“Can you blame me? Changeling years are short ones.” He spread his hands. “We have to use them wisely, while we still can.”

“I guess.” I paused, looking at him. “I always thought it was a lot of time. I mean, we can live for centuries. If we don’t go around getting shot at, anyway.”

“It may be a lot of time, but it’s short time.” He leaned back against his desk, offering me his arm. I walked over, leaning up against him, letting him wrap that arm around my waist. “It’s very short time. It runs out.”

I tilted my head back, still watching him. “So you teach us how to use it up?”

“Better than watching it dwindle. We have to burn brightly. We can’t burn forever.”

I frowned. “Now you’re starting to worry me.”

“Don’t be worried; there’s nothing to worry about.” He pressed a kiss to my forehead. “You have a job to do, don’t you? Have you found any leads?”

“Rayseline Torquill. She laughed.”

“What?”

“It’s not important.” I shook my head. “It wasn’t Simon, or Oleander, convenient as that would be; I’d know their work anywhere, and this wasn’t it. The Queen didn’t react rationally to the news, so it could have been someone at her Court.” I paused. “And it wasn’t Blind Michael.”

“How do you know that?”

“There was a body.”

Devin grimaced. “Where are you going to go next?”

The taste of roses clung to my tongue like sugar, giving me all the direction I needed. “Goldengreen.”

He blinked. “Evening’s knowe?”

“There may be answers there.”

“Isn’t that dangerous?”

“At this point anything I do is going to be dangerous. Whoever started this has already tried to kill me twice. I can’t exactly stop now.” I paused. “They killed a man. One of Lily’s. He was just a kid, and now he’s dead, and I couldn’t save him.”

“I know about Ross,” he said. There was an odd blankness in his eyes. Before I could really consider what it meant, he continued, “You’re taking Manuel and Dare.”

That was enough to shock me into protest, forgetting about the look on his face. “What? No way! They’d just be in the way. No.”

“You came to me for help, and that’s what I’m giving you. They’re going with you.”

“Devin, this is—”

“You’re paying me to help you, remember?” There was a sudden, brittle edge to his voice. I froze, eyes going wide.

“Devin . . .”

“Answer the question.”

“You know I am.”

“Then let me do my job. They’re going with you.” He pulled his arm away from my waist. “I’m not letting you out of here alone. Not after what’s happened already.”

“I’m not responsible if they get hurt.”

“Of course not.”

“I don’t like this.”

“I didn’t expect you to.”

“You’re being an idiot,” I said flatly.

“Maybe so, but it stands a chance of keeping you alive.” He flashed a grin, which faded as quickly as it came. “This isn’t for everyone, Toby. This world . . . maybe you shouldn’t have come back. I’m glad you did. But maybe it was wrong.”

This time, I was the one to lean in, kissing him as gently as I could. When I pulled away he was staring at me, surprised. “I chose this. Maybe I shouldn’t have come. But I did.”

“Once one of my . . .” He chuckled. “You never really left me, did you?”

The door creaked open before I could think of an answer, admitting an anxious Dare. She was clutching a plastic bag to her chest like a shield. “Sir?”

I pulled away from Devin, straightening. “You can toss that over here, kid.” She darted a glance to Devin, who nodded, before pulling back and tossing me the bag. She had a good arm. Of course, considering the way she’d been flinging knives at my apartment, that wasn’t really a surprise.

Opening the bag, I found a pair of jeans, my running shoes, and a wine-red cotton blouse, which was probably a good choice, considering all the bleeding I’d been doing. A smaller bag held underclothes, athletic bandages, and another cell phone. I gave Devin a curious look.

He shrugged. “You’re creative and accident-prone. You’ll find a use for them.”

“I didn’t mean the bandages.”

“That’s the trouble with miniaturizing technology. It gets easier and easier to lose. Of course, losing it gets easier when you lose the entire car.”

“Where did all this come from, Devin?”

A pained expression crossed his face. “You were out for quite a while. I had plenty of time to send a few of the kids to your apartment for supplies. And no, they didn’t break anything the Doppelganger hadn’t already destroyed, although they did manage to convince the police to go away.” He smirked. “It seems someone called in a noise complaint on you.”

“Right,” I said. “I’ll go get dressed.”

“Pity.”

“Jerk.”

“Accurate.”

Grinning, feeling better than I had in months, I left the office and walked back to the bathroom.

Changing clothes in a public restroom is an acquired skill, one that becomes an art when the bathroom floor hasn’t been washed in a decade or more. I recognized some of those stains. Still, it wasn’t hard to shimmy out of the nightgown and into my jeans, and I felt much better once I was wearing real clothes. They weren’t much as armor goes, but they were all I had.

Shoving my hands into the pockets of my jeans to tug them into place, I paused, my fingers striking metal. I grabbed hold and pulled out the key I’d taken from the rose goblin, frowning in confusion. Hadn’t it been in my other jeans? The ones I’d ruined by almost bleeding out on them?

It glittered in my hand, briefly taking on a hint of its prior luminescence. Evening’s last memories told me it was the key to Goldengreen; it needed to be kept safe. A brief flicker of blood-memory rose up, whispering that “safe” meant “secret.” I shoved the key back into my pocket, checking to be sure it was hidden before stuffing my borrowed nightgown into the plastic bag. It was a magic key. Maybe there was still something I needed to unlock.