ONE

June 3rd, 2012

So shall she leave her blessedness to one,

When heaven shall call her from this blessed darkness,

Who from the sacred ashes of her honor

Shall star-like rise…

—William Shakespeare, King Henry VIII

THE NIGHT SKY OVER SAN FRANCISCO was a patchwork mixture of starry black and cloudy gray, all of it washed out by the ambient light drifting up from the city below. It was a tourist’s dream of California summer, perfect as a postcard—and like all postcards, it wasn’t telling the full story. I pressed myself in closer to the wall of the alley, one hand on my knife, and waited.

I didn’t have to wait for long. Voices drifted down the alley, speaking in the weird mix of whisper and shout that teenagers have used since the dawn of time when trying to be subtle. There was nothing subtle about these kids, but they would never have believed that. They were playing things oh-so-cool, and they thought they were untouchable. In a perfect world, they would have been. In a perfect world, they would have been allowed to have their little rebellions and take their little risks, and nothing would ever have touched them.

We don’t live in a perfect world. We never have. And on nights like this one, it seems like we never will.

The kids approaching my hiding spot didn’t know it, but I’d been watching them for weeks, ever since I took a trip downtown to investigate reports of a courtier selling pieces of his liege’s treasury. The rumors turned out to be true—he got banished, I got paid, and nobody walked away happy—but that wasn’t the worst of it.

On the way to a meeting with his fence, the courtier had kicked aside a glass jar that someone had left discarded near the base of a garbage can. It fell on its side and rolled to a stop against a nearby wall. The smell of its contents assaulted my nostrils, and I immediately forgot about my job. I had something far more dangerous to worry about.

I crept toward the jar as cautiously as I would have approached a venomous snake, finally crouching a few feet away. I could see smears of purple clinging to the glass—not that I needed the visual. This close, the smell was unmistakable. No changeling who’s ever lived on the wrong side of the tracks could fail to recognize the smell of goblin fruit, even if we’d never smelled it before. And, Oberon help me, I’d smelled it before.

Goblin fruit grows naturally in some realms of Faerie. It’s a sweet narcotic for purebloods, intoxicating without being physically addictive—although it’s definitely habit-forming. Anything that changes the way you feel is habit-forming, as anyone who’s ever dealt with someone who says, “It’s not addictive, really,” while reaching for their next fix can tell you. A pureblood with a serious goblin-fruit problem may spend a lot of time high, but that’s about it. They’ll still be able to do their jobs, maintain relationships, and put up a good front.

Changelings and humans have a different reaction. For us, goblin fruit creates a level of addiction that no mortal drug can match. People try to dilute it or cut it with other fruits—hence the ever popular use of jam as a delivery mechanism—but the end result is always the same: dependency leads to craving, craving leads to madness, and madness leads, inexorably, to death.

Devin never allowed goblin fruit at Home. We had kids who were hooked on just about every conceivable chemical, from pot and pills to cocaine, heroin, and things they mixed up in the back room. Some kids got high huffing concentrated pixie-sweat, or smoking Dryad leaves. Devin viewed it all with benevolent indifference—he didn’t care what we put into our bodies, as long as we were able to do our jobs. But he had a zero-tolerance policy for goblin fruit. Any kid who showed up with sticky fingers and starry eyes was booted, no second chances, because he knew better than any of us that once the fruit had hold of you, it never let you go.

When Oberon locked the doors to the deeper realms of Faerie, the goblin fruit problems should have gone away, since the berries only grow in the soil of Tirn Aill, Tir Tairngire, and the Blessed Isles, and no one’s been to any of those places in centuries. Unfortunately for people who don’t like seeing changeling kids waste away on a diet of jam and dreams, clever gardeners from the lands where goblin fruit grew naturally brought plenty of soil and seedlings with them when they left. The stuff’s gotten rarer since then—and thank Oberon for that—but there are still people who use it for their own ends, and a little bit goes a long away.

All of which led to me standing in a dark alley, waiting for a bunch of teenage changelings to reach me. It had taken me weeks to figure out who the dealers were, as opposed to the ones who were just feeding their own habits. I still didn’t know who was supplying them. If this had been going down in Shadowed Hills, I might have been able to ask my liege for backup, but here, I was in the Queen’s territory, and I was on my own.

Purebloods won’t regulate goblin fruit because it’s not a threat to them. Why should they ban a sweet berry that gives them lovely dreams? The fact that it also blows changeling brains out is irrelevant to them.

A globe of light drifted past my position. One of the dealers was a half-Candela girl in her late teens. If her Merry Dancers were here, so was she, and that meant I was in the right place. I pushed away from the wall, releasing the don’t-look-here spell that had been hiding me from view. “You kids lost?” I asked.

There were five of them. They stopped where they were, staring at me with varying levels of hostility and confusion. It was the Candela girl who stepped forward and spoke first. “I remember you. You’re the girl who got us all kicked out of Home.”

“I remember you, too,” I said. She’d grown since the time I saw her at Devin’s, getting taller and paler as her Candela heritage asserted itself. She’d also gotten thinner, becoming a walking skeleton draped in the winding shroud of her own skin. That was the goblin fruit at work, eating her alive even as it showed her the most beautiful things she’d ever seen. “Didn’t Devin teach you to stay the hell away from this shit?” I gestured toward her backpack, which bulged with small, cylindrical shapes.

Her eyes widened briefly. Then they narrowed, and she spat, “Why do you care what Devin taught us? You got him killed. You got us all tossed out on the street. What Devin taught us keeps us alive.”

“And he taught you to peddle drugs to kids?” The other dealer in this group was a gangling teenage boy with hedgehog spikes in place of hair. Another survivor of Home. I swung my glare toward him. “You, too. You both know better than this.”