Page 3 of The Innocent Sleep

“True, child,” said Titania, voice sweet. “But you forget how young you are. You forget how much more time I’ve had to play this game. So much more time than any of you. Only the distorted child of mine comes anywhere near to me, and hers is a dilute and unwarranted claim to her age. I know the way of ward and wording. I know the roads through riddle and restriction. Do you truly think my husband can stop me from doing anything I want to do?”

“Get out of my house,” said October, with cold finality.

“I can’t hurt you.” Titania smiled. “But I can make you someone else’s problem.”

The smell of roses grew stronger, filling the room. My nerves jangled with the sudden awareness of danger, and I moved to wrap myself around October, to protect her and our child from the threat Titania represented. As for Titania herself, she watched me begin to move, expression entirely serene.

“Uh-uh-uh,” she said, shaking a finger. “Naughty kitty. You’ll not ruin this for me. You’ll not ruin this for her, either, or for anyone. I don’t think there’s a place for you in what I’m doing.”

October’s knives clattered as they slipped from her hands and fell to the floor. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t do anything but glare in futile, frozen hatred at the woman who was meant to be the mother of us all. The air turned pink with sourceless brilliance, then red, crimson and carmine, as if the entire world were bleeding.

This is how October sees the world, I thought, and my mental voice was the accent of my childhood, of a London that passed centuries ago, and for a moment, it dazed me, and in that moment, everything went away.

I never even saw her disappear. She was simply gone. They all were, and I was alone, plummeting through endless, burning white.

TWO

THE BLAZE LASTED FOR some immeasurable amount of time until, as abruptly as it had begun, it ended, and was replaced by the sort of blurry darkness that comes when the eyes have yet to adjust to a sudden change. I blinked repeatedly, trying to chase the afterimages away. The scene began to clear.

Whatever I was looking at, it wasn’t the bedroom I shared with my wife, or any other part of our home. I realized I was sitting down. I had been standing a moment before, hadn’t I—? But now I was seated on something soft but flexible, and when I shoved myself to my feet, it creaked dangerously under the pressure of my hands. I squinted at it, hoping closeness would give me a better view of the object, and saw it for a stack of wooden shipping pallets covered by empty burlap sacks of the sort that coffee beans are often packed in. I blinked again, then turned to survey the rest of my surroundings.

I was in a cavernous, familiar room. It had been the center of the local Court of Cats several times over the previous decades, falling in and out of favor in keeping with our number. The Eureka Valley Station was an underground edifice originally constructed for the use of San Francisco’s streetcars, and enjoyed decades of service before it had been sealed off and forgotten, allowing it to slip into the spaces occupied by the lost things—the spaces that belong to us.

The mortals still had access to their own version of the station, of course, and should they ever reopen it to such a degree that whatever arcane force marked the space as “lost” decided it had been found, our own iteration of the space would dissolve and fade away. For now, however, it was stable, and there had never been any indication that it would become otherwise. Still, at times it was too large to suit us, and it offered few comforts, being comprised of concrete platforms and open track beds. There were offices and the like, but when we had need of a place that could contain us all at once, they were useless to the point of irrelevancy.

My eyes were continuing to adjust. I realized my stack of pallets was far from the only one, although it was the tallest by several feet, as befit my station: more stacks had been pushed against the station walls, while the tracks were blunted with piled-up mattresses and heaps of fur, only some of which was attached to the curled-up, dozing bodies of cats. Crates and old, clearly scavenged posts covered in carpet and sisal dotted the scant remaining open space. From the looks of it, this had been a primary gathering space of the Court for years, which was . . . wrong.

For nearly a decade, the Court had been meeting mostly in a walled-off alley that had managed to slip into our control, choosing to risk the small chance that we might be observed in order to hold our courts beneath the open sky. The air was clearer there, and sometimes rats would stumble into our company, providing a pleasant diversion during a dull debate on some topic or other. We had abandoned Eureka Valley almost as soon as the alley had appeared in my domain.

So why were we here now?

My eyes finished their adjustment and, between one blink and the next, it was as if the room had been suddenly populated with cats. They were everywhere, curled or lounging on every surface, prowling between the pallets, sharpening their claws on sisal. Almost none had chosen the limitations of a bipedal shape, not here, not among their own kind and in their private spaces. I was considered something of an oddity by my own people for my favor of the form.

