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So what?
Kelley thought, suddenly angry with herself.
What’s the difference? You knew what he was when you fell in love with him. It’s not like he’s changed, is it? He kills Faerie.

Then again, she’d fallen in love before she’d even known that “Faerie” was what she was. But why should that matter? It wasn’t as if Sonny were a danger to her . . . although her
mother
was certainly in his sights. Of course, her mother—and it still weirded Kelley out to think of Mabh in those terms—had her own agenda. And was, in her own right, just as dangerous as Sonny. More so, Kelley was inclined to believe—even though Kelley carried that same dangerous, seductive power within her. Would Kelley’s Faerie heritage one day make
her
a target of “Auberon’s bloodthirsty little lapdog,” as Mabh routinely referred to Sonny?

“No! Of course not!” she told herself.

Lucky nudged at her gently, and Kelley dug into the damp shoulder bag that was still slung across her body. In the very bottom, her fingertips brushed the bristles of her hairbrush. She pulled it out and began to gently worry all of the knots out of the patient kelpie’s mane and tail, brushing them to silk. Lucky’s comforting presence, and the gently monotonous action of grooming him, helped Kelley calm down and get a handle on her spiraling emotions. When she was done, she ran the brush over his whole coat, until finally he stood there gleaming from head to toe, ears pricked up, tail swishing contentedly, an expression of bliss on his long, handsome face.

Kelley smiled and murmured, “This is that very Mab that plats the manes of horses in the night . . . ,” quoting Mercutio’s famous Queen Mab speech from
Romeo and Juliet
. “Which once untangled much misfortune bodes. . . .” She let the line drift away. Right. Misfortune. She’d forgotten how that line ended.

Kelley hugged herself, suddenly cold.

I am not my mother,
she thought, her cheeks heating.
I’m not dangerous or reckless or cruel. . . .

And she sure as hell wasn’t her father—that ice statue masquerading as a person! No, she was nothing like Auberon, and she felt nothing toward him but disdain. Feeling suddenly lost, Kelley slid her arms around Lucky and leaned her forehead on his strong, warm neck, closing her eyes.

When a noise behind her made her turn, Kelley barely even bothered to conceal her disappointment that it wasn’t whom she had been hoping for. It wasn’t even Fennrys.

“Oh. Hi, Bob.”

“Are you all right?”

“I guess so.” Kelley sat down on the stone wall that encircled the yard.

The ancient Fae sat beside her. “Is there anything I can do?”

She shrugged. “Right now, I just want to go home.”

“You’re a sovereign of Faerie, Kelley. At least, you have the blood of one—two, I should say.”

“But not the
power
of two. Not anymore.” Try as she might, Kelley could not keep the bitterness from creeping into her voice as she thought about the moment when Auberon had taken away the power that she had inherited from his throne . . . and the horrid emptiness it had left behind.

“You still possess the gift of your mother’s blood. That is
hardly
inconsequential. Go the same way you came: just make a door. Walk through.” Bob paused, gazing at her with his keen, unnerving stare. “Then slam it behind you and never use it again, if that’s what you want.”

“You think I’m being cruel. About Auberon.”

“In some ways, I think you’re being very . . .” Bob fished for the right words for a moment. “Very true to the nature of your kind. If not the actual kindness of your nature.”

Bob sure liked his wordplay, Kelley thought. But his tone was sincere and made her think about what he had actually said. He had been a friend to her in a very difficult time and he knew her. Her—Kelley. Not just Kelley the actress, or Kelley the Faerie princess. Bob, she had to admit, had a certain amount of insight into Kelley the person.

She thought about that as her gaze roamed restlessly over the wild and unfamiliar terrain. Here she was, sitting in a world that was—ostensibly—her home, and yet it was utterly, fantastically foreign to even her most basic sensibilities. The very air on her skin felt different. Alien. She saw weird, phosphorescent lights flitting in among the tall, spectacular trees, and felt unseen eyes on her—not hostile, just curious. Everything seemed to stand out in sharp relief. The scent of ripe apples and fallen leaves was a heady perfume in her nostrils, and all along the moss-and-pebble path that led to Sonny’s pretty little cottage, pools of rainwater shone like mirrors, rimmed with frost as delicate as the lace edging on one of the fairy costumes from the theater. Kelley knew somehow, without even needing to ask, that the dell the cottage nestled in was near the place where the land crossed over from her father’s kingdom and became her mother’s. She shouldn’t know that. There was no reason for her to possess that knowledge. The fact that she did frightened her a little.

