Seanan McGuire - Ashes of Honor

The new house was on 20th Street, overlooking Mission Delores Park. It would probably have cost a million or more on the open market. Sylvester did all his real estate investment in that area over a century ago. All he had to do was hand me the keys, and suddenly we had as much room as we needed.

Moving meant boxing up all the things Connor had accidentally left at my place: shirts and sandals, toothbrushes and half-finished paperbacks. I found them, boxed them, and took them with us. I didn’t know how to let him go. I don’t believe in ghosts, but there were times when I felt like I was being haunted. Worse yet, there were times when I didn’t know whether I minded the haunting.

Tybalt cleared his throat. “Quentin’s studies are proceeding well?”

“I think so. They seem to be. I’ve never done this before.” Quentin was my squire, making me responsible for teaching him how to be an effective knight of Faerie without getting himself killed. Mostly, this seemed to mean he was underfoot all the time, and Sylvester sent money to pay for feeding him. At least he had his own room now.

“Raj is quite envious, you know.”

I shot Tybalt a glance. “Really?” Raj was his adopted nephew and probable heir to the throne of the Court of Cats.

“Really.” He nodded. “We have nothing so organized in the Court of Cats. No one teaches a King to be a King. You claim your position the day the old King no longer holds it.”

“Because the new King has just kicked his ass?” I asked.

The amusement faded but didn’t disappear. “In most cases, yes,” he said.

We kept walking. It’s not far from the Mission Police Station to Mission Delores Park, but I wasn’t hurrying. It was a beautiful night, and I was too tired to hurry. I risked another glance at Tybalt as we walked. For someone who used to be one of my biggest—not enemies, exactly, but annoyances—he’s become very important to me. There have been times I was pretty sure I was important to him, too. Maybe I was right, but we’d silently agreed to let the issue rest after Connor died. We both needed some time.

Tybalt managed to seem feline even wearing a human disguise; it was something in the way he moved, something that had nothing to do with the shape of his ears or the color of his hair. Cats have no stripes in the dark, after all. His jeans and flannel work shirt looked at once too mundane and exactly right for him. He was walking slowly to pace me, despite his longer legs, and was staying carefully outside my personal space.

That’s something else that changed when Connor died. Tybalt used to take obvious pleasure in standing too close just to watch me squirm. As soon as I went into mourning, that part of his feline nature faded. He’s always been a contradiction that way, part arrogant feline, part genuinely compassionate man. It just took me a while to see the second side of him.

As always, walking with Tybalt was strangely comfortable. This time, it came with a new feeling—guilt, as though I was betraying Connor’s memory by being comfortable with another man. Finally, to break the silence, I asked, “How did you know where to find me before?”

“Ah.” Tybalt sighed. “It was, in a roundabout way, your squire.”

“Quentin?”

“Yes. He told Raj, including a complaint that you were going to get yourself killed. Raj, naturally, assumed this was something I might like to know, and, well…” Tybalt shrugged. “I am sure you would have been fine without me.”

“Oh, yeah. I just let you help so you wouldn’t feel useless.”

Tybalt spared a small smile. “Quite kind of you.”

“Don’t mention it,” I said. “So what was keeping May too occupied to come and get me herself? Not to sound like I’m whining or anything, but it’s not like I get picked up by the police every night, and it would have been nice of her to come down to the station.”

Tybalt made a face.

I sighed. “I meant on foot, like this. Not in the car.” May is possibly the worst driver in the world. If there are worse, I don’t want to know. I have enough trouble sleeping as it is.

“You have company.”

“Company? Please tell me you mean the pleasant kind of company, like Stacy brought the kids over, or even Danny and the Barghests.”

“As opposed to…?”

“The unpleasant kind of company. The kind of company that’s here to arrest and/or kill me. Or maybe kill me, and then arrest me, and then bring me back to life and kill me again.”

“Ah. I don’t believe the current company falls into either category. It’s Etienne.”

“Etienne?” I blinked at him. “Seriously?”

Tybalt nodded. “Seriously.”

Etienne is one of the other knights in Sylvester’s service. He’s a traditionalist, and I’m, well, not. We get along reasonably well—we’ve only ever attacked each other when we had really good reasons—but we’ve never been friends. I hadn’t even realized he knew where I lived, much less had any desire to visit. “Did he say what he wanted?” I asked. We were almost to the house, and suddenly, it seemed way too far away. “Is Sylvester okay?”

“I knew you would ask that, so I made him reassure me that everything is fine in Shadowed Hills. The Torquills are well, and the court continues to thrive.”

“So…what’s Etienne doing at my house?”

“He wouldn’t tell me.”

I sighed, turning the corner onto 20th Street. “That’s never a good sign.”

Tybalt smirked. “So little is, when you’re involved.”

I laughed and kept walking. The businesses of Valencia fell away, replaced by stately old Victorian brownstones. Most had long since been converted into smaller apartments, divided and subdivided until not even they remembered what they’d once been. A few, like mine, were lucky enough to have been in private hands since they were built, and remained spacious reminders of an earlier era. Most of the houses were dark, the gates separating their small yards from the street closed and locked. Tybalt and I kept walking until the light from my living room window told us that we’d reached our destination.

It looked like any other house on the street from the outside. The tiny yard was a mix of heirloom rosebushes and easy-care groundcover, all of which was tended by the groundskeeper Sylvester paid to “protect his investment.” In daylight, the paint was maybe a little too bright, an eye-popping mixture of yellow, green, and electric blue. But at night, with the moonlight softening the colors, it was beautiful. Knowing Sylvester, I had faith that it was intentional. Fae eyes would see the house by night, so night was when the house would look its very best.

I opened the gate and started up the path to the porch, pausing when I realized Tybalt wasn’t coming. I turned. He was still standing on the sidewalk, watching me walk away. I blinked, once, and then smiled.

Maybe I’d been avoiding him long enough. Maybe it was time to let my friends come in out of the cold. “Well?” I asked. “Are you coming?”

Tybalt’s eyes widened, a smile blooming on his face. “If you insist,” he said, and followed me inside.

THE SOUND OF THE TELEVISION drifted quietly from the direction of the living room as I stepped into the house, moving to the side to let Tybalt follow. I shrugged out of my jacket, hanging it on the hook next to the door. “Want to take your coat off?” I asked.

Tybalt looked amused. “Coats removed in your presence tend to disappear from my possession.”

“Suit yourself,” I said, unable to keep myself from smiling.

The entryway was narrow enough that having two of us there made it uncomfortably intimate. There was a small table next to the door, covered in junk mail, paperbacks, and less-definable oddities, hinting at the tightly controlled chaos to come. May’s a pack rat, and neither Quentin nor I are much for housework.