Page 5 of The Innocent Sleep

Quickly, I circled the house to the front door, where two elderly colorpoint cats sat on the step, their faces turned toward the door itself, yowling their unhappiness to the air.

“Cagney! Lacey!” I called, in the half-spoken, half-understood language of cats, which fae and mortal felines share. They turned to me as I bounded toward them, and for a moment, the three of us moved as one organism, rubbing cheeks against bodies, twining tails together as we stepped lightly around each other.

“Mother!” wailed Cagney.

“Mother is gone,” added Lacey.

I stepped back, and they watched me go, their matching blue eyes bright with fear and heavy with resignation. “What do you mean, gone?” I asked.

The sisters were mortal cats, adopted by October from an animal shelter shortly after her return from the pond, when she had still believed me to be an enemy. That she had taken cats into her home even when she knew they might spy for a man she mistrusted was one of countless small things that had endeared her to me. Being mortal, they were somewhat less astute than their Cait Sidhe cousins, and not always equipped to understand complicated concepts. What they called “gone” could just as easily mean “visiting the Luidaeg” or “at the grocery store.”

Although I was direly afraid they meant neither of those things.

“Gone,” repeated Lacey. “We slept in our bed—”

“Safe, warm, good.”

“—and then we were outside, alone, and all trace of Mother was gone. We’ve gone around the whole house, and she’s not here. Who will feed us? Who will pet us?” In a moment of rare complex thought, Lacey looked at me and asked, “Who will pet you?”

“October,” I said. “Because I will find her. I refuse to allow her to be taken from me by whatever force this is. Until I can do that, I will take you to the Court of Cats, where you’ll be safe and warm. None of my subjects will harm you, not unless you provoke them.”

They exchanged a look. They were soft, domestic housecats, used to a pampered existence inside a private home. They weren’t equipped to survive outside. And still they hesitated to consider my offer.

I didn’t attempt to hurry them along, sitting down and beginning to groom my paw as I waited. Every nerve I had was screaming for me to continue my search, but my little fish would never forgive me if I left her cats to fend for themselves, and no one has ever successfully compelled a cat to make their mind up before they were prepared to do so.

Finally, the sisters looked back to me. “We will go,” said Cagney.

“It is appreciated,” I said, and looked around for signs of watching humans before I stood on two legs and stooped toward them. They leapt into my arms, nestling against my chest, Lacey already purring. “Hold your breath,” I advised, and stepped into the shadows, holding them close.

I could feel their hearts beating fast as we ran along the Shadow Roads, until I emerged into the strangely soporific Court of Cats. I set them down, and called, “Let it be known that these cats are here under my protection, and any who troubles them does so at the risk of offending your King.”

I didn’t wait for a response, instead stepping back into the shadows to resume my search.

The panic that had taken root inside me the moment I found myself away from home was beginning to blossom and grow, putting out thorny branches that wrapped tight around my heart until I feared I might be strangled by them. I could die of terror, if it was given sufficient time to bloom. It had more than fertile soil on which to feed.

My wife—my pregnant wife, and there was a phrase that came draped in a terror entirely its own, one October bore no responsibility for but would have to navigate the length of—was missing. Our home was abandoned, our possessions vanished, our housemates as absent as October herself. My Court was strange, transformed in some way I didn’t yet fully understand but would have to face soon enough, once I knew where my lady was.

Once I could breathe again.

When October needed aid, she went to one of two places to begin, and of late, had gone almost exclusively to the same one. So I turned my steps in that direction, and ran until the road told me I was near my destination. I slipped from the shadows into the mortal neighborhood where the Luidaeg kept the entrance to her home, and froze.

For as long as I had known her, the Luidaeg had kept her apartment anchored in the same mortal apartment building. For a creature as mercurial as she, her dislike of change was well established and broad. The neighborhood had molded itself to her presence. For all that it was in a rougher part of the city, it was perfectly safe, with fewer crimes and less public misery than similar areas. The humans living there were happy and healthy to a much greater degree than their kin who lived elsewhere. The domiciles looked like hovels from the outside, but I had never known a vacancy to last more than a few days.

Perhaps that was another thing about to change, for the alley I emerged into looked like any other where it would be considered unsafe for someone to walk alone by night, or even during the day. Trash was piled against the walls, some of the bags torn open to allow their contents to leak out onto the streets, and the air smelled of stale urine and decay. The buildings were crumbling in earnest, not only in the most superficial of appearances, and several of the windows I could see were broken.

Cautiously, I approached the door that had always led to the sea witch, pausing only to drape myself in the thinnest of human disguises. I knocked, and the crying of a child answered. I knocked again.

This time, the door opened, a mortal woman in a housedress and slippers glaring at me from under the tangled fringe of her hair. “Whatever you’re selling, we don’t want it,” she snapped. “Go back to the Castro with your own kind.”

Then she slammed the door, and I was alone.

My family was missing. The sea witch was missing. Everything was wrong.

I stiffened my spine, breathing through my nose until the urge to weep passed me by.

THREE

IF THE SEA WITCH was missing, I would need to locate my lady on my own. Perhaps Arden would know where October was. If something had happened to scatter us across the kingdom, surely October would have gone to the Queen who controlled her Court, seeking reassurance and alliance in my absence. There was a time when I would have expected her to seek her liege, Sylvester, but he was no longer the ally he had once been, having chosen his wife and her strange loathing of October over his obligation to one of his own sworn vassals.