One Salt Sea
Page 6

I was still groaning theatrically when he and Quentin got into the car and drove off, leaving me to walk to my battered old Volkswagen Bug alone. I performed my usual check of the back before unlocking the door. Call me paranoid, but I only needed to find one assassin lurking in my car for that to become a lifetime habit.
Turning up the radio to ear-busting levels, I sang loudly—and badly—along with song after song as I drove back to my apartment. Even with traffic, I made it home in record time. The wards around my door were intact, meaning that my night might stay decent. Miracles never cease.
“Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?” I chanted. “With thorny stings and other things that make it a bad place to go.” I snapped my fingers. The wards dissolved, leaving the scent of copper hanging in the air. Piece of cake.
Wards are easier for me these days, since they’re constructed and removed with brute force, and I hit harder than I used to, magically speaking. Sure, sometimes my spells go horribly wrong and things get scorched, but it’s better than a ten-a-day Tylenol habit, right? I was never that attached to my security deposit, anyway.
Spike and the cats mobbed my ankles the second I got inside, meowing and chirping irritation over some perceived indignity. “Settle down, guys,” I said, laughing as I squirmed out of my jacket. “I’ll feed you in a second.”
“Actually, I think they’re upset because I’m here.” The Luidaeg stood, dropping May’s new Entertainment Weekly on the coffee table as she stepped away from the couch. “They don’t seem to like me.”
I froze and stared at her, my jacket slipping out of my suddenly nerveless fingers and falling to the floor with a thump. I’ve always known that my wards wouldn’t stop anything big, but I’d never seen proof before.
The Luidaeg watched me levelly, waiting for the shock to fade. Finally, unsteadily, I said, “Luidaeg. You’re . . . here.”
“Good catch. You should go into detective work.” Her amused tone was underscored with bleakness, like she was making jokes because it was easier than screaming. Somehow, that was even scarier than finding her in my apartment.
The Luidaeg isn’t scary on the surface—most days she looks more human than I do, like the sort of plainly pretty woman you probably pass on the street every day. She stands about five-six, tan verging into sunburned, with freckles on her nose and the ghosts of old acne scars on her cheeks. Today she was wearing battered khaki pants and a gas station employee’s shirt with a nametag that read “Annie,” and her curly, shoulder-length black hair was pulled into pigtails tied off with electrical tape.
Her eyes were brown. That was encouraging, anyway. The Luidaeg’s appearance is unnervingly variable. The more irritated she gets, the more her humanity slips, usually starting with her eyes. When the Luidaeg’s eyes go strange, I look for an escape route.
The Luidaeg raised an eyebrow. “Is there something you need to do before you can pay attention to me?”
That was my chance to take control of the situation. I pounced on it. “I need coffee,” I said, picking up my jacket and hanging it on the coat rack. “Can I get you anything?”
“Coffee’s fine. Do you have any sour cream?” The Luidaeg followed me to the kitchen and sat down at the table, pushing a pile of junk mail out of the way. Spike and the cats followed her.
“I think so.” I grabbed the half-full pot of coffee from the warmer and filled two mugs. I’ve always belonged to the school of thought that says coffee improves with age. Give me a pot of three-day-old diner coffee, and I’ll prove that sleep is an unnecessary luxury.
“I’ll take mine with salt and a spoonful of sour cream,” said the Luidaeg. She gave the cats a thoughtful look. They looked back, unblinking. She nodded. “I thought so. You can go. Nothing I have to say is yours to repeat.”
The cats didn’t move.
The Luidaeg raised an eyebrow, asking, “Do you really think your King will hurt you worse than I will?”
That got through. Cagney and Lacey bolted from the room, their ears pressed flat and their tails sticking straight up in the air.
Spike stayed where it was, eyeing her warily. The Luidaeg smiled. “You can stay. Your loyalties have shifted.” She glanced toward me. “You know the fleabags are spying for Tybalt, don’t you?”
“I’ve been assuming.” I opened the fridge, rummaging until I found a container of sour cream. May and Jazz both like to cook, and with Jazz spending more and more time at the apartment, our fridge has been acquiring actual food. I never knew there were so many kinds of bread. Or that you needed so many knives for purposes beyond stabbing people. “Is that why you made them leave?”
“He’ll get the details soon enough. I don’t feel any need to stroke the man’s ego by telling him things he doesn’t need to know yet.”
“Right.” I put the sour cream and one of the mugs in front of the Luidaeg, indicating the salt shaker with a wave of my hand, and turned to start fixing my own coffee. “So why are you here? You haven’t exactly been social lately.” That was putting it mildly. I’d seen the Luidaeg exactly once since Lily got sick, when I went to her and demanded to know what I really was. She’d put a name to my mother’s bloodline—Dóchas Sidhe—and then she’d kicked me out.
She wasn’t there when I was pardoned. She didn’t answer her phone, and when I went looking for her apartment, I couldn’t find it. Now she was in my kitchen, and maybe I’m paranoid, but I didn’t trust the situation one bit.
“Getting down to business already?” She poured salt into her coffee. “Are you going to ask how I’ve been?”
“Why should I?” I finished sugaring my own coffee and sat down in front of her. “It’s not like you’ve been terribly concerned with my well-being since Mom played with my genetic code.”
“So you’re being sulky, is that it?” The Luidaeg shook her head. “You didn’t need me, Toby. There was nothing I could have done that you weren’t already doing. I knew Sylvester would take care of you.”
“That makes it okay for you to just disappear?”
“You have no idea what I’ve been doing since you last saw me.”
“Should I care?” I realized the answer was probably “yes” as soon as the words left my mouth. They don’t come much bigger or badder than the Luidaeg. If she’d been too busy to deal with me, it wasn’t because she’d been vacationing at Disney World.