I threw up my hands and turned to open the nearest refrigerator. Even if everything went back to what passed for normal right now, the fact that I even knew how to open a refrigerator door proved it was never going to be last week’s normal, no matter what. Sure, it was just a handle you pulled on, but before the blood memory in Bridget’s kitchen, I’d never seen one of these big white boxes before, much less understood that you kept food in them. Now I found that I had all these little whirling bits of information hanging at the edges of my thoughts, telling me things about refrigerators, like that the light inside would go off when I closed the door. Why did I need to know that? Why did anyone need to know that? Did cheese prefer to sit in the dark?
There wasn’t much in the way of what I would recognize as food on the shelves. I picked up a package of something that claimed to be ham and a stack of orange flat squares that said they were cheese and carried them with me as I moved toward an open chair.
The tied-up teens glared at me, but none of them tried to interact. That was a relief. I wasn’t sure what I would have said to them if they had. “Sorry we had to get rid of your boss, but it’s okay, because he was never really him to begin with” was sort of what the Luidaeg had already said, and I couldn’t explain it any better than she had.
Dean followed me as I went to sit, Raysel trailing a bit behind him like a pale, anxious shadow. “I’m glad you’re back,” he said.
“Oh?” I asked, politely, as I began to unwrap the first orange square.
“Yeah. You always know what to do. I’m not so sure about this . . .” He waved his hands, indicating the length of me. “. . . version of you, but you’re still you, and you’re going to know what to do.”
I blinked. His faith in me was staggering, if probably misplaced. I unwrapped another orange square. They were leathery and faintly moist in an unappealing way. “I hope so,” I said. “Right now, I don’t feel like I know very much, except that I want to go home and I miss my sister.”
“Yeah, May’s the best,” he said.
I frowned at him. “Who? My sister’s name is August.”
He blanched. “Oh. Um. August’s nice too. Right, right, she’s your sister before she’s my sister— I’m sorry, I’m just not used to thinking of you and her at the same time. She’s always Undersea with Peter and our parents, and you’re here in San Francisco with May.”
“Who’s ‘May’?”
“Oh. She’s your other sister. She was your Fetch when I first met her, and then she wasn’t your Fetch anymore, and she’s just your sister now.”
I stared at him. “My Fetch? You mean the death omen? If I had a Fetch walking around, I should be dead by now, not sitting here and trying to help you figure out how to break Titania’s Ride.”
“Yeah, it was complicated, and I don’t all the way understand it. I’m sure someone will explain it to you—oh, or we can get that spell off you, and then no one will have to explain.”
“I can’t take it off myself, and we need someone else who can tell us more about what they remember after it’s broken before we’re going to be able to convince August. Acacia is Firstborn, and August will probably wonder if that’s why she might have retained more memories than either of us will. My sister can be stubborn like that when she wants to be. Which is pretty much always.” I paused, looking across the room to where Chelsea was engaged in a quiet, but apparently vigorous, argument with her father. “Sir Etienne? May I have your kind leave to borrow Lady Chelsea for a moment?”
“I hope this doesn’t last long enough for me to get used to you talking like that,” muttered Dean.
Raysel giggled behind her hand.
Etienne, meanwhile, looked up sharply, then nodded. “You may, providing she comes right back over here when you’re done with her,” he said.
“Ugh. Fine, Dad,” said Chelsea, and stomped over to join me. “Appreciate the save, Toby. He’s being all protective and parental at me, and I’m not used to it, and I don’t like it. What can I do you for?”
I decided not to ask about her weird choice of words: it was a distraction from what actually mattered. “I broke the spell that was making everyone take you for a changeling.”
“Yes, and I’m way grateful for that.” Her expression turned speculative. “Not sure why setting up a whole illusion to lock me out of Faerie was easier than making Dad think my mother was some Tuatha lady who died or skipped town, but whatever. I like my actual mom, and it would have been double-dose trauma if I’d suddenly had to deal with being someone else’s kid.”
“Up until the spell was broken, though, you really thought you were a changeling. You totally belonged to Titania’s version of the world.”
“Ah,” said Chelsea, and nodded. “You’re working your way around to asking how much I remember, aren’t you?”
“I am.”
She shrugged. “The last four months are really clear. Everything about them is just like I lived through them, all the classes, the commute, watching Mom argue with Dad when he’d get home from the Court, trying not to get caught out by the fae, feeling like something was wrong with the whole world. Like I was out of step with myself. Everything before that is . . . it’s there, but it’s hazy, almost, like a story someone else told me once and asked me to believe in. The life I actually lived is a lot clearer. What’s funny, though? I used to be sort of mad at Dad, for not being there when I was a kid. Here I was, not all the way human and trying to cope with that while Mom pulled her hair out looking for ways to hide me, and he was off dancing with the fairies.” Chelsea chuckled. “Only in my version of the world, it was because he didn’t know I existed. In this version, he was there from the beginning. He watched me grow up, he taught me how to throw a punch when I was ten—and I still know how, even if that never really happened. I think I love him more because I dreamt I lived inside a lie. Is that what you needed to know? The love you already had will come back when the spell comes off. The love you grew inside it will still be with you.”
“I . . . Yeah,” I said. “That’s what I needed to know.”
I didn’t know my own full history, and I didn’t see the point in asking. More and more, it looked like breaking the spell was going to be our only real option. Staying as I was wasn’t going to be on the table, and to be completely honest with myself, that ship had already more than sailed. I’d seen too many fragments of the other me’s life. I understood too many things I should have known nothing about.
And then there was Tybalt.
I didn’t know the man. I’d met him once, and I hadn’t enjoyed the experience. I was also married to him, and cared about him enough to dream about him even when I had no idea who he was. It was a contradiction in every way possible, and the longer I stayed snarled in this spell, the longer he was living in a world where I didn’t know him but he knew me well enough to look at me the way he had in my first blood memory. I needed to get back to him.
And if what Chelsea said was true, I could do that, and I would still love my sister. That mattered more than anything else. I finally opened the package of ham as Chelsea walked back over to Etienne, pulling out a cold, limp slice of improbably pink meat. I frowned at it. It wobbled.