Page 80 of A Killing Frost

“I appreciate you, but this isn’t the biggest bathroom in the house, so go hang out somewhere else. May needs to fix my face before I head to Muir Woods.”

Spike made a disappointed chirping sound, but rose and trotted back out of the bathroom, leaving me alone. I started to slump forward and put my head in my hands but stopped as I considered how annoyed May would be if I messed up my hair again.

It had been a week since Walther found the right combination of herbs, simples, and magical brute force to wake her up. His counter had required a blood donation from the Luidaeg, to chase down and burn away her sister’s contribution to the mix. I was starting to think that minimizing contact with the Firstborn, or at least the shitty ones, might be the right answer after all. That was the last any of us had heard from her. She’d dropped the blood off in his office at Berkeley, leaving it on the desk without visiblyappearing or opening the office doors, and left a note with it that read only, “Not now. Leave us alone. -A.” Out of self-preservation, we had listened, and even I hadn’t tried to call her.

Quentin had attempted to go by the apartment once, to tell her the divorce was moving forward, and hadn’t even been able to find the alley, much less the door. He’d walked the block where it was supposed to be for almost an hour before coming home and informing me wearily that she didn’t want to be found.

It made sense. She was in the middle of the most intense family reunion imaginable. Most people still didn’t know it was going on. We had all agreed without discussion that we weren’t going to tell anyone who hadn’t actually been there to witness what happened about Oberon’s return. It was a big secret to keep. It was a bigger secret to spill. Silence seemed like the best and only option we really had.

Tybalt was still being clingier than usual, keeping a close eye on me when we were in the same place and checking in constantly when I went out to work. It would have seemed pushy and overbearing, if not for recent events—and if he didn’t calm down soon, he was going to wind up crossing that line, and he wouldnotlike what he found on the other side. Even I have my limits. Still, I can understand that it’s unsettling for the people who love me when I nearly get myself killed, or go and completely forget who they are due to taking Firstborn curses onto myself to save an old enemy, and I can be forgiving.

It’s easier to forgive when you’re hoping to be forgiven. We care about each other. So we apologize, and we try, even when it’s not the most convenient thing that we could do.

May bustled back into the room, a wicker basket full of cosmetics slung over one arm. “Stay,” she commanded me, even though I hadn’t so much as shifted positions while she was gone. She dumped the basket on the corner of the sink, grabbed my chin, and began smearing fixative around my eyes, blending it with her thumbs.

“This will keep your eyeshadow from sliding down your face as the night goes on,” she said. “And it’ll help to keep your eyeliner from smearing. Tybalt loves you no matter what, but if you’re facing Mom tonight, you should do it looking majestic and heroic, not like someone’s slapped tits onto a raccoon.”

“You jerk,” I said, trying to keep my head from bobbing asI swallowed my laughter. “Nothing too heavy, okay? I like to be able to recognize my own face when I see it in the mirror.”

“Don’t worry. Stacy’s planningmuchheavier for the wedding. Now close your eyes and relax your face.”

“Yes, ma’am.” It was easy enough to do as she said. I trusted her not to hurt me, and that alone was a wonderful thing. There aren’t many people in this world who I can trust like that.

May worked quickly and silently, not asking for my opinion or my choices of color. She knew I didn’t care enough to make good choices, or at least not choices that she would approve of enough to honor. In what felt like hours but was probably less than fifteen minutes, she dropped the mascara back into her basket and said, “You can look now.”

“Permission appreciated.” I stood, turning toward the bathroom mirror.

May’s makeup choices for herself are often “1980s mall décor as aesthetic.” She favors heavy neons, contrasting colors that worm their way right up to the edge of clashing before they back off, and glitter. So much glitter. Glitter by the gallon. For me, she had gone in virtually the opposite direction, building up a smoky eye with black eyeliner and half a dozen shades of shadow, made dramatic only by the inclusion of a deep red that mirrored my jewelry and a few highlights of arctic white that made it easier to see what little color my eyes still possessed. She had highlighted my cheekbones so as to accentuate the actual color of my skin and painted my lips in a shade of deep pomegranate. I looked lovely and mature and not remotely like my mother, which, today, was a good thing. I turned back to May, earrings brushing my cheeks. She beamed.

“See, this is why we skip the stage of you pretending you’re going to do it yourself and go straight to letting me make sure you’re ready for your public,” she said. “Your dress is on the bed. Get it on, and we’ll get out of here.”

“I can dress myself.”

“I know!” she said. She was still laughing as she left the bathroom.

I threw a hairbrush at her.

Someday I’ll move beyond the dresses we had made for me when I was a child, but as those were expensive, specially tailored to grow up with me as I matured, and most importantly of all, largelyin my closet already due to repeated raids on Mom’s tower, “someday” isn’t going to be particularly soon. The dress spread out across my bed was from that era, long and flowing, with a high neckline that still managed to seem revealing, thanks to the “back” of the dress consisting simply of a band of fabric about four inches across that went over the back of my neck and provided structural stability to the entire bodice. It had been made when I was about nine. I didn’t remember what it had looked like before I hit puberty, but I had to hope Amandine hadn’t actually commissioned a backless gown for her pre-teen daughter.

It’s hard to say, one way or the other. Sometimes fae ideas about appropriateness can be pretty dramatically distinct from human norms.

It was made of gunmetal gray fabric, sleek as satin and softer than velvet, and it sealed to a point just above my hips before running out of fabric. I dropped my robe and worked the dress over my hips, pressing the fabric together with my thumb and forefinger to close it. Nothing so gauche as a zipper here; the dress knew what it was expected to do, and so it simply did it, courtesy of some pureblood seamstress who was probably centuries older than I was and would be appalled to know that a gown made decades ago was being worn in the company of a queen. The fae never get rid of anything. They still have opinions about how often a wardrobe should be refreshed.

Faerie is a construct of constant contradictions. Take them away, and what remains is a jumble that can’t even hold its own shape most of the time.

I smoothed the front of the gown with the heels of my hands and returned to the bathroom to retrieve the bangle bracelets that went with the rest of my jewelry, slipping them over my hands and looking at myself in the mirror. I wasn’t going to win any Summerlands beauty competitions, but no changeling ever will; we’d be competing against people who’ve worked for millennia to refine beauty into a weapon. I wasn’t going to embarrass myself or my household, and that was what mattered. Tybalt always liked it when I took the time to dress up, saying it was a pleasure to watch the purebloods who’d ignored me when my circumstances were different stand confronted by what they were no longer allowed to have.

Personally, I thought he just enjoyed being a jerk. As with most of the dresses from Mom’s place, this one lacked a slit throughwhich to draw my knife, and so I fastened my scabbard around my waist, wearing my weapons openly. A little gauche, maybe, but it was either go gauche or skip the event, since there was no way in hell I was going tothisparty unarmed.

My shoes were by the door. I stepped into them and left the room, heading down the hall to the stairs. Quentin and Tybalt were already in the hall. They straightened at my approach, Quentin looking me over with the assessing eyes of someone for whom the pureblood court system, where appearances were more important than actualities, was second nature, Tybalt just looking. The pure appreciation in his eyes was almost enough to make me uncomfortable.

Only almost.

“No Shadow Roads unless someone is tryingreallyhard to murder us,” I said. “This dress doesn’t have a back, and I’ll freeze.”

“You do realize that by saying this, you’ve all but guaranteed someone will attempt to murder us in a way that suits your definition of ‘tryingreallyhard,’” said Tybalt. “Turn around, please.”

I turned around. He made a low growling sound. I smirked at him over my shoulder.

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