A local habitation

“I’ll be as nice as she lets me,” I said, turning toward the door.

My hand was raised to knock when he said, “Toby?”

“Yes?”

“Nice meeting you.”

That earned him a smile. “Same here,” I said, and knocked.

The sound of my knuckles meeting the wood was sharp and slightly hollow, indicating that the room on the other side probably wasn’t actually co

A voice called, “Come in!” Shaking my head, I turned the knob and did as I was told. There’s a first time for everything.

SIX

THE OFFICE WAS THE SIZE of my living room, but was packed with enough stuff to fill my apartment. Shelves and filing cabinets rose out of a sea of papers, providing landmarks in the universally messy landscape. Computers lined the walls, linked together by a feverish tangle of wiring, and the glow from their screens added a green undertone to the light, making the room seem slightly unreal. A coffeemaker surrounded by an invasion force of green plastic army men rested on a shelf by the door; the toaster oven next to it had its own problems, since it looked like it was about to be gutted by a herd of brightly-colored plastic dinosaurs.

“It’s the place where paper goes to die,” I muttered.

A narrow path through the mess led to a desk in front of the room’s single green-curtained window. The brunette from downstairs was perched cross- legged on the desk’s edge, surrounded by towers of paper, attention focused on the portable computer balanced on her knees. Her glasses were sliding down her nose; they’d already made it more than halfway.

She raised her head and smiled, almost sincerely enough to hide the flash of wariness in her eyes. “Yes, it is. Can I help you with something?” Her tone was pure Valley Girl, implying a level of intelligence closely akin to that of granite.

I wasn’t buying it. “I’m looking for Countess January Torquill. Is this her office?”

“Sorry, no. It’s mine.” The smile didn’t waver.

“Well, I need to find her. I’m here at the request of her uncle.”

The wariness returned, barely kept in check by her frozen-glass smile. “Really? That’s fascinating. Because, see, normally people call before they send guests.”

“He sent me because his niece hasn’t called in a few weeks.” There was something about her smile that bothered me. Not the obvious falseness—she was clearly on edge—but the way it was shaped. “I don’t suppose you know anything about that?”

Her eyes widened, and she shoved her glasses back up her nose, smile abandoned. “What? Hasn’t called? What’s thatsupposed to mean? He’s the one who stopped calling!”

Moving her glasses made them frame her eyes rather than blocking them and brought the goldenrod yellow of her irises into sharp relief. I only know one family line with eyes that color. Ignore the hair, take away the glasses, and she looked more like Sylvester than Rayseline did.

“That’s not what he thinks,” I said. “January Torquill, I presume?”

Her eyes narrowed, and for a brief moment, I thought she was going to argue. Then she deflated, shoulders slumping, and said, “Not really. I mean, I’m January. I’m just not January Torquill. I never have been.” She shrugged, a flicker of humor creeping into her voice. “As far as I know, no one’s January Torquill. Which is probably a good thing—that’d be a terrible name to stick on a child. It sounds like something out of a bad romance novel.”

“So if you’re not January Torquill, that makes you . . . ?”

“January O’Leary. I’m not full Daoine Sidhe—my father was half-Tylwyth Teg, and his last name was ‘ap Learianth.’ That doesn’t exactly work on a business card. We settled on ‘O’Leary’ as the abbreviation when we incorporated.” She smiled again. This time, the expression had an edge I recognized all too well. Sylvester smiled that way when he was trying to figure out whether something was a threat. “It’s interesting that Uncle Sylvester didn’t tell you that. Considering the part where he sent you here, and everything.”

“You have a phone,” I said. “You could call him.”

“I already tried that while Elliot was stowing you and the kid in the cafeteria.”

“And?”

“No one answered.”

“I have directions in your uncle’s handwriting.” I held up the folder.

“Handwriting can be faked.”

I bit back an expletive. Half the Kingdom knew me on sight and expected me to start breaking things the second I walked into the room, while the other half wanted three forms of photo ID and a character witness. “Alex and Elliot knew who I was.”

“They know who you look like. There’s a difference.”

Sad to say, she had a point. I nearly got killed last December by a Doppelganger who impersonated my daughter. In Faerie, faces aren’t always what they appear to be.

“Okay. If you know who I look like, you presumably know what . . . that person . . . can or can’t do. Right?” January nodded. “It’s sort of hard to prove that I can’tcast a spell, so that won’t work. If you want to give me some blood, I can tell you what you did for your fifth birthday . . .”

“That’s okay.”

“Didn’t think so.” I sighed. “I don’t suppose dropping my illusions and letting you poke me with sticks would do it? I’d really like to get this sorted out.”

She frowned. “It’s a start,” she said.

“Got it,” I said, and let my human disguise dissolve, wafting away in a wash of copper and cut grass.

Jan watched intently, nostrils flaring as she sniffed at the air. Then she gri

“No one’s ever been that happy about the smell of my magic before,” I muttered. “How do you . . .?”

“I have files on my uncle’s knights, in case someone tries to sneak in.” There was a brutal matter-of-factness to her tone. She was the Countess of a County balanced on the edge of disaster, and this was just the way things worked. “We’ve had people who could fake faces and pass quizzes, but nobody’s been able to fake somebody else’s magic.” The word “yet” hung between us, unspoken.

“Well, your uncle’s worried, and he asked me to come see how you were doing. Why didn’t you tell me who you were when I got here? We could’ve taken care of all this an hour ago.”

“Do you know where you are?” she asked.

I frowned. “I don’t see what that has to do with . . .”

“Humor me.”

“I’m in the County of Tamed Lightning.”

“Do you know where the County is?”

“Fremont?”

“Fremont, where we’re sandwiched between two Duchies that don’t get along. We’re a shiny little independent County right where it’s not a good idea to have an independent County.”

“I was under the impression that things were stable.” That could change at any time, of course, and there’s always a risk of small-scale civil war in Faerie—it’s something to do when you’re bored and immortal—but the modern world has reduced that risk substantially. The fae are poster children for Attention Deficit Disorder: give them something shiny to play with and they’ll forget they were about to chop your head off.

January sighed. “Uncle Sylvester is respected around here. Something about him having a really big army he could use for squashing people like bugs.”

“So that makes you even safer. Dreamer’s Glass would never bother you with Shadowed Hills standing right there.”

“That’s the problem.”

“Okay, now you’ve lost me.”

“People think that because Sylvester’s my uncle, Tamed Lightning is an extension of his Duchy here to make him look ‘egalitarian and modern,’ and one day he’s going to pull us back in.” She slid off the desk, starting to pace. “They treat us like we don’t matter, or they assume we can get them favors and come around sniffing for political leverage. It got old, fast. So we stopped helping.”