I didn’t know what to do with myself. To make matters worse, I wasn’t even sure who I was anymore. Everyone who had a hand in shaping my character had lied to me. I’d been so desperate for any scrap of affection, any hint of kindness after decades of torture and pain, that I’d taken their lack of physical violence as being welcomed into their hearts.
“Do you know what it’s like, Newt?” I asked my cat, who was screaming his displeasure at being trapped in a beige plastic kennel. “It’s like I am the pig they brought into the house to raise among the dogs so it grows up thinking it’s a pet, and then one day they slaughter it for bacon.”
I’d like to think he stopped meowing long enough to hear me, but I knew he was just taking a breath for another course. Still I took the brief silence as a thoughtful reflection on my words, but I knew better. Another deep inhale and his furry little chest was refueled, a brace of breath to power the siren pouring out of his tiny little mouth.
After the first ten messages from Jonas and Sparky, I turned off my link without answering their calls as I’d gotten Newt all packed up. When Cari’s number flashed across the wristband screen, I waited until her message was done recording before listening to it, not trusting myself not to break apart if I answered. Instead of her smoky voice scolding me for letting the call go to voicemail, I heard Jonas’s deep rumble telling me he was coming down to talk to me. Pissed off Cari let him use her link, I packed up the cat and left, hoping to go to the one place I knew I could find sanctuary.
And I hated like hell that I had to go there.
The darkness surrounding Balboa was a milky veil, the towering forest poured over the hilly mesa throwing up a coy barrier between the Southern Rise Court and the sprawling human city surrounding it. Before the Merge, the area had been a verdant park dotted with a constellation of museums set with a sparkling star of a conservation zoo. Now all that remained of San Diego’s former crown jewel were the sweeping historic Exposition buildings built for several long-ago expositions and a scatter of wandering pandas cared for by a wild-eyed hermit named Crazy Gertrude.
The Court’s towers were crystalline white stone spears nestled into the older human structures, taking on some of the Spanish and Mission Revival forms as if struggling to blend into the city’s bones while maintaining their Sidhe essence. They were visible through the thicket as I crossed over the bridge to the cobblestone courtyards laid down by long-dead human craftsmen. The Exposition structures were ivory weathered, stone holding a bit of the sun in its façade, and even in the cloud-draped moonlight, it was easy to see where the Sidhe buildings were beginning to shift to match—a slowly encroaching tide of color washing over the too-bright walls pulled up from the land beneath the Court.
Southern Rise was very different from Elfhaine. The city against the white mountains to the north of San Diego was as ethereally foreign to me as the cloud dragons I’d seen the bones of. The towers in Balboa Forest were building themselves off of the remains of human structures, blending their newly risen edifices into what was already there, embellished by elfin forms and broad windows to soak in every bit of sunlight the city had to offer. The Court was far enough away to be safe from the sheer ravines to the east, a steep drop-off where a raging river cut the upper part of the city, yet the air was moist from the nearby waters, a filmy mist often rising up into the skyscraper-tall trees to pearl the elfin commune in glistening dew.
I didn’t understand how the elfin built their cities. Or rather how the Court built itself. Ryder tried to explain to me. So did the stone crafters who spoke to the construction to guide it along its way. There were Sidhe stone-magics involved, but more importantly—or so the Sidhe told me—the Court decided for itself who spoke for it and its people and guided evolving and shifting structures to accommodate its inhabitants. Ryder, Clan Sebac, Third in the House of Devon and bane of my existence was the current High Lord of the Southern Rise Court, and I was tangled up with him in ways I also didn’t understand.
The Court did. Or at least that’s what it seemed like, because the bristling brace of new towers to the north of the main structure began to thrust up from the ground after we’d shared a single kiss.
Scared the hell out of me to think of what would happen if we ever went further than a kiss, and I sure as hell wasn’t in any state of mind to contemplate that. Not when I was coming in hot and torn open as if I were still carrying weeping iron in my bones.
At some point the living stone decided I needed a place for myself, or at least that’s what everyone told me, because not long after Ryder punched his way into my life, the Southern Rise Court began to shape a spire for me to live in, connecting it to Ryder’s suite in the main structure. I tried to deny use at first, but I was drawn to its wide-open balconies and the curling metal dragon shapes the Court somehow pulled out of the earth to accent the broad spaces it made for me.
After parking the Mustang near the base of my tower, I wrestled with Newt’s kennel and the supplies I’d brought with me. Whiskey still numbed my face and kept my legs a little shaky, but it was only four flights up from the side entrance, which kept me from having to speak to anyone in the main building. Some elfin rarely slept—usually the older ones—and I wasn’t up to talking. I’d carried bigger kits while on runs, but never halfway drunk and dragging a screaming cat in a plastic box with me, but eventually I made it to the top. The door to my space opened easily, the knob practically turning when I reached for it.
The one thing the Court didn’t provide was furniture or a litter box, so I was surprised to discover a bed the size of an ocean at the far end of the open space I’d claimed as my own, as well as a sectional couch that looked as soft as the bed and was about as large.
“Ryder,” I muttered to my cat. “Hold on, bastard. Let me make sure all of the doors are closed. Last thing I want is for you to go roaming through the Court. I don’t want to have to go pull your teeth out of someone’s leg just because they’ve pissed you off.”
Letting the small mottled gray ball of fury I’d found chewing on one of my kills out of his kennel earned me that bite on the leg I was trying to save others from, and after the damned cat got his bit of blood from my flesh, he sauntered over to the cat dish I’d put down for him and noisily chewed through the bits of tuna I’d dumped into his wet-food bowl. The litter box was his next stop, but by that time I was done with dealing with his needs and the last thing I wanted to do was remain upright.
I also needed to take care of the sobriety I seemed to be developing while making sure Newt was comfortable.
The cat had food and a place to shit, pretty much all he needed to keep himself happy, so I shucked off my boots, pulled off my shirt, and climbed into the middle of the humongous bed. The sheets were cool and smooth on my skin, and when I lay back against the pillows, my shoulders and back sank into their soft cradle, propping me up so I could stare out the open doors and on to the city beyond the Court’s boundaries. Reaching for the bottle of whiskey I’d tossed onto the bed before I took care of the cat, I watched the lightning tear across the sky, and I tore off the black wrapper, then twisted off the cap and inhaled the sweet-perfumed sting wafting up from the open bottle.
“I’m going to miss you, old man,” I murmured, saluting the roiling skies. “Thanks for saving my life and fucking it up at the same time.”