Page 21 of Silver and Lead (October Daye #19)

SEVEN

A HAND SETTLED ON my shoulder, squeezing just hard enough to catch my attention without hurting me, and shook.

“October. It’s time to wake up now.”

“Mrgh,” I said, intelligently, and opened my eyes.

I was facing the kitchen window of my house, complete with May’s riotous windowsill herb garden and the mismatched spectrum of suncatchers and prisms Jazz had hung from the frame. I blinked to clear my vision, then sighed.

“Did I sleep the whole way home?” I asked, turning toward the owner of the hand.

Simon nodded. “I’m afraid so. We considered waking you to take a detour through the McDonalds drive through, but you seemed so peaceful that it wasn’t a good enough idea to act upon.”

“What?” I glanced at my empty lap, then back to Simon. “How did you and Tybalt discuss anything? I doubt he turned human again during the drive.”

“He didn’t,” Simon agreed. “I proposed the stop, he hissed at me, I took that for negation, apologized, and drove us the rest of the way home.”

The car windows were down. Tybalt must have jumped out as soon as we were home. “Hope he had his keys,” I said, unfastening my belt.

Simon got quickly out of the car and moved around to open my door. “Here, let me help you,” he said, offering his arm. I took it, letting him pull me to my feet. He smiled at me as I rose, then stepped back, leaving me with a clear path to the kitchen door.

I grabbed his hand before he could go any farther. “How were you planning to get back to the shore?” I asked.

“I did live in this city for many years,” he said.

“I intended to walk to the train station and flag down a cab. Most drivers can be convinced to take a man to the sea for a healthy enough tip. And if that should fail me, it’s only a two-mile walk to Crane Cove Park.

The water is easily accessible from there. ”

“Yeah, no. I don’t care how comfortable you are with the idea, but I’m not letting you wander off alone in the middle of the night to chuck yourself off a pier.”

“Dianda has assured me—”

“I know you have ways of coming and going, but no,” I said.

“Quentin and Dean should be home soon, and I know Dean was planning to spend the night at Goldengreen. He always comes in before he goes home, so he can have a cup of hot cocoa and some of May’s cookies.

You can hitch a ride with him and go back to Saltmist from the cove there.

Much safer. Much less likely to give me anxiety. ”

Still Simon hesitated, trying to tug his hand out of mine. “I’m not sure whether I’ll be welcome within your walls.”

“Why wouldn’t—oh.” I caught myself. My own healing had been sped so much by our time under Titania’s enchantment that I sometimes forgot not everyone had been there. Not everyone had received the benefits of a lifetime of false memories.

If it seems a little weird for me to be calling having my existence rewritten by an ancient, borderline-all-powerful bigot a “benefit,” well.

I can’t make it not have happened, so I need to find a way to live with the fact that it did.

Accepting that my having a different set of memories around some people has improved our relationships and made them easier is really the smallest adjustment I could make.

The kitchen door opened, revealing Tybalt standing there framed in light. “She’s not in the kitchen at the moment,” he said. “You can at least come in for a cup of tea.”

The corner of Simon’s mouth tugged upward. “You can take the man out of England,” he said, almost wistfully. “I think I would like that.”

“I’ll go upstairs and talk to her,” I said, letting Simon go ahead of me into the house. “Maybe she’ll be okay with it. And if she’s not, maybe she’ll be willing to stay in her room until you’re gone. She stays in her room most of the time as it is.”

“I don’t want to make her uncomfortable in her own home,” said Simon, but stepped into the kitchen all the same, moving quickly out of the doorway so I could follow.

After the cool dark of the San Francisco night, stepping into the bright, sugar-scented confines of my kitchen was like entering another world.

It wasn’t the biggest kitchen I’d ever seen in a residential home, but May had worked a series of charms on the cabinets that expanded their available space tenfold, meaning she could shop for our six permanent residents along with our rotating assortment of teenagers without taking up all the available room.

A few mismatched cloches sat on the counters, protecting the latest assortment of baked goods from going stale.

Not that it was much of a risk with the swarm of teens that swept through periodically: nothing ever went stale in this house. A small table was shoved into the dining nook, mostly clear of papers and clutter; those things dominated the dining room, but this was May’s domain.

