Page 11 of The Unkindest Tide

Pushing the covers back, I swung my feet to the floor and looked at my knees as I said, “I’m out of time. I have to go see Gilly today, and I’m not ready. I was . . .” I hesitated. Admitting this felt like cowardice; lying to Tybalt after everything he’d been through at my mother’s hands felt even worse. “I know she’s been going to see Elizabeth Ryan to learn how to be a better Selkie, and I guess I was hoping Liz would let something slip about what was coming. I mean, it would make sense, right? For her teacher to be the one who told her.”

“And not her still semi-estranged mother. I can understand that.” Tybalt shifted positions, settling next to me and rubbing my back with one hand, forming small, concentric circles. I was never going to get tired of the way he wanted to be always touching me, taking the social grooming of cats and extending it in a form my bipedal mind could easily comprehend. “But you are her mother, October. Whether she’s mortal, fae, or in the middle, you’re the one who bore her, and you never intended to give her up. That means something. That means you have a responsibility to her, and she a responsibility to you. If you come to her with information, she should listen.”

I took a deep, shaky breath, leaning into his hand. “Will you go with me?” I asked. “To tell her she’s going to have to choose whether she wants to die or lose her humanity forever?”

“Certainly, I will.” He pressed a kiss to my temple. “But you’re better equipped for this conversation than you think you are, my love. You’ve faced this choice, and you chose survival. She’ll choose the same. She may not care much for your company at the moment. She’s still your daughter, and that makes her a fighter.”

“I hope so.” I got up. “No time like the present, I guess.”

Selkies, like seals, are largely diurnal. It was a problem back when Connor and I were dating. Connor O’Dell had been a Selkie diplomat, assigned to the Court of Shadowed Hills back when assigning diplomats to the Queen’s Court had been a waste of time and resources. He’d been good at his job, so good that he’d eventually wound up married to Sylvester’s daughter as part of a carefully orchestrated political alliance. We’d become lovers after the marriage ended—and very nearly before, a fact that I wasn’t entirely proud of.

He’d died saving Gillian’s life, and while the skin she wore had never belonged to him, sometimes I felt as if it had. Lose one Selkie, gain another. That’s the way things had always worked for them. And I was going to be part of bringing that to an end. Their whole social structure, their way of life . . . it was about to die. I might not be the hand that killed it, but I was the weapon that hand was wielding.

Selkies were diurnal. Were Roane? Was Gillian about to find herself separated from her humanity for the rest of her long, long life, unable to keep her eyes open in the middle of the day, leaving her human father wondering what had changed?

Sometimes I felt like the person I really needed to apologize to was Cliff. He’d loved me once. He’d been a good man—still was, according to Gillian and Janet, who had never found themselves banished from the walled city of his heart—and he’d loved me, and what did he have to show for it? An ex-lover he thought of as a deadbeat, a daughter who couldn’t tell him why she was pulling away, and a wife who’d been lying to him since the day they met.

I grabbed clothes without paying attention to what they were, yanking them on and pulling my hair into a rough ponytail. It’s not that I don’t care how I look. It’s more that I’ve learned that the more attention I pay to my appearance, the more likely I am to wind up ruining something I actually like when I get covered in blood. Again. At least the blood is usually my own. I’m not sure why that’s better, but it is.

Tybalt remained on the bed, watching me dress. Finally, he yawned and asked, “Am I permitted to be your boyfriend on this visit, or must I play the acquaintance if your former swain is present?”

“I’m hoping Cliff will be at work this time of day, but even if he’s not, you can be my fiancé,” I said.

Tybalt blinked. “Really?” He sounded pleased.

Too pleased. I nodded firmly. “Really. I’m going to marry you. Cliff moved on a long time ago, and if he doesn’t like hearing that I’ve done the same, I don’t think I actually care.”

“You are an endless delight,” he said, and stood, retrieving his own trousers from the floor. He hummed to himself as he pulled them on. The smell of musk and pennyroyal gathered in the air, twining around him until my Cait Sidhe lover was gone, replaced by a human man who looked very much like him, even down to the delighted twinkle in his green eyes. He was wearing a T-shirt with Shakespeare’s face on the front, and his trousers had gone from linen to denim, but I would still have been able to recognize him in a crowd.

“No shoes?” I asked, amused.

“My own shoes can pass for mortal, and I refuse to appear before your ex-lover looking like the sort of man who wears sneakers,” he said. There was a faint, arrogant sneer in his voice, and I’d never been so happy to hear someone being a snob.

There was a time, immediately after his abduction, when I’d thought Tybalt’s arrogance might have been broken forever. There had also been a time, much earlier in our acquaintance, when I would have considered that a good thing.

Not anymore. He was my arrogant, smug, gloriously pointed King of Cats, and I wouldn’t want him any other way.

I found my own shoes while he dealt with his, strapped my silver knife to my belt, and grabbed a double handful of shadows, chanting, “Ride a black pony to Banbury Cross, to see a fine lady upon a white horse. With rings on her fingers and bells on her toes, she shall have music wherever she goes.”

The magic gathered and burst around me, drifting to floor level and leaving me garbed in a human disguise of my own, one that made me look like the woman who’d been Cliff’s lover and Gillian’s mother, brown-haired and blue-eyed and blissfully ordinary, unaware of the dangers ahead of her. Sometimes I miss being that woman, who never knew what she was capable of, who had never needed to know. She’d been ignorant in the most merciful of ways.

I looked at Tybalt, who was smiling at my transformation with simple affection, and thought I liked who I’d grown into being a whole lot better. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t feel sorry for the way the other me had ended.

“Are you ready?” he asked, stepping toward me with his hands extended, like he was going to escort me to a cotillion.

“I was going to drive,” I protested.

He snorted. “Please. And look for parking in this mess of a city? Allow me the privilege of saving us both the time.”

“You’re too good at getting your own way,” I said, and slid my hands into his.

Tybalt’s smile was a knife drawn in a darkened room. “I’m a cat,” he said, and stepped backward into the shadows, pulling me with him.

All Cait Sidhe have access to the Shadow Roads, the secret corridors and connections drawn between the dark places of the world. As a King of Cats, Tybalt’s connection and control are better than most. He’s strong enough to take passengers with him—which, at least in the last few years, has usually meant me.

It’s cold on the Shadow Roads. It’s cold and it’s dark and it’s airless, at least for me, because they can tell I don’t belong there. Like all the truly ancient passages through Faerie, like the knowes, the Shadow Roads are at least a little bit aware, and they can reject the things that shouldn’t cross their borders. Tybalt always comes out of the shadows chilly but not wheezing, and not covered in sheets of ice the way I do.

Well. Not always. There have been a few incidents where, for one reason or another, I was unable to run beside him and he had to carry me through the darkness, putting a heart-stopping strain on his system. With as often as both of us seem to wind up dead, we should really get a frequent-flier card for the underworld.