She wished she were home in Manhattan. Or even back in the Catskills, where she’d grown up. Thinking she was human. Her hand went to the charm at her throat, fingers brushing the cool green-amber stones.

“D’you remember when I asked you if you could make it so that this never comes off?” She tapped the pendant. “So that I could never draw on Mabh’s power?”

Bob nodded slowly. “I do. And I believe I counseled against such rash action.”

“You did. Except, well, now it’s happened. Whether I wanted it to or not.”

“You mean the charm—”

“I can’t take it off.”

“But you are here!” Bob protested, not understanding. “You must have opened the Gate. I know it wasn’t that Janus brute Fennrys, because only someone who wields the power of royal Fae blood can do that at will.”

“Yeah, I know.” Kelley lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “I think it might have something to do with that tree I killed—”

“You killed a tree?”

“It tried to kill me first.”

“Perhaps you should tell me
exactly
what happened to you, Princess.”

Kelley sighed gustily and gave Bob the “CliffsNotes” version of her adventure in the park, while all around her Sonny’s fire sprites danced in her hair. The evening stars began to peep through the creeping dark.

“This man who attacked you,” Bob said finally, once she was finished her tale. “Describe him for me.”

“He was some whacked-out Faerie guy.” Kelley shuddered a bit, remembering how frightened she’d been. “I thought he was just a mugger that first night.”

“And both times he appeared you were just walking through the park?” Bob asked.

“Yes.”

“On the path?”

“Yes!”

“You didn’t kick over a toadstool in a Faerie Ring or step on a patch of bluebells or anything?”

“No, Bob. I left the park flora entirely unmolested.” Kelley laughed without humor. “Which is not to say that it returned the favor.”

“Hmm,” Bob grunted. “What did this ‘whacked-out Faerie guy’ look like?”

“Biker couture. Skinny, shaggy hair, jeans, and tattoos . . . plus, y’know, the aggressively green thumb.”

“Vivification, yes,” Bob said. “Impressive. Especially on that kind of scale.”

“Vivi—?” Kelley blew a strand of hair out of her eyes. “Okay. Whatever.”

The boucca’s pale green forehead furrowed faintly. “I don’t suppose your assailant was wearing exceptional quality footwear?”

“Yeah,” Kelley answered, startled. “Boots. Like motorcycle boots. Shiny black leather, silver buckles.”

“
Seven
silver buckles.”

“I didn’t exactly stop to count.”

Bob didn’t even crack a smile. “If you run into him again, I suggest you don’t.” The ancient Fae’s expression had grown very dark indeed.

“What . . .
was
he?”

“Leprechaun,” he said. “Bad one.”

“Are you sure?” Kelley asked. The image of a leprechaun from children’s storybooks and cereal boxes simply didn’t tally with the scary, skinny man who had attacked her in Central Park.

But Bob nodded, sounding as sure as if he’d fought the creep himself, as he said, “I had a lot of time to contemplate his identifying features throughout the course of almost an entire century of honeyed fermentation—remind me to tell you that story sometime.” His eyes went cloudy with memory. “He used to be a fairly natty dresser—three-pointed buckskin hat and a long coat. But, whatever his fashion sense nowadays, it sounds as though his personality has not exactly mellowed with the passage of time. Still the same mean, miserable son of a bitch. Tell me”—Bob’s brow furrowed in thought—“if he cast a spell so that you couldn’t remove the charm, how on earth
did
you manage to cross over?”

“Well, when the—er, when the leprechaun brought the tree to life, it tried to suffocate me. The tree, I mean. I stabbed it with his knife, and it—well, it sort of . . . bled all over me.” She tapped the clover charm. “All over this.”

Amber is the blood of very old trees,
her aunt had once told her.

“Aha! Borrowed magick!” Bob exclaimed. “
That
explains how you were able to rip open a passageway. Sometimes, even the odd mortal gets lucky—or unlucky—that way. If he poured a bunch of magick into vivifying the tree that held you fast, then it probably reacted against the magick stored in your charm. Even with most of your own power hidden by the clover, what you had sticking out around the edges was obviously enough to spark off the power that was bleeding out of the tree. Sort of like a fuse on a—”

“Firecracker,” Kelley said, the word whispering through her mind in Sonny’s voice. “Right . . .”

