all cool and mysterious back when I was afraid of you, but I’m not afraid of you anymore, and I can see clearly that you are a nerd.”

“I never denied it,” he said, and leaned in to kiss me again.

The doorbell rang. We both froze.

The doorbell ringing isn’t that unusual. In addition to serving as a knight errant and hero of the realm, I still work as a mortal P.I., handling cheating spouses, small thefts, and the occasional custody dispute. Since I don’t have an office, my clients come to the house, and people who want to hire a private investigator aren’t usually bound by normal business hours. I’ve had human clients show up as late as one o’clock in the morning. Fae are largely nocturnal and have been known to show up at two or three, apologizing for the proximity to dawn, but fully expecting me to be awake.

The trouble was the time. It was after four. That’s late for anything short of a Kingdom-wide emergency, and if it had been a Kingdom-wide emergency, someone would have called.

“Let May handle it,” said Tybalt, hands moving to encircle my waist. “The hour is late. You need your rest.”

“This isn’t my definition of ‘rest,’ exactly,” I said, and leaned in for another kiss.

The doorbell rang again. This time, the sound was followed by footsteps—May’s, from the tempo of them. I resumed my lean.

My lips were about to touch Tybalt’s when I realized the house had gone silent. May wasn’t saying anything. The doorbell had stopped ringing; I’d heard her open the door. She should at least have said hello. But she hadn’t said anything.

Tybalt met my eyes and nodded. As quietly as I could, I climbed off him, wishing my knives weren’t upstairs in my room and my sword wasn’t in the trunk of my car. Only a few minutes before, going unarmed in my own house had seemed like the most reasonable thing in the world. Now, it felt like the sort of oversight that could get me and the people I cared about killed.

The hallway ran in a straight line down the length of the house. As soon as I stepped out of the living room, I turned to get a look at the visitor who had silenced May so conclusively.

May was between me and the open door, giving me an excellent view of her pink denim jacket and the bright red steaks in her otherwise colorless brown hair. My Fetch never met a garish color combination she didn’t want to put to use. She was standing rigid, her shoulders locked into a hard line, and every inch of her radiated fear and confusion.

The smell of pennyroyal and musk drifted from the living room. Tybalt had stepped into the shadows. If I knew him as well as I thought I did, he was using the Shadow Roads as a shortcut to my bedroom, and my knives. He didn’t like leaving me undefended. He liked me being functionally defenseless even less.

“May?” I called. “Everything okay?” I started toward her, doing a quick inventory as I went. Tybalt would be back in a few seconds. In the meantime, there was an aluminum baseball bat in the umbrella stand. Sometimes blunt-force trauma is a girl’s best friend.

May didn’t reply. May didn’t move. This was bad.

Anyone who could freeze my Fetch like that either wasn’t human or wasn’t going to live to see the morning. I didn’t bother recasting my illusions as I hurried down the hall, nudging her to the side in order to face our unexpected guest. “Can I help—” I began.

The words turned to ashes in my mouth. Serene to the end, my mother tilted her head, accenting the swanlike line of her neck. Everything she did was beautiful. Every move was designed to show her to her best advantage. I loved her. I wanted to impress her. I wanted her to be proud of me.

I wanted her to go away.

She wasn’t wearing a human disguise; she didn’t care whether my neighbors saw her. There was no car on the street. I had no idea how she’d reached the house. It didn’t really matter—she was there, whether I wanted her to be or not. Amandine of Faerie, Last among the First, on my doorstep.

There’s a reason humans called the fae “the Fair Folk” back when they admitted we existed. Some of us take beauty to the kinds of extreme that can be painful to look at. My mother put most of them to shame. She stood a few inches shorter than either me or May, her figure lithesome and flawless. Time had no hold over her: she was as beautiful now as she’d been when I was a little girl. I hadn’t seen her much since then. She had been slipping away from me for a long time before I’d disappeared, and even my return hadn’t been enough to bring her back. When my mother didn’t want to be found, no one found her.

She wore a dress spun from flower petals and sweet drifts of Queen Anne’s lace, still blooming and perfuming the air around her. Her hair was a cascade of white gold tumbling to her hips, held out of her eyes by a pair of thin waterfall braids that started at her temples and ran along the crown of her head, finally meeting at the back. Her skin was so pale that I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear she hadn’t seen the sun since her disappearance. Her face was still somehow accented by a faint dusting of freckles across the bridge of her nose. They weren’t imperfections: they were a reminder that she was real, and hence proof that no one else would ever be as flawlessly constructed as she was.

Her eyes were a foggy shade of gray-blue, like mist in the morning rolling across the San Francisco Bay. They weren’t human eyes. They never could have been. And they were so much like mine that it hurt. Without those eyes, it might have been possible to pretend I was a changeling in all senses of the word: not just part-human, but someone else’s child entirely, foisted on Amandine when she failed to prevent it. Those eyes . . . there was no way I could have belonged to anyone else.

There was a soft sound behind me, accompanied by the scent of pennyroyal and musk. Tybalt was back. Tybalt was back, with my knives, which she might take as either an insult or an attack, depending on what kind of mood she was in. Amandine was Firstborn. She could hurt him. I needed to stop this.