Ashes of Honor

Her front door was warped and water stained, and it looked like it would fall apart if subjected to the slightest pressure. Appearances can be deceiving, especially when the Luidaeg is involved. I raised my hand and knocked briskly, not hammering, but not gently tapping, either. There was no immediate answer. Quentin and I exchanged a look. The Luidaeg normally opened her door almost instantly, sometimes even before we had a chance to knock. Then again, it was more than an hour past sunrise, and even sea witches have to sleep sometime.

“I wish we’d been able to stop for the donuts,” said Quentin.

“You and me both,” I said and knocked again.

This time, we heard movement on the other side of the door: feet, shuffling down the hall. I lowered my hand, and the door swung open, revealing a sleepy-eyed, apparently human woman with tousled brown hair, tan skin, and freckles warring with the ghosts of teenage acne scars for ownership of her cheeks. She was wearing a blue bathrobe over a floor-length white cotton nightgown. She looked like she couldn’t be more than a few days over seventeen.

I knew better. “Hello, Luidaeg,” I said. “Can we come in?”

The Luidaeg blinked. “Toby?” She glanced to my companion. “Quentin? What are you two doing here? You didn’t call.”

“We were going to, but I had car trouble, and it sort of slipped my mind. It’s why we didn’t bring donuts. Please can we come in? There’s something we need to talk about, and I’d rather not do it standing on the porch.”

The Luidaeg looked at us again and then looked back over her shoulder at the hallway. The door blocked whatever she was looking at. Finally, she sighed. “All right, you can come in—but don’t you dare say a word about the condition of my apartment. I didn’t have time to get ready for company.”

Considering that the Luidaeg’s apartment normally looked like a cross between a compost heap and the dumpsters behind a Goodwill, that was a terrifying statement. “Sure,” I said. “We won’t say anything.”

The Luidaeg scowled at me. “Yeah, you will,” she said. Then she turned and retreated into the hall, leaving the door open so we could follow her inside.

I stepped over the threshold and stopped. Quentin froze beside me, the two of us staring wide-eyed at something even more unexpected than a monster sleeping on top of my car.

The hall was clean.

The carpet—visible for the first time in the years that I’d been visiting—was the color of fresh kelp. The walls were cream-colored, decorated with a few judiciously placed fishnets. They filled the air with the pleasant scent of fresh seawater, salty without being briny.

“Toby…”

“Yeah, kid. I see it, too.”

The Luidaeg stopped at the end of the hall, turning back to scowl at us. “Are you going to come inside or not?”

Quentin and I exchanged a look before stepping into the hall. The door swung shut behind us, and we walked down the hall to the pristine living room. The couches—which had always been splotched with patches of muck and mold before—were clearly antique but well cared-for. There were even a few pictures on the walls, all images of oceans. I recognized one of them as having been taken at Half Moon Bay, near the home of Connor’s family. The Luidaeg has an…interesting…relationship with the Selkie families. They owe her their existence. She’s planning to call in that debt soon, and I’m pretty sure it’s going to involve me.

“What the hell happened here?” I asked, looking toward the Luidaeg.

“Like I said, the place isn’t ready for company. If you’d called first…”

The Daoine Sidhe are illusionists. Maybe that’s why Quentin was the one to say, indignantly, “You mean you’ve been pretending this place was a pigsty all this time?”

“I never said ‘this place is a pigsty,’ did I?” asked the Luidaeg. “I never lied to you. I’ve never lied to either of you. I just let you think what you wanted to think. If you’d ever asked…”

I shook my head. “But let me guess. If I’d asked, ‘Is the apartment always like this?’ you would have said, ‘No, sometimes it’s a mess,’ and let me think it just got worse instead of telling me that it was spotless under a glamour.”

“Yup,” said the Luidaeg. “Or if you’d asked, ‘Don’t you ever clean?’ I would have said I cleaned all the time. Lies and truth are all in how you’re looking at them. That’s something you, out of everyone, should have figured out by now.” She yawned, covering her mouth with the back of her hand. “Now what the fuck do you people want? This is ‘rip your heads off and leave your bodies as a warning to others’ early.”

Quentin grinned. Apparently, threats of dire physical harm from the Luidaeg made him happy. Weird kid. At least I could take some small pleasure in knowing that I was part of what made him that way. “It’s good to see you, too.”

“Uh-huh.” She went stomping toward the kitchen. “I’m making some fucking tea.”

Sometimes I think the Luidaeg uses human profanity as much as she does just because she’s trying to shock me. I ignored it and followed her, with Quentin close behind me.