“I was gone for less than an hour,” I said. “How did you make this big of a mess? And where’s Jazz?”
“At the store; we ran out of ice cream,” said May. “As for ‘how did we make this big of a mess,’ there are five—count them, five—teenagers in the other room who were told that for tonight, they got to be normal. Not in charge of anything, not afraid of anything, not learning how to exist in a strange new world, just normal. So they tore through the kitchen like a buzz saw, made nachos when they realized that we’d foolishly failed to order enough pizza for an army, and now they’re in the living room watching Disney movies.”
Her voice rose a bit on the last two words, breaking like she was struggling not to laugh. My eyes widened. “Oh, sweet Maeve, you’re not serious.”
“I am.” She nodded solemnly. “I am serious. They are enjoying the animated stylings of the Walt Disney Corporation. Dean has never seen a cartoon before.”
“He had Internet in the Undersea.”
“Sure, but he lacked the cultural context to tell him why he should want to waste his time watching movies about things that weren’t real.” May glanced to the kitchen door as she lost her battle against her grin. It spread across her face like she was in the process of becoming a Cheshire cat, until it seemed like she was nothing but the smile. “That poor, unfortunate soul.”
“Yeah, his mother’s going to kill us.” I walked over and stole a finger-scoop of Rice Krispie treat.
Dean’s mother, Dianda Lorden, was the Duchess of Saltmist, the neighboring Undersea demesne. She was also a Merrow, which meant that in human terms, she was a mermaid—just like humans would lump me, Arden, and Walther all under the banner of “elf,” if they knew that we existed. Dianda was amiably violent, as seemed to be the norm among Undersea nobles. She was either going to find us showing her son The Little Mermaid hysterically funny or incredibly offensive and, sadly, I didn’t know which way she was likely to go.
“What happened with Arden?” May sounded concerned. I couldn’t blame her.
“Good job waiting to ask that until I’d been home for five minutes,” I said. I took a breath. “Remember how she said the High King was coming next week, so she needed to wake Madden and her brother up now if she wanted to be certain she’d be able to give them the cure?”
May nodded. “It was less than an hour ago, so yes.”
“She woke Madden up. That was all we had time for before the High King walked in.”
May audibly gasped. “He’s already here?”
“Yeah,” I said grimly. “He’s not going to punish her for waking Madden, but he’s forbidden her to wake Nolan. As for me, my punishment for helping her go against his wishes is attending the conclave—with Quentin. I’m guessing he was planning to convince-slash-command me to do that anyway, since this is the sort of thing Quentin really ought to see. Doesn’t mean I’m thrilled. What’s the dress code for a conclave?”
“Since you’re unlanded and attending as a witness and observer, you should be fine with whatever you’d normally wear to a court function,” said May. “Bring your knife, but be prepared to surrender it at the door.”
“Wouldn’t it be better not to bring a weapon if they’re just going to take it away from me?”
“Not really.” May resumed stirring her Rice Krispie mixture. The marshmallow had begun to set. The treats resisted her machinations. “By bringing a weapon, you show that you’re willing to defend the conclave. By giving it up, you show that you trust your hosts to protect you, and your fellow attendees not to need stabbing. It’s a show of good faith. It also means that if day one goes really well—or really poorly—they might let you keep your knife on day two, because you’ll have earned the right to go armed.”
“Pureblood hospitality gives me a headache,” I grumbled, snatching another piece of gooey cereal.
May shot me a sympathetic look. “It’s designed to be learned over the course of decades and refined over the course of centuries. It’s not your fault that you don’t take to it naturally.”
“I wish you could go instead of me.”
“I’ll probably go in addition to you,” said May. I blinked at her. She shrugged, beginning to spoon her cereal mixture into a serving dish. “Apart from the fact that I was one of the people elf-shot in Silences, I have a long, long memory. None of the people whose lives I consumed had been elf-shot themselves, but some of them had lost friends and loved ones that way. One man, his wife was elf-shot and still decades away from waking when we came for him. He died with her name on his lips, and I put his face on to finish it. Elf-shot is supposed to be merciful, but I’m pretty sure it’s not. I want to see how this goes.”
“Oh.”
May was my Fetch: a night-haunt who had consumed the blood of the living and transformed into a duplicate of that person when the time came to play death omen. She’d expected her long, long life to end when she became my mirror, and she’d done it anyway, because the night-haunts lived vicariously through the people whose corpses they ate, and the last person she’d consumed had been a girl named Dare. Like me, Dare had been trained as a street thug by Devin, a modern day Fagin crossed with Peter Pan. Unlike me, she’d never been able to escape the gravity of his attention. Dare died thinking I was her hero, and that thought had been enough to influence the night-haunt who took on the bulk of her personality. She had chosen to die a second time, all for the sake of warning me that my own life was coming to an end.
Under normal circumstances, May would have appeared, I would have died, and she would have vanished, dissolving into mist and the smell of rain. Instead, my mother, Amandine, had intervened, changing the balance of my blood for the first time in my adult life. Somehow, that had cleansed the elf-shot that was killing me from my body, and transformed me just enough to break the tether tying May’s existence to my own. She was something unique now, a Fetch with nothing to bind her. And while the bulk of her memories were taken from either me or Dare, sometimes she’d say things to remind me that she was so much older.
I sighed. Speaking of things that were older . . . “Do you have everything under control down here? I think I need to give the Luidaeg a call, let her know what’s happening, and tell her the High King is in town.” She might already know. She was often surprisingly well-informed—or not so surprisingly, given that she was the sea-witch, Firstborn daughter of Maeve, and fully capable of grilling the local pixie population for news. Still, she’d appreciate hearing it from me, and it was always good to avoid getting on her bad side.
“Go, go,” said May, making a shooing gesture with her free hand. “I can control the ravening hordes for a while longer. I think they’re enjoying the lack of adult supervision.”
“You’re the best,” I said, and grabbed one more chunk of Rice Krispie treat before leaving the kitchen and heading up the stairs to my room.
San Francisco is one of the most expensive cities in the world, and getting worse as the tech boom moves more and more multimillion-dollar human companies into the business district. Jazz owns a secondhand shop in Berkeley. May works there occasionally, when Jazz needs the help, and spends the rest of her time doing whatever strikes her fancy. My PI work brings in a reasonable amount, although very few nobles ever think to pay me for knight errantry. Quentin mostly eats whatever appears in the fridge and spends his time learning how to be a better ruler. So how is it that we’re able to afford a two-story Victorian near Dolores Park, in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood?
Simple: my liege, Duke Sylvester Torquill, has been in the Bay Area for centuries, and owns enough land in San Francisco to make the snootiest of human tech millionaires sit up and salivate. We live rent-free, and the foundation he’d established to handle mortal upkeep of his properties paid the taxes. It’s a sweet setup. It would be even sweeter if I didn’t feel so guilty about it. Sylvester and I were . . . not estranged, exactly, but not exactly speaking to each other, either.