Page 56 of Night and Silence

Janet stared at me, expression hurt. “I haven’t done anything to you.”

“You’ve done everything to me. To all of us. You broke the Ride, if you are who you say you are. That means this world is your fault.” I pulled to a stop on the street in front of the Luidaeg’s alley. Technically, it wasn’t a legal parking place, thanks to the combination of red curb and fire hydrant. I wouldn’t get a ticket. No one who came to see the Luidaeg ever had to worry about anything as mundane as the police.

Being turned into something unpleasant and chucked into the bay, on the other hand . . .

There was a moment when I thought Janet might bolt. I took one elbow. Tybalt took the other. With her safely pinned between us, we marched on, Quentin in the lead, May ready to tackle her if she somehow broke free and tried to run.

The Luidaeg’s door looked like it always did: rotten wood and peeling paint, set so far back into the wall that it would have been easy to miss if we hadn’t already known where we were going. Quentin hopped onto the stoop and knocked without any sign of hesitation. He’s known the Luidaeg since before he formally became my squire, and while he appreciates that she’s terrifying and all, he also seems to consider her as much his aunt as she is mine. He adores her. She returns the favor. With as long as she’s been one of Faerie’s greatest monsters, it must be nice for her to have someone who just loves her, no qualifiers, no strings attached.

Seconds ticked by. Janet squirmed.

“Your friend isn’t home,” she said. “We should go.”

“She’s here,” I said. “Wait.”

Janet was still glaring at me when the door opened and the Luidaeg appeared.

As always, when not trying to make a point, she looked like a human teenager, somewhere in the baby-faced range between puberty and college. The ghosts of acne scars dusted her cheeks, and her thick, curly black hair was pulled into twin pigtails, one over each shoulder, both tied off with electrical tape. She was wearing a pair of denim overalls, her feet and shoulders bare, and the expression on her face was somewhere between annoyance and relief.

“I was wondering whether you assholes were going to come bother me today,” she said without preamble. “It’s been a week. I was starting to think you . . . had . . . forgotten . . .” Her voice slowed, finally trailing off as she stared at Janet. She took a step forward, stopping when her toes struck the edge of her threshold. She froze there, still staring.

“Hi, Luidaeg,” I said. “I finally met my grandmother.”

“October.” Her voice sounded hollow. “Do you know who that is? Do you know . . .” She stopped, swallowing hard. The blue was bleeding out of her eyes, replaced drop by drop with clear glass green. That wasn’t a great sign. Better than if they had been going black, but still, not great. “Do you know what she did?”

“Can we come inside?” I asked. “This doesn’t feel like the sort of conversation we should be having in the street.”

She looked at me with honest, raw confusion. I had never seen her at such a loss for words, not even when I had used blood magic to bring her back from the dead and loosened some of the geasa on her in the process. “Inside?” she asked. “Inside my home?”

“Yeah. I’m sorry to ask you to do this, but we don’t have anywhere else to go, and Janet may be in danger.”

The Luidaeg looked at her—scrawny mortal woman with her messy hair, sandwiched between me and Tybalt, both of us holding an arm so she couldn’t get away if she tried—and laughed. “In danger? Her? She is danger, and make no bones of that. But if you came all this way, I suppose you may as well come in.” Her gaze swiveled to Janet. “We’ll discuss the rest of this behind closed doors.”

Janet blanched, twisting in our hands as she tried, futilely, to break away. Tybalt and I both tightened our grips—I, at least, was still trying not to bruise her; I couldn’t necessarily say the same for him—and pulled her into the apartment, following Quentin and the Luidaeg. May brought up the rear, closing the door once we were all inside.

It latched with a sound loud enough to consume the world. Janet moaned, small and tight and, yes, terrified. I gave her a sidelong look.

“Why are you so afraid?”

“Why aren’t you?” she demanded, turning to face me. “Do you know whose door you’ve darkened?”

“Yeah. The Luidaeg is a friend of mine.” You couldn’t have told it from her apartment. The illusions that made it look like something that had washed up with high tide were back in place. Streaks of mold in a dozen virulent colors smeared the walls, all of them clashing with one another, and clashing even worse with the wallpaper behind them. The carpet was worse, seeming to squirm under its thick layer of slime and debris. It squished under our feet. Maybe it was just illusionary water, but the Luidaeg is a master of her craft, and the muck still felt like it was seeping into our shoes.

Janet wasn’t resisting anymore. She allowed us to drag her toward the living room, her eyes rolling wildly as she took in everything around her.

“You know, it’s pretty common knowledge that the Luidaeg is in San Francisco,” I said, tone light, almost conversational. I would have been lying if I’d tried to say I wasn’t enjoying seeing her so uncomfortable. This was the woman who had known I was fae, had known my disappearance was related to the world Cliff couldn’t touch, and rather than helping me make peace with my daughter, had used her knowledge as a lever to keep me even further away. “What the hell are you doing here, if you didn’t want to risk running into her?”

“I wanted to be near my Amy,” she said. “And I knew the sea witch was here, but she didn’t know about me. That made all the difference in the world. She’d never see me if I didn’t want her to.”

Tybalt and I exchanged a glance over her head. He looked baffled. Cait Sidhe sometimes seem to have a monopoly on arrogance, but this was a class above.

The Luidaeg was already seated in her favorite overstuffed armchair when we pulled Janet into the living room. She raised a hand and pointed imperiously to the couch.

“Put her there,” she said.

“Where’s Poppy?” I asked, as Tybalt and I led Janet to the couch.

“Sleeping, like all sensible fae should be at this hour. Which is how I knew it was you people on my porch. You can be accused of having many things, October, but ‘sense’ doesn’t even make the list.” The Luidaeg’s expression softened for a fraction of a second. Then it slammed down again, turning to ice as she looked at Janet. “Do you know what she did?”