Page 67 of A Divided Duty

“I love your hair, and I remain a cat; if I didn’t tease from time to time, would you recognize me in your bed?”

Danny’s car was a generic yellow cab, the paint dingy and pocked with scratches and small patches of rust encouraged by the salty air. He was leaning out the driver’s-side window, draped in the human disguise Tybalt and I had both forgotten to apply: between the hour of the morning, the thick fog, and the way the Luidaeg’s wards made humans just a little … fuzzy, there honestly hadn’t been the need.

That wasn’t a good habit for me to be getting into, and I blamed the lingering effects of Titania’s spell. In my actual youth, Devin had enforced the need for illusions with an iron hand, and there had been no attempt at wearing a velvet glove: we were expected to know what to do when interacting with the human world, and to do everything in our power to avoid giving the purebloods the slightest excuse to shut us down. That meant being beyond impeccable any time we stepped outside, blunting our ears and recoloring our eyes to stay within mortal norms.

In Titania’s world, I had never interacted with a human. There had been no reason that I should, not when I was born to be my sister’s servant and pampered pet. So I’d never needed to get into the habit of disguising myself. I still remembered to do it consistently enough that I hadn’t been caught or anything, but the fact that I was slipping worried me.

What else was lingering from her enchantment that I hadn’t managed to notice yet? What was waiting to bite me in the ass?

Not a Barghest, thankfully: when I opened the cab door and slid into the backseat, it was to find hair and shed scales, but no tiny monsters waiting to chomp my ankles. “Good job leaving the kids at home, Danny,” I said, buckling my seatbelt as Tybalt got in on the other side.

“I could say the same to you, Tobes,” said Danny, adjusting the rearview mirror so he could look at us. Despite his illusions, the mirror reflected his true face, craggy gray skin and all. On the rare occasion when he had human passengers, it would show the illusion. Just one more custom trick installed by his Gremlin mechanic, who I had yet to meet but had heard a lot of good things about.

“Miranda’s too young to be running around the streets of San Francisco with her parents,” I said.

Danny scoffed. “Come off that. We all know the sea witch is her godmother. No such thing as too young to visit your godma. I was kinda hoping you’d have her along. I still need to meet the mite.”

“Sorry, Danny, she’s at the house with May,” I said. “And while that’s where you’re driving us first, we’re really not set up for company right now.”

“You’re never set up for company my size,” he said. “But sometime soon can I come over and get a look at her, if I promise to stay in the car?”

“Oh, Danny. We haven’t been keeping her away from you because you’re too big to be safe with her. We’ve been keeping her away from everyone, because the world is too big to be safe with her,” I said. “It was never about you.”

“Not even after everything that happened?” He shifted his reflected gaze to Tybalt, who still hadn’t fastened his belt. “Buckle up or turn your royal ass into a cat, Yer Majesty. I’m not driving you anywhere like that.”

In a hot rush of pennyroyal and musk, Tybalt was feline and leaping into my lap, curling up with his nose against the base of his tail. I ran a quick hand down his back.

“Coward,” I muttered.

He lifted his head enough to make a small chirping sound at me, then put it back down and closed his eyes.

I sighed. “What happened wasn’t your fault, Danny, and I haven’t been a very good friend to you if I’ve let you think that it was. Dame Altair was working for a very bad woman with some very specific grudges against my family. None of us could have known what she was going to attempt. You did the absolute best that it was possible for you to do. I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you that sooner.”

“You’re really not mad at me?”

“I would hug you right now if you weren’t driving,” I said. “I don’t really want to test my indestructability by getting you to roll the cab.”

Danny drove like the roads had issued him a personal challenge, and he was damn well going to answer and exceed it. Again thanks to the charms he had on the cab, I only knew how wildly he was driving because of the streets flashing by outside the window. The ride remained perfectly smooth and even, which was part of how I could tell that it was magic. There’s not a single street in San Francisco with that few potholes. And yet he didn’t hit a single one.

“You got no idea how nice it is to hear that,” he said, and took a curve so hard that the audible sound of screeching tires made it through the illusions—and the window—to remind me of how quickly we were going.

Tybalt flattened an ear. I stroked him again.

“You’re going to love Miranda,” I said. “She’s absolutely beautiful. Her hair has stripes like her father’s, and her eyes are— You know how we’re still trying to figure out what the Dóchas Sidhe are going to look like? Like how Bridge Trolls are all tall and gray and craggy?”

Danny laughed. “Yeah, I know that.”

“Well, it looks like one of the hallmarks of the Dóchas Sidhe is going to be that whatever color we have is going to look like it’s been diluted way, way down,” I said.

Danny laughed again. “I’ve seen yer sister. I coulda told you that.”

“She’s the most perfect baby to have ever lived.”

He looked up at the rearview mirror again, smiling as he met my eyes. “They all are, Tobes. They always are.” He hit the brakes then, bringing us screeching to a halt. “And with that, you’re home.”

“Great. Can you wait out here while I get Tybalt inside and update May on the situation? Quentin drove my car back from Muir Woods, so I can get myself to Shadowed Hills, but I want to be sure that May doesn’t need anything.”

“For you, the world,” said Danny, and turned off the engine. “I’ll keep the meter running.”