I paused to lean in and plant a kiss on Tybalt’s cheek. “You take care of getting drinks for you and Simon—I’d like a glass of rosemary lemonade if we still have it—and I’ll go check on Raysel. Back in a few minutes.”

“Of course,” said Tybalt, clearly much more relaxed now that we were back in the house, where most of Faerie’s dangers would have trouble reaching us without ploughing through my wards.

Titania had ripped our original wards down when she came, shredding them like tissue paper and leaving the house defenseless.

It had taken the better part of a month to reset them to a level I was comfortable with after her enchantment shattered, and now the wards, rather than being tied solely to me, contained contributions from almost everyone who lived here.

Most people would be hard-pressed to get through uninvited.

Knowing that made it easier to sleep at day, since I didn’t feel like my enemies were going to come crashing through the window at any moment.

I started pulling myself up the stairs one step at a time, keeping my hand on the bannister for balance.

There’s no such thing as a good fall when you’re eight months pregnant.

Sweet Maeve, I was going to be glad when this pregnancy was finished.

I was excited to meet the baby, and I didn’t regret it, but I’m used to being able to jump off roofs without fear of lasting consequences.

Until the kid was out of me and we could tell whether they healed like me or like their father, I had to be more careful than I had been in years.

I didn’t like it. Behaving like I was breakable was so limiting .

I was halfway up the steps when I heard a rattle. I looked up to see Spike sitting on the landing, watching me curiously. I shot it a smile and kept moving.

Our resident rose goblin had been roughly the size of a cat when I first brought it home.

Shaped like a cat, too, if cats came in pink and green, covered with thorns that clicked together like the beans inside a maraca whenever Spike shook itself.

It was still shaped like a cat. But rose goblins didn’t exactly come with care and feeding instructions, and it turned out that when you fed and watered them, they grew.

Spike was now roughly the size of a basset hound, and smart enough to know that we couldn’t both fit on the stairs in my current condition. Instead, it turned vivid yellow eyes in my direction and rattled its thorns at me.

“Hi, Spike,” I said. “How’s Raysel doing?”

We’d been worried, when we first orchestrated Raysel coming home with us to recover, that she would find the presence of a rose goblin upsetting.

They came from her mother’s garden, after all, and getting away from her mother was a large part of why she needed to be here.

To everyone’s surprise, her reaction had been the exact opposite.

Spike now slept in her room at day, either with her in the bed or on the floor in front of the door, where it could rattle its thorns menacingly at anyone who tried to enter while Raysel was asleep.

It followed her around the house when she left her room, providing a form of constant companionship.

And Raysel adored it. She brushed its thorns and trimmed the ones that had gotten too long, making it easier for the spiky little creature to move around the house without getting stuck to things.

It continued to watch me as I made it to the top of the stairs and paused to catch my breath. “Is Raysel in her room?” I asked.

It rattled its thorns at me in what I hoped was the affirmative.

“Good goblin,” I said, bending to run a hand over its head. As long as I stroked with the grain of the thorns, it didn’t draw blood.

This essential errand accomplished, I continued down the hall to Raysel’s closed bedroom door room and rapped gently.

“Hello?” she called after a moment.

“It’s Toby,” I replied. “Can I come in?”

The door inched open, wide enough for Raysel to peer out at me. “It’s your house,” she said. “You don’t have to ask.”

“It’s your room; I do,” I countered.

We’d had this exchange dozens of times, both reciting our lines with conviction. Me knowing what I was supposed to say plainly reassured her, and she pulled the door wider open, letting me inside.

Before Raysel had come to live with us, May had taken it upon herself to prepare our former guest room for a longer-term stay.

I would never have thought of that. I wanted Raysel to be comfortable, but I’m bad enough at taking care of my own needs that setting up a whole room for her would just not have occurred to me.

The walls were white, the furniture basic and sparse, but the shelves were increasingly cluttered with the things she’d been collecting since she came home.

Shells and books and interesting trinkets. Everything but rocks.

She didn’t collect rocks anymore.

Raysel closed the door behind me and moved to sit on the edge of the bed, leaving the desk chair open. I sat down, putting myself on her level. “Hey,” I said.