Much of Faerie disdained us for going about in the bodies of beasts. We pitied them for never having the opportunity. Spending a life locked into a single shape meant they were cutting themselves off from other perspectives.

Perhaps that was why my little fish was so intriguing. She belonged to the Divided Courts, one of their static daughters, and yet she had spent a long period looking through other eyes, even if it had not been by choice, and not been suited to her desires.

And none of that mattered right now, because she wasn’t beside me. I shook my head, trying to clear away the last, clinging cobwebs of the flash that had somehow moved me from the safety of my home to the confines of my Court. Half the cats I saw were unfamiliar, and all of them seemed indolent to the point of resignation, draped over the surfaces they had claimed as their own.

A colony of cats—or a Court of Cats—is a living social organism, with its own internal structure and politics. One cat will always be superior to another, and perhaps inferior to yet a third. It’s a more fluid structure than the Divided Courts tend to adhere to, but its very fluidity made the scene around me a strange one. Some opportunistic kit should have been looking for a better sleeping spot, or trying to reintegrate with a family unit that had decided they were old enough to sleep safely on their own.

The stillness was a sign that something was wrong, if not as clear a sign as my presence was.

I have been San Francisco’s King of Dreaming Cats since the late 1800s, when I took the crown from the former Queen, who had wearied of its weight and sought to move inland in pursuit of a quieter life. I don’t know what became of Cornelia after her relocation; I received a few postcards informing me that she was thinking of settling in Highmountain, where there were few Cait Sidhe in general, and no royal cats had yet chosen to stake their claim. I’ve always assumed she set herself down there, establishing a new kingdom among the airy mountains, and found herself as content as she was ever going to be anywhere.

It took me well over a century to find myself a probable heir. Royal cats are rare at the best of times, and the centuries since Maeve’s disappearance have not been the best of times for the shapeshifting lines among the fae. Our children vanish without explanation; our animal kin find themselves hunted and worse, leaving us without the ability to conceal ourselves among them. When one among my subjects sired a son, a boy who already showed the sparks of power that would one day make him a Prince, and perhaps even a King, I had seen my eventual freedom in the kit’s still-clouded eyes.

Perhaps it was unwise of me to allow Samson and Kamini to remain with their child when they brought him to me, but I had been very weary in those days, trapped in an endless maze of responsibilities and rules, and I had remembered my own kittenhood all too well. Children should be raised with love whenever possible. I could have taken Raj from his parents, raised him as my own son and not my nephew, and I would have loved him as well as any kitten had ever been loved, but his mother’s affection for him had been evident and unfeigned, and I had been unwilling to steal him from her side.

That choice brought me a boy, and eventually a betrayer, when Samson thought to put his son in power sooner than the normal march of time allowed. But Kamini was long dead by then, done in by Oleander’s cruel machinations, and while I had always loved the boy, his father had seen him as a tool rather than a child. In the bloody clash for the Court, Raj had chosen me, and still stood as my heir when his father stopped his dancing.

In the days since then, I had presented my suit to Sir October Daye of the Court of Shadowed Hills, and she had accepted it, showing the flagrant lack of common sense for which she was perhaps best renowned, agreeing to become my wife and tie her dancing to my own. We had faced many dangers and overcome them all, some through luck, some through skill, most through my lady’s occasionally heart-stopping ability to stand up again after suffering an injury that should have left her for the night-haunts.

And in the midst of all those changes, other adjustments had been required. Samson had been able to raise his rebellion in part because his claim that my attention was split between the Court and my lady had contained a grain of truth, and a King must put his people first. When it became clear that I could no longer do that, I had gone to Raj and asked him if he was ready to carry the crown.

He was not, nor had I expected him to be, but he was eager to help my happiness in whatever way he might, and had agreed readily enough when I proposed going to my old friend, Jolgeir, King of Whispering Cats, to ask if he might be willing to grant us the loan of his second-born daughter. Ginevra had been born a changeling, like my lady, and had grown to her adulthood in that happily balanced state, beloved of both her parents, powerful enough to change her form, but not much else.

A meeting with my October had changed that—had changed everything, for all of us. For when Ginevra had requested to be made fully fae, the removal of her mortal blood had revealed her to have the strength necessary to stand as a royal cat. She would one day be able to take her father’s place, when the time came for him to stand aside, and thus his freedom was assured.