“
I
was going to say stick of dynamite.” Bob looked at her sideways. “But you take my meaning.”

“Sure.” Kelley understood now the mechanism by which she had managed to draw upon her power. What she didn’t understand—and what, in that moment, she decided not to mention to Bob—was that she’d also experienced the incredibly potent vision of Sonny. And that, in the moment before she was able to draw blood from the tree, that vision had seemed to intervene, somehow. “It seemed like this guy was slinging an awful lot of magick all over the park.”

“Aye, well. The Wee Green Men are some of the oldest, strongest powers in all of the worlds.”

“Wee Green Men?” Kelley snorted. “You’re kidding, right? There was nothing particularly wee or green about this guy. Heck—you’re greener than he was, Bob.”

“They’re called that because they are the sons of the Greenman.”

“The old forest god?” Kelley asked, remembering the giant, leafy creature who had raised his mug of whiskey to her and winked with a kindly, twinkling eye. “I think I met him at Herne’s Tavern back in October. He was really sweet.”

“His progeny are
not,
” Bob snapped. “Neither the Wee Green Men nor their sisters, the glaistigs—those we call the Green Maidens—are the sort you want to run into in dark alleys. Horrible creatures, all of them. They are like the untamed saplings of a tree that spring up wild in a garden—choking out the other, more desirable growth. The Greenman was all about balance. His children, be they leprechaun or glaistig, are far more interested in chaos.”

“Great. And now one of them is after me.” Kelley reached up again to touch the charm at her throat, her fingertips playing over the cool surface of the stones. “You know, Emma told me you gave her this, to hide me when I was a baby. But you never actually told her where you got it from, did you?”

“It might have slipped my mind. . . .”

“Bob. Am I in possession of stolen goods?”

The boucca shifted uncomfortably. “
Ownership
is such a
human
concept—”

“Bob!” Kelley sputtered.

“I never expected he’d find you!” Bob threw his hands in the air. “But ever since Samhain, well . . . word of you has gotten out.”

“Thanks for the warning.”

“Sorry.” Bob smiled weakly.

“You know—I’d cheerfully give it back to him if I thought he’d actually listen to me long enough to undo the whole binding-curse thing.”

“Which brings me to my next point.” Bob’s expression went a bit grim. “Even if the leprechaun troubles you no further, unless you can find a way to remove the spell on the charm, you may never be able to access your Faerie power on your own. You’ll be as good as mortal for the rest of your life.”

Kelley wasn’t exactly sure how she felt about that. On the one hand, she felt something like a vast sense of relief wash through her. But, on the other, she could almost hear a furious shriek of outrage deep inside herself.

“I wish I could lie to you and tell you that your father might help you remove the binding,” Bob said. “Then maybe you would come with me. But I can’t.”

“Oh.” Kelley swallowed hard, determined to suppress her flaring emotions in the same way that the clover charm now suppressed her flaring wings. Kelley’s wings had once been silvery, shimmering things, in those first few days when she had newly discovered her Faerie magick. Her father had taken those—leaving her with only her mother’s magick—and the only wings that she could manifest now were dark as midnight. Auberon had ripped those first wings away, along with the Unseelie power he’d sucked out of her. She hoped he choked on it. “I understand. He won’t help me.”

“You don’t understand at all.” Bob stared at her blandly. “Auberon can’t help you. He’s too weak. Of course, you
could
still pay him a visit—you know; ‘in the neighborhood, thought I’d drop by,’ that sort of thing—”

Kelley shook her head. “If he can’t do anything for me, then there’s no reason for me to go see him.”

“That’s a little harsh, Kelley. Don’t you think?”

“I really don’t,” she said. “
I
remember what happened on Halloween. I’m surprised you’ve forgotten.”

“I haven’t
forgotten,
” he answered. “I’m just no longer certain I
understand
what I remember. Someone once said. ‘There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.’”

“Hamlet.”
Kelley smiled. “Seriously—just how well
did
you know Shakespeare, Bob?”

“We frequented the same pubs. That’s all. Sometimes he’d bounce ideas off me for one of his plays. And, of course, he’d frequently stiff me with the bar tab.” He patted Kelley’s knee. “Well, I have to be getting back to Court.” He tried one last time. “He’ll be disappointed you didn’t come. . . .”