Seanan McGuire - Ashes of Honor

“Oh, Etienne.” Playing faerie bride—being fae, and loving a human—is never easy. Doing it while serving as the Seneschal of a madman would be virtually impossible. “What happened?”

“What always happens.” His smile turned bitter before fading. “I fell in love with a human woman. I did what I had always looked down on others for doing. I wasn’t sorry then, and I’m not sorry now. I’m only sorry it had to end. Sylvester was getting worse. Jin was having more difficulty getting him to take the sleeping draughts, and it got harder to slip away. Bridget was understanding at first, and then she was angry, and finally, she stopped answering her phone. I went to the campus during her office hours once, to apologize—I knew better than to think I could get her back, not at that point—and there was a sign on the bulletin board saying she was on sabbatical and would be back the next year.”

“And was she?”

“I don’t know.” Etienne looked at me, dark eyes full of sorrow. “That was the last time I tried to see her. There wasn’t time after that; it wouldn’t have been fair to either of us. It was the spring of 1996. You’d been gone less than a year. The darkest days were just beginning.”

I shivered. “I had no idea.”

“We didn’t exactly advertise.”

“But…I’m confused, Etienne. What does all this have to do with anything? I mean, that was sixteen years ago. Did Professor Ames track you down?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes.” Etienne shrugged. The gesture was somehow alien on him, like a coat that didn’t fit quite right. “I gave Bridget a number where she could reach me in an emergency. I was in love. It seemed the thing to do.”

I stared at him. “You gave her the number for Shadowed Hills? ”

“One of them, yes. I told her it was the office where I worked. There’s a special ring when someone calls from a mortal location; whoever took her call would know to be careful.”

“And I can’t even change the ringtone on my phone,” I muttered. More loudly, I asked, “So she called you?”

“Yes. Three hours ago now.” Etienne rubbed his face again. “It seems we were both keeping secrets. I didn’t tell her I wasn’t human.”

There was only one thing he could say next, and it wasn’t something I wanted to hear. I still prompted him, asking, “And what did she not tell you?”

“That she was pregnant.” Etienne dropped his hand away from his face, looking at me despondently. “I have a changeling daughter, October. Almost sixteen years old and raised outside of Faerie’s knowledge.”

I stared at him, stunned into silence.

Most changeling children have instinctive illusions that make them seem human for the earliest years of their lives. It’s a form of defensive camouflage, like spots on a fawn. But that baby magic shorts out as changelings grow, and a changeling who hasn’t learned to weave a human disguise by the age of six or seven is a danger to Faerie. Secrecy is the only thing that’s kept us alive for so long. Etienne had always played things by the rules and by the book—and now there was a chance that he’d committed the greatest infraction of them all. There was a chance he’d given Faerie away.

There was just one piece missing. “So…if your daughter is sixteen, her baby magic must have failed years ago. Why did Bridget call you now? What changed?” I paused, then asked the big question: “How did you not know? ”

“I never asked,” said Etienne. He smiled—the small, painful smile of a man who suddenly saw what he had been doing wrong for years. “All the people I paid to check on her, all the pixies and sprites I bribed…I never asked them to check for a child, and I never went myself. I didn’t know the girl existed because I never asked.”

“Oak and ash,” I breathed. “And…why now?”

“Bridget called because our daughter is missing.” Etienne sat up a little straighter, looking me in the eyes. “She vanished this afternoon, on her way home from school—and I do mean ‘vanished.’ Her friends said she was there one moment and gone the next. Bridget assumed, quite reasonably, that the faeries had finally found her. She called me screaming, begging for the return of her little girl. She knew exactly what I was, even down to the name of my race.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t have dated a folklore professor,” I said.

“Maybe not,” said Etienne. “Regardless, I did, and we had a child together, and now that child is missing. She may have been taken. She may have finally found the magic she was heir to and not known how to control it. Either way, I am here to hire you. Please, October. I need you to find my daughter.”

Oh, oak and ash. This wasn’t going to end well.

I STARED AT ETIENNE. He must have been expecting that reaction, because he didn’t bat an eye. He just looked back at me, waiting for me to get it out of my system.

If I’d been asked to list the ten people most likely to have an affair with a human, Etienne wouldn’t have come anywhere near making the cut. And if I’d been asked to make a list of the people I could see fathering an accidental changeling, Etienne wouldn’t have made the top fifty. Like most Tuatha, he loved rules, and the rules said that sort of behavior wasn’t allowed. But Sylvester had been out of his mind with fear and grief, leaving Etienne to hold things together by himself, and that had changed the rules. Tired men make mistakes when they’re looking for a place to rest. Etienne wasn’t human, but he was still a man.

May’s laughter drifted up the stairs, reminding me that time was passing. Whatever had happened to Etienne’s daughter wasn’t going to unhappen just because I was busy staring at her father. “Etienne—”

“I’ve already rehearsed every objection you might make. I have answers to them all. Please. Can’t we just skip that part and reach the point where you agree to help me? My daughter is alone out there. Time is of the essence.”

He was wrong about one thing: she probably wasn’t “alone out there.” Teenage girls run away from home sometimes—I was a prime example of that—but they don’t usually vanish in broad daylight. If she’d disappeared that abruptly, the odds were good that someone made her disappear. I hate missing children cases, and that’s probably why the world keeps handing them to me. Reality is nothing if not malicious where I’m concerned.

Instead of arguing or objecting, I asked a simple question: “Why me?”

“Because you were the one who dared to go up against Blind Michael. When the sons of Saltmist were taken, you were the one who brought them home. And because my daughter is…she’s…”

“She’s a changeling,” I said. “You want me, instead of one of the other knights, because you think I’ll be more understanding of the fact that she’s not a pureblood.”

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. He just nodded.

“I’m going to regret this, but…okay,” I said. I picked up my mug and downed its contents in a single long gulp. The coffee was hot enough to burn my throat a little, but I didn’t let that worry me; I’m a fast healer. I set the empty mug aside. “What’s her name?”

“Chelsea.” He said her name like it was some strange, undiscovered country, one that had disappeared from maps a thousand years ago. The wonder in his voice would have been touching if we’d been talking about a baby and not a missing half-human teenager. As it was, it was just a little sad.

“You said she disappeared on her way home from school. Do you know what school she attends?” He wouldn’t have a picture, since he hadn’t known she existed before she went missing, but every school keeps photos of its student body. Breaking into the office couldn’t be that hard. It would be easier than breaking into Bridget and Chelsea’s house, since schools tend to be closed at night, and that’s when I do the bulk of my petty larceny.