Page 3 of Once Broken Faith

“Okay, this was a fantastic idea and we should do it every week,” I said. As if on cue, there was a knock at the back door. I crossed the kitchen to answer it.

Dean Lorden—slightly older than the rest of our guests in chronological terms, slightly younger in terms of experience with the world outside the Undersea—was standing on my back porch, a backpack slung by one strap over his left shoulder. He was dressed in his usual Court clothes, which meant he looked a little old-fashioned, like he’d just stepped out of the 1920s and didn’t understand the concept of “denim.” He looked unsettled.

“Marcia drove you, huh?” I guessed.

“She says I need to get used to riding in cars if I want to live in the human world,” he said, and stepped inside. He released the illusion making him look human as soon as he was over the threshold, adding a layer of eucalyptus and wet rock to the bizarre mix of magical scents already hanging in the air. His clothes remained the same; only his features shifted, becoming sharper and indefinably inhuman. He was a handsome kid, with his mother’s sand-colored skin and his father’s bronze hair, complete with a patina of verdigris highlights. His eyes were dark blue, like the sea at night, and his ears tapered to sharp points. He’d be a heartbreaker when he got a little older.

I was just hoping the heart he chose to start with wouldn’t be Quentin’s. Dean and my squire had been seeing each other for a few months. I wasn’t sure yet whether “dating” was the word. Dean had grown up in the Undersea, and I had no idea what their formal courtships looked like; Quentin was a pureblooded scion of the Daoine Sidhe, destined to become High King of the Westlands. He’d dated once before, a human girl named Katie. It hadn’t ended well. As long as he and Dean were being careful with each other, I was fine with their relationship, but the second I felt like someone was going to get hurt, I was going to . . .

Oak and ash, I didn’t know what I was going to do. This was all outside my realm of experience, and I was as confused as everyone else.

May handed Dean a plate of cookies. “Take these to the front room,” she said. “Everyone will be delighted to see you.”

He smiled shyly. “Okay,” he said. To me, he added, “You have a lovely home.” Then he was gone, following the sound of shouting toward the rest of the party.

I walked over to one of the unoccupied kitchen chairs and collapsed into it. “Five,” I said mournfully. “There are five teenagers in my house right now. Who thought this was a good idea? It can’t have been me. I have more common sense than that.”

“No, you don’t,” said May, setting a fresh-baked chocolate chip cookie down in front of me. “If you did, you wouldn’t be you.”

“I hate you all,” I muttered, and reached for the cookie.

Someone knocked on the back door.

Slowly, we all turned toward the sound. Jazz spoke first. “I thought everyone was here already,” she said warily.

“And Tybalt doesn’t knock,” said May. “He just sort of shows up. Like the plague.”

“Tybalt is busy at his court tonight,” I said, standing. Being engaged to a King of Cats has come with its share of adjustments. Getting used to the idea that sometimes he wasn’t going to be available, no matter how much I wanted him to be, had been one of the bigger ones. Raj was his chosen heir. Because of that, for Raj to have an official “night off”—as opposed to all the nights he spent unofficially hogging the remote and eating all my food—Tybalt needed to be with his people. It was going to get interesting when the time came to go out of town for our wedding. Raj was going to be livid if he didn’t get to come, but I couldn’t see any way the Cait Sidhe were going to go for that.

“Should I get your sword?” asked May, eyeing the door.

“It’s in the car.”

“Again?” She shifted her gaze to me, now admonishing. “A sword won’t keep you safe if it’s in the trunk of your car.”

“True, but it won’t be used to gut me in my own home, either.” I pushed my shirt back enough to show her that I had my silver knife, and finished crossing the kitchen to the door. “Who is it?” I called.

“Um, Arden,” was the reply. “Can I come in?”

I glanced over my shoulder at May, wide-eyed. She and Jazz were staring at me, looking about as baffled as I felt. I turned back to the door and unlocked it, pulling it open to reveal Arden Windermere, Queen in the Mists, regent of Northern California, standing on my back porch. She was wearing a black T-shirt with the Borderlands Books logo on the front, along with a pair of dark jeans and battered white tennis shoes. A human disguise blunted her features and removed the purple highlights from her hair, although her eyes remained mismatched, one brown, one gray trending into silver.

“Uh,” I said.

She mustered a faint smile. “Yeah, I know,” she said. “Can I come in?”

It abruptly hit me that I had the Queen at my back door, asking for my permission to enter. The Queen, who was Tuatha de Dannan, and hence fully capable of opening a portal into my kitchen and stepping through without so much as a by-your-leave. This was not a situation my etiquette classes had prepared me for. To be honest, it wasn’t a situation I’d ever thought about. Maybe I should have.

“Sure,” I said, and stepped aside.

Like Dean, Arden released her human disguise as soon as she was inside, filling the air with the scent of redwood sap and blackberry flowers. Her hair turned the color of ripe blackberries, while her eyes lost their mortal hues, becoming pyrite and mercury instead of brown and gray. Her ears were pointed like Dean’s, but the shape of them marked her as Tuatha de Dannan as clearly as a sign would have. There was no mistaking her for anything but what she was.

She waited for me to shut the door before she said, “I’m here both as a courtesy, and to request a favor. Which would you like first? And where is your, ah, squire?”

Arden had learned Quentin’s true identity at the same time I had: when he convinced her that being a princess wasn’t the worst thing in the world, and that she owed it to her Kingdom to take the crown. That knowledge made her one of a small circle of people who’d been trusted with who he really was. May and Jazz knew, of course, and so did Raj. Dean might or might not; that was Quentin’s choice to make. But I knew Chelsea and Karen didn’t. Well. Karen might. She’d walked in his dreams, after all. “He’s in the front room. Should I get him?”

“Oberon’s eyes, no,” she said, her own eyes widening in alarm. “He can’t hear what I’m about to say.”

I raised an eyebrow. “I know I’m a hero of this realm and all, but if you’re here to plot sedition against the King of the Westlands, I want to be the first to say that it’s probably not a good idea. Like, it’s a really bad idea. I’m out of the king-breaking business. After getting stabbed in the heart the last time, I’m planning to stick with missing persons and the occasional murder for at least a year.”