“Then why are you looking out at the ocean for him?”

“He is coming from the ocean, just not by boat,” I said.

“Okay, I’ll bite; if he’s not coming by boat, how is he getting here?” Becket asked.

“He’ll walk,” I said.

“Princess, you don’t do this often, but when you do, it’s like pulling teeth to get you to answer a straight question.”

I turned and looked at Cooper, and thought about it. “I’m sorry, you’re right. I’ve spent the last few months with just other fey, and we aren’t always known for straightforward information sharing.”

Becket gave a snorting laugh. “That’s an understatement.”

“Becket,” Cooper said, voice sharp.

“It’s all right, Agent Cooper, truth is truth.”

“All right, then if King Sholto isn’t coming by boat, how is he going to walk here?”

“Magic,” I said, and went back to staring at the edge of the water.

“Can you elaborate, please?”

I smiled, and thought about it. “Do you know what his title is as lord among the sidhe?”

“He’s the Lord of That Which Passes Between,” Cooper said.

“Exactly,” I said.

“What does that mean, Princess?” Becket asked, and he sounded impatient now.

I sighed, and shivered for a minute even in the borrowed jacket. “The edge of sea and shore is a place between, which means he can use it to travel to me.”

“You said he was going to walk; do you mean he’s going to walk onto the beach like magic?” Cooper asked.

“Not like magic, it is magic.”

“You mean literally ‘oooh’ magic?” Becket said, making a finger-waving gesture when he said “oooh.”

“Exactly,” I said, smiling. I liked Becket. He made me remember that I missed being around people who weren’t sidhe, or fey, or familiar with the high courts. It was a more formal world, and I’d been surrounded by people who had lived in it for centuries, and it had made me lose some sense of myself that wasn’t sidhe, or even brownie. I’d forgotten that being human could be fun, and that though I’d hated being exiled to Los Angeles without any way to interact with another sidhe, and losing all of faerie had been like a living death, I’d found a part of my humanity that had gotten lost at the Unseelie Court. I’d grown up with a house full of sidhe and other fey, but I’d gone to school with humans—American humans—and our neighbors had been the same. I hadn’t realized until this last year that being raised outside faerie had given me more of a connection to my human grandfather’s culture, and having the ambassador and his men in the house had made me realize I’d gotten sucked right back into the culture of the courts. It was a different culture than either the Seelie or Unseelie, but it was still not a human way of looking at things. The soldiers who had visited hadn’t helped me understand that, because they’d come more as priests and priestesses seeking answers. That hadn’t been normal enough to make me realize that I was in danger of losing something important. My human great-grandfather had been a good man, from every story I’d ever heard. He’d been a Scottish farmer who had been special enough to fall in love with the family brownie, not a type of fey known for their beauty. I didn’t want to lose that part of my heritage again. I’d actually begun to wonder if I needed to work at the Grey and Hart Detective Agency just to remember that I was more than a faerie princess. I was a person, I was Merry Gentry, or had been for three years until the queen had sent Doyle to these Western Lands to find me and bring me home. Now I had sidhe lovers, and faerie had come to us. I had almost everything I’d been homesick for, plus three children, and the magic of the Goddess returned, but in all that wonder I didn’t want to forget that I was part human, too, and part brownie. I wanted to find a way to honor all those parts of me, and share that with our children.

“You look very serious all of a sudden, Princess; what ya thinkin’ about?”

I glanced at Becket and smiled. “That I’m part human, not just sidhe, and I need to be reminded of that.”

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“Are you saying we remind you what it’s like to be human?” Cooper asked.

“No, you remind me that I am human.”

He gave me a look, one dark eyebrow rising. “Forgive me, princess, but you aren’t exactly human.”

“My great-grandfather was.”

“And your grandfather is Uar the Cruel, one of the high nobles of the Seelie Court, who is mentioned in myth and folklore going back hundreds of years.”

“My great-grandmother was a brownie.”

“And your father was Essus, Prince of Flesh and Fire. He was worshipped as a god before the Romans conquered Britain.”

“Agent Cooper, are you saying that the noble side of my heritage is more important than the non-noble side?”

He looked startled. “I wouldn’t say that. I mean, I didn’t … I didn’t mean that.”

“She so got you, Coop,” Becket said.

“I didn’t mean to insult you, Princess, but you can’t just say you’re human with the pedigree you have.”

“I didn’t say I’m just human, but I’m not just sidhe either, and I want my children to understand that they’re more than just sidhe. Through me they’re brownie, and through Galen they’re pixie, and Doyle gives them phouka. I want them to understand that they are more than just sidhe of either court. I want them to value all parts of their heritage.”

“It sounds like you’ve been thinking about this,” Cooper said.

I nodded. “For a few days, yes.”

“So you want your kids to grow up being more human?” Becket asked.

“Yes,” I said. A shimmering caught my eye at the edge of the sea. One moment it was just the waves and the sand, and the next Sholto just stepped out of nowhere and started walking up the beach toward us.

“Holy shit!” Becket said.

Cooper had started to reach for his gun, and then forced himself to relax, or at least pretend.

The wind caught Sholto’s hair, streaming it out around him in a pale blond halo that intermingled with the black of his cloak, so that he strode toward me in a cloud of silken hair and dark cloth. The three yellow rings of his eyes had already begun to shine as if they were carved of gold, citrine, and topaz. It almost distracted from the beauty of his face, the broad shoulders, the sheer physicality of him as he strode toward me.

“You can try to be human, Princess, but that’s not human,” Becket said.

“Oh, Agent Becket, you have no idea how not human he is.” Then Sholto was there, sweeping me into his arms, kissing me as if he hadn’t seen me in months, instead of just days. I wrapped myself around him, and he put his hands under my ass and started up the stairs, his mouth still married to mine. He climbed smoothly, easily, as if he could keep kissing me forever, whether he was climbing a set of stairs, or a mountain.

Becket called after us, “I don’t know, Princess, I think the glowing eyes give it away.”

I broke from the kissing long enough to look over Sholto’s shoulder and let the men see that my own eyes had started to burn.