“But—”

“But nothing. Go home. There’s nothing for you here.” I shoved the door open and stepped inside.

“The Duke—”

“Won’t blame you for failing to deliver this message. Trust me on this one.” I paused, suddenly tired, and turned in the doorway to face him. He looked very lost. It was almost enough to make me feel sorry for him. “How long have you been with Sylvester’s court?”

“Almost a year,” he said, confusion shifting into sudden wariness. I couldn’t blame him for that. I hadn’t been exactly pleasant.

“Almost a year,” I echoed. “Right. That explains why you drew the short straw. Look: I am a knight in the service of His Grace. That’s true. I can’t make him release my fealty. But unless he gives me a direct order, I don’t have to listen. Did he send you here with a direct order?” The kid shook his head, silent. “That’s what I thought. Tell him I appreciate him thinking of me, and I’d appreciate it even more if he’d stop.” Almost gently, I shut the door in his face.

The knocking started less than a minute later. I groaned. “Root and branch, don’t some people know how to take a hint? I’m not interested!” The knocking continued.

Swearing under my breath, I shrugged out of my coat and threw it over the back of my battered, Goodwill-issue couch. It’s the little touches that can make a house a home, right?

The knocking wasn’t stopping. I glared at the door, considering telling him to go the hell away before I shook my head and moved farther into the apartment instead. Sylvester has a knack for inspiring loyalty. If he told the kid to deliver a message, the kid was going to do his damnedest to deliver it. It might have been easier to just open the door and let him say whatever it was Sylvester felt needed to be said, but the thing was I didn’t want him to. As long as I didn’t hear it, I didn’t have to run the risk that I might care.

Sylvester started trying to contact me as soon as someone told him I was back. First it was with letters delivered by pixies and rose goblins. Then it was messages passed through mutual acquaintances. If he’d moved up to sending pages, he must be getting desperate, but I still didn’t want to hear it. What did he have to say to me? “I’m sorry you screwed up this simple little thing I asked you to do and got yourself turned into a fish while I kept suffering alone?” “Maybe you didn’t find my family, but hey, you lost yours, so I guess it all evened out?” Thanks, but no thanks. I can wallow in guilt just fine without any help from my titular liege lord.

One day, Sylvester’s going to move up to ordering me to answer him, or worse, to come to Shadowed Hills and see him in person. When that happens, I won’t be able to disobey—even if I’m trying to deny Faerie, he’s my liege, and his word is law. Until then, I’m free to disregard his messengers as often as I like, and as often as I like is always. Let the kid hammer on my door until someone called security. I was going to get some sleep.

The cats were puddled on the couch in a tumbled heap of cream and chocolate. I walked past them, heading for the narrow hallway that connects the living room and kitchen to the back of the apartment where the bedrooms are. The hall lights have been burned out since I moved in, but that’s not a problem; fae are essentially nocturnal, and even changelings see well in the dark. I left my shoes by the kitchen door and my shirt on the floor outside the extra bedroom. Keeping up a human disguise for the duration of a night’s work was exhausting, and I needed to sleep.

My battered secondhand answering machine was on a low table just outside my bedroom door, dingy red display light flashing. I winced. It was probably another message from Stacy, inviting me to come over for dinner with the family, or out to coffee with her, or anywhere, just as long as I was willing to see her and let her make it better. I couldn’t deal with it. Not after Mitch and his concerned looks, and Tybalt in the alley, and Sylvester sending a page to hammer on my door until I let him yell at me. Stacy could wait. Hell, if I was lucky, maybe the machine would malfunction again and wipe the tape before I got around to listening to it.

Silencing the phone’s ringer with a flick of my finger, I walked into my bedroom and left the answering machine to flash at an empty hall. Almost as an afterthought, I closed the door.

I kicked off my jeans, taking my well-thumbed copy of the works of Shakespeare from the bedside table before crawling, otherwise dressed, into bed. My book-mark was set in the middle of Hamlet. The text was familiar enough to be soothing, and I fell asleep without noticing, sliding straight down into dreaming.

The dreams always start in the same place, and they always start so kindly, with a sunny kitchen in a little house in Oakland, California, and a smiling woman with white-blond hair baking cookies like a Donna Reed fantasy come true. My mother. Amandine.

I always knew she wasn’t human; that’s not the sort of thing you can hide from a kid. It took me longer to understand that I wasn’t human either. They’ve called my mother’s side of the family the Kindly Ones, guardians of the garden path, stealers of children . . . or in her case, before she met my father, assistant clerk at the local five-and-dime. Playing human teenager amused her, and I guess when you plan on living forever, you do whatever it takes to make the days pass. The arcane mechanisms of modern retail served well enough to keep her entertained for a while.

That was in 1950. They say the mortal world was simpler then, but it was complicated enough for her.

Daddy wasn’t like her, and that drew Mother to him like a moth to a flame. She played faerie bride better than I did; she could weave an illusion in an instant, hiding pointed ears and colorless eyes behind a human smile before the people around her had time to blink. She never got caught out by the dawn or wound up shouting excuses from the bathroom while she tried to shove her “face” back into place. The fae are liars, every one of us, and she was the best. They met in 1951, married three months later, and had me in ’52, in the month I was named after.

In the dream, she puts the cookies on the table and takes me in her lap, and we eat cookie dough while we watch the house clean itself, feather duster and broom and mop moving as smoothly as anything animated by Disney. Amandine was really my mother then; she grinned a chocolate smile as she held me, happy as anything with her weird little version of reality. She’d never played faerie bride before. The game enchanted her, and she followed its rules with the scrupulousness that was her hallmark. They were happy. We were happy. That’s something I try to hang on to. We were happy once. She held me in her lap and brushed my hair; she taught me to love Shakespeare. We were a family. Nothing can change that.