“No.”

I stopped, surprised. I’d expected a lot of things. I hadn’t expected her to refuse me. “Your Majesty?”

“No, October Daye, daughter of Amandine.” The Queen lifted her head, jaw set. “I will not help you, and we will speak of this no more. What’s done is done; when the moon is high, we will dance for her, and until that day, no one here will speak the name of the Winterrose, and after that day, no one will speak her name again. I will not help you . . . and you will not ask me to.”

“But . . .”

“No. Amandine’s daughter or no, I will not give you what you would ask me for. I would refuse you and be damned before I did such a thing.” She shook her head. “I have done enough for you down the years; there are no debts between us, and I will not help you now.”

Not even being slapped would have surprised me more. “But, my lady, Evening was murdered, with iron—”

“Don’t tell me how she died!” I rocked back on my heels, clapping my hands over my ears in a vain attempt to block out the voice of the Queen. Maybe time had diluted the blood of her Banshee and Siren ancestors enough that her scream wasn’t fatal, but I’ve never been much for roulette. “Don’t tell me!”

The Court was buzzing again, but this time, their whispers were directed at the Queen. She was shaking where she stood, eyes gone moonstruck-mad with fury. Her rage might have been impressive if it was focused on something else, but it was focused on me, and that made it terrifying. Humanity has instincts that kick in around the fae, forcing them to be good and humble. Changelings don’t get the full brunt, but we get some of it, until sometimes even our own parents can scare us away. I backed up several steps, dropping a hasty curtsy. “Your Majesty, if we’re done, I . . .”

“Get out!” She snapped her head from side to side, an unearthly wail seeping into her voice. “Now!”

I didn’t need another invitation. Whirling, I ran toward the far wall, and through it, back into the darkness of the cave on the other side. My shoes were made for dancing, not running over seawater-slippery rocks. After the third time I nearly fell, I pulled them off, carrying them in the hand that wasn’t being used to keep my skirt as far out of the water as possible. Bruising my feet was a small price to pay if it meant I could get away from the queen before she decided to shut me up herself, or worse, forbid me to involve myself in Evening’s murder.

The air outside the cave was so cold that running into the open was like being slapped. It didn’t matter; I didn’t stop. I ran across the beach, stopping only when I hit the pavement, and there only long enough to put my shoes back on. My original clothes hadn’t come back, and I doubted they would—the Queen is strong enough that a transformation of the inanimate was likely to be forever. I didn’t care. I kept running.

SIX

MY CAR HADN’T BEEN DISTURBED. I dug the spare key from under the bumper and fumbled with the lock until I managed to stop the shaking in my fingers and get the door open. I climbed into the driver’s seat, nearly slamming the trailing hem of my dress in the door as I closed it and started the engine. Evening’s liege wouldn’t help me. This wasn’t a mortal problem. Mortal tools wouldn’t solve it, and my camera wasn’t going to save my ass this time. The police could study Evening’s “body” forever if they wanted to, but a lot of the fae don’t leave fingerprints. They’d never find anything, and that meant there wouldn’t be anything I could steal from them.

Slamming my human disguise back into place, so that I just looked like a hard-used brunette in a party gown, I slumped in the driver’s seat and scowled. I needed to look at things from a different direction. Maybe I couldn’t do anything as an investigator, but as a knight . . . there are resources in Faerie that don’t exist in the human world, and this was a faerie crime. I could solve it, if I found the right spells and called in the right favors. But still . . . I’m just a changeling. Evening was ten times more powerful than I’ll ever be. Whatever took her down wasn’t just lucky; it had to have been strong, too, or it wouldn’t have scared her that way. That meant I needed some power of my own, or I wouldn’t stand a chance.

Asking the Queen for help after she’d all but thrown me out of her knowe might be rude enough to get me killed. Dying wasn’t part of my plan for solving the case—it was bad enough that it might be the price of failure—and that meant our Lady of the Mists was actually a hindrance, because if I got in her way, I wouldn’t have time to run. There were other Courts and nobles I could go to, but only a few had the resources I’d need, and of the choices I had, only two didn’t leave me cold. I wanted to get out alive, and that ruled out both Blind Michael and the Tarans of the Berkeley Hills. I considered the Luidaeg, but cast that thought aside as quickly as it had come. Some things are worse than dying.

I couldn’t go to Lily. I just couldn’t. That wasn’t as self-involved as it sounds; Lily’s an Undine, and she’s tied to her knowe. Unless Evening’s killers sat in the Tea Gardens discussing what they were about to do, she wouldn’t be able to help me anyway.

Sylvester would help me if I went to him.Sylvester would insist on being the one to help me, and I couldn’t take it. I’d have to go to him eventually—he’d have to know that Evening was gone, and he was my liege; it was my duty to make sure he knew—but I couldn’t go until I was going to be able to say, “It’s all right, I have help, I don’t need you.” I could stand a lot of things, but I wasn’t ready for the idea of him being able to make me come back.

If I couldn’t trust the Queen, and I couldn’t turn to Sylvester, there was really only one place left that I could go. Devin. Devin, and Home.

Lips thinned with new resolve, I pulled out of the alley, heading away from the water and into the part of the city that smart people do their best to avoid after the sun goes down. I try to be smart when I can, and careful when I can’t, but at the moment, neither of those was going to work for me, because I was doing something I’d sworn I’d never do. Oberon help me, I was going Home.

A lot of changelings have fled the Summerlands over the centuries, building an entire society on the border between Faerie and the mortal world. The purebloods know—of course they do—but they don’t know what to do with their precious half-blood children when they turn into angry adults, and so they’ve never done anything to stop it. It’s a vicious, cutthroat place, where the strong feed on the weak, and it’s where changeling runaways always seem to end up.