Seanan McGuire - Ashes of Honor

“You have a daughter? With a human man?” Bridget’s tone thawed a little; perhaps she was finally allowing herself to believe we might be here for the right reasons. “What’s her name?”

“Gillian. She’s a few years older than Chelsea. She was kidnapped last year, and I would have done anything to get her back. Anything . Even if it meant trusting people I wasn’t sure about.” I shook my head. “If a human kidnapper took Chelsea, you called Etienne for nothing. I don’t think you would have done that. Not after sixteen years of being careful. That means you really think it was one of us. If you’re right, don’t you need our help?”

For a moment, I thought I might have pushed too hard. Then, reluctantly, Bridget nodded. “What can I do?”

“Well, first, can we get off the street? I’m feeling a little exposed, and I’d like to see Chelsea’s room.” If the smell of smoke and calla lilies was this strong on the open street, I wanted to see how strong it was in an enclosed space.

Bridget hesitated before nodding again. “Follow me,” she said, turning to march up the walk to her house.

Quentin and I followed at a more sedate pace, neither of us all that anxious to go where the woman with the anti-fae frying pan led. “Are you sure about this?” he asked.

“Nope,” I said calmly. “I just don’t have any better ideas, and I really want to get a look at that room.”

“Tybalt’s going to kill me,” he muttered.

“What was that?”

“Nothing.”

The door was locked, even though Bridget had gone no farther than the sidewalk. She looked back over her shoulder at us as she unlocked it, saying, “You can’t be too careful.”

A lock wouldn’t stop a truly determined Tuatha de Dannan or Cait Sidhe. For once, I thought before I spoke and didn’t say that out loud. “It’s a scary world out there,” I said.

Bridget nodded and opened the door. The smell of sycamore smoke and calla lilies poured out, a hundred times stronger than it had been on the street. Schooling my expression to keep from giving away just how thick the smell of Chelsea’s magic was, I followed Bridget inside. Quentin was right behind me.

It only took one look at the living room walls for me to realize there was no need to ask for a picture of Chelsea. There were pictures of Chelsea everywhere. She was a sweet-faced little girl who grew into a beautiful teenager over the course of dozens of images. Her delicate bone structure might have tipped me off to the presence of some fae blood in her lineage, but I would never have pegged her as a full changeling. I frowned, studying the pictures more closely.

“Oh,” I said, finally. “I see.”

Bridget looked at me. “Do you?”

In every picture, Chelsea’s brown-black hair—something she inherited from her father—was styled to cover her ears. The lenses of her glasses were tinted, making it hard to tell what color her eyes were. “Does she need glasses?” I asked.

“No,” said Bridget. Her expression softened as she looked at Chelsea’s picture, the hard edges going out of it until she was just a mother, scared for the safety of her child. “She started wearing them when she was six. They’re tinted glass.”

“Rose-colored glasses. Literally,” I said. Etienne’s eyes had a copper sheen to them, glittering, metallic, and inhuman. If his daughter had his hair, the odds were good she had his eyes as well. “How long have you known?”

“That my lover wasn’t human? I suspected from the first, but I told myself I was making up stories. I was new to the department, I missed Ireland, and here was this mysterious stranger come to argue with me and spin me yarns and be exactly what I needed, exactly when I needed it. I thought he had to be one of the Sidhe, come to save me from myself…and then thought I was being a fool, because everyone knows the Sidhe don’t exist.” The smile she shot my way was bitter. “I suppose that makes me twice a fool, doesn’t it?”

“No,” said Quentin. “It makes us what you said we were. It makes us really good liars.”

I glanced at him, surprised by his quick response. He looked at me and shrugged, looking slightly embarrassed.

“It’s true,” he said. “We are.”

“I just didn’t expect you to say it,” I said.

“That reminds me.” Bridget raised the frying pan again. “I’ll thank you to take off whatever masks you’re wearing. I like seeing who it is I’ve allowed into my home.”

Quentin and I exchanged a look. It seemed like every time I thought we’d broken all the rules, another one popped up for us to violate. “I’m not sure…” I began.

“Please.”

That stopped me. I sighed, once, and let my human disguise wisp away into the smell of cut grass and copper. Quentin did the same, and the smell of our mingled magics briefly overwhelmed the smell of smoke and lilies. It was a pleasant change, even if it didn’t last.

Bridget’s eyes went wide and round. It was one thing to challenge two strangers and declare them to be part of a hidden world existing alongside her own. It was something else to have it proved. It probably didn’t help that the similarities in our human disguises were washed away by our true appearances. Quentin is Daoine Sidhe, bright and vibrant as something from a fairy tale. I, on the other hand, look as though half my color was stolen from me by the villain from some children’s TV show.

Oh, and there were bullet holes in my jacket. Can’t forget those.

“What are you?” she whispered, finally.

“Quentin is Daoine Sidhe,” I said. “I’m Dóchas Sidhe. We’re…cousins, I guess.” It was close enough; both races descended from Oberon, although Titania claimed the Daoine Sidhe as her own. “What we are doesn’t matter. Finding Chelsea is what matters. Can I see her room?”

“Yes, of course,” said Bridget, tossing the frying pan onto the couch before beckoning for us to follow her. Apparently, disorientation made her agreeable. Then again, it might also be the deep conditioning of human history at work, the old lessons that say, “mess with the fae, and you’ll regret it.” Now that she could really see us, maybe she didn’t feel she could fight us anymore. Either way, I was just glad she’d dropped the frying pan.

The smell of smoke and lilies got stronger as we walked down the hall. By the time we stopped in front of a door decorated with the poster from the third Lord of the Rings movie, it was all I could do not to breathe through my mouth to avoid choking.

“This is her room,” said Bridget needlessly.

“I kind of figured,” I said. I sneezed, once, before turning to Quentin. “Wait out here with Bridget, okay?”

“Okay,” he said.

Catching Bridget’s sudden irritation, I explained, “I can sort of detect magic, but it works best when I’m alone.” And better still if someone has bled recently, but since Chelsea was taken from the street, that was probably too much to hope for. “I promise I’m not going to do anything to your daughter’s things. You can even keep the door open and watch me.”

“Oh, I will,” she said…but she opened the door, releasing a cloying wave of lily-and-smoke perfume. “Don’t you dare take anything.”

“I won’t,” I said, and went in.

Chelsea’s room was practically spotless, especially for a teenage girl. There were no dolls or plastic horses; instead, she had rows of neatly shelved secondhand paperbacks, build-it-yourself model kits, and what looked like a working microscope. The walls were covered in Star Trek and Firefly posters, and she had posters for the first and second Lord of the Rings movies taped to her ceiling. A too-small bedspread patterned with spaceships and planets was folded over the foot of her bed, the remnant of a childhood she wasn’t willing to let go of yet. I turned slowly in place, a lump in my throat that wasn’t caused just by the difficulty of breathing through the miasma of Chelsea’s magic. She deserved better than whatever was happening to her…and she deserved better than what was going to happen to her when she was finally found.