Seanan McGuire - Ashes of Honor

I sat for a moment. Then I lay backward on the cold pavement, closing my eyes. The smell of blood was everywhere, and my hands were sticky with the stuff. Somehow, that bothered me more than the fact that my shirt and jeans were ruined. I was still bleeding. That was a problem. How much blood does the body hold, anyway?

Answer: not enough. I took a deep breath, pulling more magic out of the air, and forced it down again, trying to press it into my skin. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was doing, but I didn’t have any better ideas, and I didn’t want Tybalt to come back and find me dead in the alley. It would be cruel of me to do that to him after swearing that I’d be fine.

The magic sank into my skin, and the burning around the bullet holes faded to a dull ache as my body finally started focusing on the twin issues of lead poisoning and physical trauma. The sensation of muscle knitting itself back together wasn’t exactly what I’d call pleasant, but I gritted my teeth and didn’t move until the pain had faded. I touched my belly with one sticky hand and found only equally sticky skin.

I sat up, using the last of my magic to spin an illusion that made me look both human and uninjured. It wouldn’t do for me to go staggering down the street looking like something out of a Saturday night horror movie. The effort left me winded again. I stayed where I was for a few more minutes, waiting for my head to stop spinning. Then I stood and began walking back toward the street. I was done. I was exhausted, I was covered in blood, and I was absolutely, without question, done . Nothing was going to keep me from going home. Absolutely—

Sudden light blinded me. I raised a hand to shield my eyes, squinting against the glare.

“Stop where you are. Keep your hands where I can see them.” The voice was unfamiliar, but the combination of words and tone was unmistakable: that was a police officer talking into a speaker. Which meant someone had reported the gunshots, and I was about to be taken in for questioning. Oh, lucky, lucky me. At least I was wearing a human disguise. I might get arrested, but I wasn’t likely to be dissected.

This is my life.

“LET’S GO OVER THIS AGAIN,” said the policeman.

This is also my life: sitting in the Mission police station for almost two hours after getting picked up for standing in an alleyway where gunshots had been reported. I was waiting for the nice policeman assigned to take my statement to decide that he was done and tell me I could go.

I had better luck with the drug dealers.

“I can do that,” I said.

Not fast enough, or maybe not enthusiastically enough. The policeman looked up from his paperwork, eyes narrowing. “Unless you had somewhere else you wanted to be tonight?”

“I’m fine with going over my statement again,” I said, and smiled.

He didn’t. “Good. Now, you were picked up at approximately ten thirty-seven PM—”

He droned on. I kept smiling and nodding, trying to look like as if I was practicing attentive listening and paying attention to every word he said. Little could have been farther from the truth, but sometimes you have to play by the rules, even if they’re the rules of somebody else’s game.

My name is October Daye. I’m a knight errant in service to the Court of Shadowed Hills, one of the secret Faerie fiefdoms hidden in the state of California. I’m a sort of supernatural troubleshooter, and what I do is technically outside human jurisdiction…but that’s not something I can explain to mortal law enforcement, since they don’t know that Faerie exists.

The policeman stopped talking, apparently waiting for me to say something. I quickly reviewed the last few things he’d said and ventured, “It was dark.”

“You’ve said.” He scowled, picking up another piece of paper. “You told Officer Brannon that you were walking home when gunfire broke out, and you didn’t see the shooters.”

“Yes. It was dark, I didn’t expect people to have guns…” Darkness isn’t actually an issue for me—I see better at night than most humans do in daylight—but it was an excuse. I needed excuses, since there was no way the truth was going to fly with the SFPD.

“Have you lived in San Francisco long, Ms. Daye?”

“All my life.” I’ve never been fond of dealing with the human police. In addition to being a knight errant, I’m a changeling—part fae, part human—and most of the time I manage to restrict my interaction with authority figures to the fae side of things. I don’t like dealing with them either, but at least they’re honest about what they want. Sure, “what they want” frequently involves my head on a platter, but nothing’s perfect.

“Yet somehow you wound up in a very disreputable neighborhood, by yourself, after dark. That doesn’t seem like the move of a native.”

It was getting harder to keep smiling. I gritted my teeth as I said, “I had a fight with my sister and went out to clear my head. As soon as I realized where I was, I turned around.”

“Ms. Daye—”

“Let it go, Carl.” The new voice came from behind me, male, and familiar in a “maybe we were in the same Starbucks once” kind of a way. I twisted in my uncomfortable plastic chair. He was in his mid-thirties, Caucasian, brown hair, with a face as vaguely familiar as his voice.

Carl glowered at the newcomer. “I have a few more questions for Ms. Daye.”

“We’re not charging her with anything, and that means we can stop taking up her valuable time.” Translation: I wasn’t telling them anything useful, and they had better things to do. That was okay by me.

“Fine,” said Carl, with obvious reluctance. His attention flicked back to me. “You’re free to go. Officer Thornton will take you to retrieve your things.”

“I appreciate it,” I said, standing. I hadn’t surrendered my most important things—the silver knife at my belt and the Summerlands-compatible phone in my front pocket. Both were hidden by the illusion that made me look human. That was for the best, since San Francisco law frowns on carrying hidden weapons and explicitly forbids loitering while armed. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time and loitering aren’t quite the same, but I was willing to bet they’d have at least tried to make the charges stick, and I couldn’t afford a lawyer.

Carl grunted, hunching over the paperwork he’d been toying with during my amateur interrogation. Officer Thornton gestured for me to follow him out into the station’s dingy hallway.

“Let’s get you out of here while you can still get a few hours sleep,” he said. Out of habit, I squinted at him sidelong, trying to detect the flicker of an illusion. There was nothing. Officer Thornton might be unusually calm for a grave-shift policeman, but he was human. “Your friend is waiting for you up front.”

I blinked. “My friend?”

“Yes.”

“Right.” That could be any one of a number of people. I gave Officer Thornton another sidelong look, this time focusing on his face. “I’m sorry, but you seem familiar. Do I know you?”

“Golden Gate Park. You were wearing a leather jacket in the middle of summer.” Officer Thornton grinned at my obvious surprise. “I don’t forget a pretty face, especially when it’s refusing help for heatstroke. You’re not going to do that again this year, are you?”

“Oh! That was you?” I remembered that day in the park. I hadn’t been suffering from heatstroke; I’d been poisoned by an old enemy, Oleander de Merelands, who was trying to drive me out of my mind. She came disturbingly close to succeeding. Sometimes I wish my problems were as simple as heatstroke.

“That was me,” he confirmed. He turned to the officer manning the desk, and said, “Ms. Daye is being released. Can we get her things, please?”