The sky paled while I huddled in the water. The cold eventually drove me to the land, and I somehow managed to stand without killing myself. I don’t remember how I did it. I just found myself walking down the paths on half-frozen feet, totally alone. None of the normal denizens of the Tea Gardens were there—no pixies, no Will o’ Wisps, nothing—but I was too confused for their absence to seem strange. That would come later, when I started understanding what had happened. A lot of things would come later. For the moment, I wandered at random, occasionally stumbling or stopping to cough up more water. I didn’t know my name, or where I was, or what I was. I just knew that the pond had rejected me, and I had nowhere else to go. I couldn’t remember any other life. What would happen to me now that I couldn’t go home?

I was in a state of utter panic by the time I reached the gates, ready to bolt at the slightest provocation. And then the mirror that hangs next to the ticket booth caught my eyes by glittering, and held them with the image it contained.

It was a tired face, with the tips of dully pointed ears barely managing to poke through its frame of wet, shaggy brown hair. Her skin was pale from over a decade without sun, and her features were too sharp to be beautiful, although people called them “interesting” when they were being charitable. Her eyebrows were arched high, making her look perpetually surprised, and her eyes were a colorless foggy gray. I stared. I knew that face. I’d always known that face, because it was my own.

I stood there, still staring, as the sun finished rising and the dawn slammed into me, bringing the truth about who and what I was crashing down, along with the inevitable comprehension of what had happened. It was too much. I did the only thing I could to make the pain stop: I passed out.

Lily didn’t appear during my slow stagger through her domain, but she must have been there, because when the maintenance man found me sprawled naked in front of the ticket booth with no identification or reason to be there, he saw nothing but a human woman who had been the victim of some brutal attack. He called the police, and they came, collected me, and carried me off to the station for questioning. I didn’t fight them. Shock is a beautiful thing.

The police station looked pretty much like every other station I’ve ever seen: a little sad, a little overused, and seriously in need of a good steam cleaning. I didn’t notice the computers on the desks or the dates on the calendars; I still wasn’t used to being bipedal, and most of my attention was fixed on staying upright. The attending officer, a brisk, no-nonsense man named Paul Underwood, called for someone to clean the scrapes on my elbows, hands, and knees, and had them bring me some clothes. They were kind enough to let me dress alone in the bathroom; I guess having no possessions or pockets makes you seem less likely to be a dangerous criminal, and the various small injuries I’d picked up during my trek through the garden made them more inclined to believe me when I claimed to have been assaulted and left for dead. Being in a state of shock helped me ramble convincingly.

Now that I was starting to understand what Simon had done, I couldn’t get past the fact that he’d actually turned me into a fish. My thoughts were chasing their tails like puppies, caught between fear and fury. I thought the worst was over. I had no idea that the worst was still to come, or just how bad that could be.

Officer Underwood fed me coffee and stale donuts until I started making sense, and then he gave me papers to fill out—name, social security number, residence, place of employment—all the standard questions. He took them away when I was finished, presumably to be filed. Still standard procedure . . . at least until he came back ten minutes later with murder in his eyes.

“Just what are you trying to pull, lady?”

It was my name that did it. He knew it because he’d been assigned to the case when I disappeared; he spent a year turning over rocks, questioning witnesses, even dredging the big lake in Golden Gate Park looking for my body and finding nothing, and he didn’t think it was very clever, or very funny, for me to be posing as a dead woman. He handed me a clean set of papers, ordering me to fill them out correctly, without any stupid jokes. I think that’s when I started understanding just how much trouble I was in. Numbly, I turned the papers over, starting to fill them out, and the first correction came before I even got to my name.

“You’ve got the date wrong. It’s June eleventh, two thousand and nine, not nineteen ninety-five. Christ, lady, pay attention.”

My fingers tightened, snapping the pencil in half as I stared at the attending officer, eyes wide and uncomprehending. “How long?” I whispered.

“What?”

“How long did he leave me . . . oh, no. Oh, oak and ash, no.” I closed my eyes, letting myself go limp as the enormity of it all struggled to sink in. Fourteen years. I’d been afraid the spell might have lasted weeks, maybe even months, but fourteen years? It was too much to wrap my mind around. But I didn’t have a choice, and it just got worse from there.

Everything was gone. Every single thing I’d built or worked for in the mortal world . . . all gone. Cliff sold my business to cover my debts after my investigator’s license expired; after I expired, since seven years on the missing list is the limit of a human existence. I’ve always found that slightly ironic—after all, seven years is also the traditional period of confinement for those humans who manage to find their way into the hollow hills. October Daye, rest in peace.

Thank Oberon for Evening Winterrose, known as Evelyn Winters in the mortal world. She was the only person I knew whose telephone number wouldn’t have changed in the intervening years. I used my one phone call to beg her to come and get me. I expected her to yell, but she didn’t. She just came to the station, confirmed that I was who I was claiming to be, and somehow convinced them to release me into her custody. Then she took me to a motel where I could get my head on straight. We both knew that taking me to her place wouldn’t have helped, and so neither of us suggested it; I wasn’t up for entering someone else’s domain.

She stayed with me all day. She ordered pizza for dinner and scolded me into eating it; she hid the telephone book so I couldn’t try to find Cliff; she summoned pages and sent them to notify the other local nobles of my return. And when the sun went down and I finally started crying, she took me in her arms, and she held me. I’ll always remember that. Evening was never a nice person, but she held me as long as I needed her to, and she never said a word about my tears staining her silk blouse, or about the way I’d thrown her world into disarray. When push came to shove, she did what needed to be done, and she didn’t refuse her own.