ONE

August 22nd, 2012

We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow.

—William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Part II.

LIKE MANY PORT TOWNS, San Francisco is a city built on top of its own bones, one where broad modern streets can exist side by side with narrow alleys and abandoned thoroughfares. It’s a lot like Faerie in that regard. Both of them are studies in contradiction, constant wars between the old and the new. I prowled down one of those half-hidden alleys, the sky midnight dark above me and my shoulders hunched against the growing chill. I’m inhuman and borderline indestructible. That doesn’t make me immune to cold—more’s the pity.

I’d been walking down the alleys of the city since a little after ten o’clock, when most of the mortal population was safely inside and the streets informally switched their allegiance to Faerie. The air around me smelled faintly of cut grass and copper, as well as the more normal scents of garbage and decay. The don’t-look-here I had cast over myself was holding, for the moment.

Somewhere in the alleys around me, a tabby tomcat was prowling, and a woman who looked enough like me to be my sister walked shrouded in her own don’t-look-here. Quentin and Raj—my squire and Tybalt’s heir, respectively—were back at the house watching horror movies and pretending not to resent the fact that we wouldn’t let them come along. I’ve dragged Quentin into plenty of dangerous situations, but even I have my limits.

We were hunting for goblin fruit.

It’s a naturally-occurring narcotic in Faerie: sweet purple berries that smell like everything good in the world and give purebloods beautiful dreams. The effect can be concentrated by making the fruit into jam, dark as tar and more dangerous than any mortal drug. What’s just pleasant for purebloods is an unbreakable addiction for humans and changelings—the crossbred children of the fae and human worlds. They waste away on a diet of nothing but sweet fruit and fantasies.

Goblin fruit isn’t illegal. Why should it be? It doesn’t hurt the purebloods who love it, and it’s usually too expensive for changelings to get their hands on—which didn’t explain why the stuff had been appearing on the streets of San Francisco with increasing regularity. My old mentor, Devin, used to control the city’s drug trade. He kept the goblin fruit out . . . at least until he died. It took me too long to realize what a hole his passing would make. In my defense, I was busy trying to keep myself alive.

That excuse wasn’t going to hold much water with the people who were already addicted—or with the ones who were already dead.

Word on the street was that half a dozen local changelings had vanished recently, there one day and gone the next. They hadn’t taken any of their possessions, if they had anything to take; not all changelings did. They hadn’t told their friends where they were going. A few were known criminals—thieves and petty thugs. Others were just kids who’d been bunking in the independent fiefdoms of Golden Gate Park while they tried to figure out what to do with their lives. And then, suddenly, they were just gone.

Changelings are the perfect victims in Faerie. We’re a born underclass, and very few of us have anyone to miss us if we disappear. I might never have heard about the problem at all, if I hadn’t been one of Devin’s kids, once upon a time. A few of my fellow survivors came to me to see if there was anything I could do. I agreed to try. I’d been out on the streets every night for a week doing just that. So far, I’d busted three goblin fruit dealers, stopped a mugging, and stopped for coffee at half the all-night diners in the city. But I hadn’t seen any of the missing changelings. I honestly wasn’t sure whether that was a blessing or a curse.

A raven cawed harshly from somewhere overhead. It would have been a perfectly normal sound in the daylight, but here and now, this late at night . . . I looked up, scanning the rooftops until I spotted the outline of a large raven perched on a broken streetlight. It cawed again and then took off, flying west. I swore under my breath and chased after it, trying not to let it out of my sight as I ran along the alley.

The uncharacteristically night-flying raven was the animal form of Jasmine Patel, my Fetch’s girlfriend. She’d been keeping lookout over the whole area. If she was calling for backup, she’d seen something—and whatever it was, it was pretty much guaranteed to be nothing good.

Jazz’s caws guided me through the maze of narrow streets, until I skidded around a corner and into a dead-end alley. There was a dumpster at the far end, so overstuffed with garbage that it had practically become a tiny, localized landfill. A figure I knew was standing at the edge of the mess, her head bowed in evident sorrow. She was my height, with colorless brown hair worn short and streaked with neon pink. Her clothes were almost shockingly bright in the dim alley—orange corduroy pants and an electric blue sweater—but somehow, that didn’t do anything to lessen the impact of the scene. May knew what death meant, maybe better than any of us. She was a Fetch, after all.

I stepped up next to her, releasing my don’t-look-here as I joined her in looking at the heaped-up trash. She put a hand on my shoulder, sniffling.

“Yeah,” I said softly. “I know.”

There was a girl lying sprawled in the garbage. Her skin and hair were the ivory color of old bleached bones, with a faint waxy sheen: she was half Barrow Wight. Only half; her height, and the square lines of her jaw, came from her human parent. She was thin enough to look consumptive, and she wasn’t breathing.

I walked forward, kneeling to touch the girl’s wrist. Her skin was still warm. She’d been alive when we started prowling the streets. There was a faint, sickly-sweet smell to the garbage around her, too dilute to be tempting, but strong enough to make her cause of death plain. Goblin fruit. We’d finally found a changeling who had been killed by goblin fruit. Luck was with us.

Luck was nowhere in the picture.

“Toby?” May’s voice was very soft. “What do you want to do now?”

There was only one thing that we could do. I stayed crouched beside the girl, my fingers still resting lightly on her wrist. “We wait for the night-haunts.”

The soft scent of musk and pennyroyal tickled my nose. “Are you sure that is the wisest course of action?” asked a male voice, sounding faintly concerned.

“I promised not to summon them again. I didn’t promise not to hang around and say hello.” I straightened, turning to face him. I couldn’t quite conceal my relief at the sight of Tybalt, standing there in a wine-colored shirt and tight black pants. Unlike May and I, he hadn’t bothered trying to make himself look human: the black tabby stripes in his dark brown hair were clearly visible, and his eyes were banded malachite green, with vertical pupils. His expression, however, was as sorrowful as May’s.