She's No Faerie Princess (2 page)

nothing new."

"The only reason why I would be sorry would be if the queen found out," Fiona said. "And the only way my aunt could possibly find out something like that would be if you told her. Which you're not going to do. Are you, Babbage?"

The pixie remained stubbornly silent. For once in his life.

Fiona's hand darted out, pinching his gossamer tunicbetween her thumb and forefinger and hauling him rightup to her face. "Are you, Babbage?"

He glanced from her to the gate on the other side of the

clearing and back again. His wings drooped at the edges. "No, Princess Fiona. I will not tell the queen of your rash and ill-advised excursion into forbidden territory."

"I've asked you not to call me 'Princess,'" she said, and

released him with a flick of her fingers.

From her shoulder, Squick stuck his tongue out at thepixie.

Babbage flew back a couple of feet and gave a woundedsniff. "You
 
are
 
a princess."

"Sure, along with ten of my female cousins, and that's not

counting the other cousins who happen to be princes."

She peered around the trunk of an old oak tree andscanned the break in the thick vegetation for any signs ofmovement. Just because she wouldn't let the fear ofgetting caught stop her from going through the gate didn'tmean she wasn't going to try to avoid it.

"None of them had parents who died and left their care

directly in the hands of the queen."

"Babbage, do you
 
want
 
me to take you with me?"

"You can takes me!" Squick shouted, jumping up and

down excitedly.

The renewed threat shut the pixie up, but the damagehad already been done. He'd reminded her of somethingshe spent a great deal of her time trying to forget, andnow she'd spend at least the rest of the day with ithanging over her head. Pesky pixie pest.

Fiona knew that ignoring the truth wasn't going to make it

go away, but that didn't keep her from trying. On a daily basis. She despised court life, whether it was at her aunt's Seelie Court or at the Unseelie that was ruled by Mab's former husband and Fiona's still officially uncle, Dionnu. The idea of taking the throne when the peace between the two courts had been uneasy at best for most of her lifetime made her break out in hives. And that was exactly the reason that she needed to take a vacation. She didn't have the patience or the devious ness required to be a successful leader of the Fae, and she had no intention of developing either. Her parents might both have been sidhe—the noble race of Faerie—but she swore that sometimes she wished they'd been goblins or trolls or pixies or sprites or even a dryad and a satyr. Any type of Fae under the sun or moon would have been fine with her, so long as it wasn't a member of either high court. Sometimes, she reflected, life as a Faerie princess pretty much sucked.

Thinking about it only steeled Fiona's resolve to screwthe rules and seize the opportunity for her much-neededvacation. In the human world, she'd be able to blend infor a little while, to be a nobody. She wouldn't stand out,and with most of her magic drained from her by theunfamiliar surroundings, she wouldn't have been able tomake much in the way of waves if she tried. It soundedperfect.

She took one last careful look around, set Squick downon the ground beside her, and shouldered her smalltravel bag. Grinning, she flicked the imp and the pixie ajaunty wave.

"Take care, little friends," she called, hurrying toward the shimmering Faerie gate and into the simple, predictable

world of the humans.

Tobias Walker hadn't gotten laid in at least three months. He knew very well that this hardly qualified as anemergency, but he did consider it symptomatic of a largerissue. Not only had he not had sex in all that time—whichwas not inconsequential for a bachelor werewolf in hisprime—but he also hadn't gone on a date, gotten anuninterrupted night of sleep, watched an entire ball game,or taken a day off. Considering all that, was it any wonderthat his mood edged toward cranky as he stalked throughhis 3:00 a.m. park patrol?

Technically, this wasn't even his patrol, a fact that onlycontributed to his case of the grumps. As beta of the Silverback Clan—second in command after the alphapack leader—Walker had been put in charge of the Lupine-led policing of Manhattan. That meant he got toassign shifts and theoretically give himself one off nowand then. Tonight should have been his night to get adecadent five hours of sleep after a double shift on hisregular beat through Central Park. Unfortunately, thepackmate who had been assigned up here in Inwood Hill Park had come down with a raging case of pregnancy,and her mate had refused to let her out of the house.

Walker could sympathize with the sentiment; his own Lupine instincts would have driven him to react the sameway if he'd had a mate. Something attached to the Lupine Y chromosome turned them into raging Neanderthalswhere the safety of their mates was concerned, but Walker was still single. He also still had an entire city topatrol and a security force already stretched thin to cover

it.

He growled and stuffed his hands into his pockets as hestalked through the park, his sharp gaze constantlysweeping the surroundings for anything unusual.

You'd think by now he'd be used to the wholeoverwhelming thing. It had been like this for nearly sixmonths, ever since the Council of Others and itsequivalents from around the world had entered intosecret negotiations with the humans. The delicate natureof the talks necessitated an atmosphere of peace, nomatter how tense, if the two sides were going to reach anagreement that didn't lead to bloodshed on either side. And when you were negotiating with vampires,shapeshifters, Others, and human politicians, Walkerreflected, bloodshed was always a possibility, no matterhow hard he and his pack worked to prevent it.

These negotiations would alter the course of the future,for both the Others, who had finally taken their first stepout of hiding, and the humans, who now needed toacknowledge that so many of the things they believed tobe safely fictional actually did walk among them. It meantasking the humans to discard centuries of fear andsuperstition to allow what many of them considered to bemonsters to enjoy the same rights and legal protectionsas anyone else. So in contrast, beefing up Other securityto be sure no one got out of line and did anything tofrighten the humans into another Inquisition seemed likea wise course of action.

The Council had put the Silverback Clan in charge ofmaking sure that the Others kept themselves in line anddid nothing to frighten the humans into breaking off the

talks. Since Walker was pack beta and his day job happened to be as head of security at the largest private club for Others in this half of the world, it fell to him to coordinate that security force. Which was why he was currently on his third patrol in twenty-four hours instead of facedown in his mattress.

Heading north at the fork in his path, Walker consideredall the changes he and his kind had faced over the pastmonths. No one had really been prepared. Sure, Othershad been debating about the Unveiling on and off formost of the last century, but that had been a theoreticalsort of thing, an "imagine if" approach to the future. Ithadn't prevented the shock of learning a few months agothat a radical sect called the Light of Truth had gatheredenough evidence to take the decision out of their handsand reveal their existence to the humans whether theywere ready or not.

That news had convinced the Council of Others that thetime had come to take the first steps in claiming an openplace in the world around them, hence the secretnegotiations. Even the most optimistic members of the Council knew better than to break the news to the humanpublic without first gaining some assurances from theirgovernments that the rights of the nonhumans would bepreserved. Optimistic did not equal foolish.

For their part, the Others were prepared to make certainnone of their kind did anything stupid, like attack ahuman. Or even be seen within ten feet of one whohappened to be dead, injured, or mildly inconvenienced. The last thing they needed was for the humans toabandon the bargaining table. Walker figured he wascurrently doing his best, and the best of at least three

other people to boot.

Thankfully, things were staying pretty quiet—quietenough that twenty-four-hour patrols probably weren'tstrictly necessary, but you just never knew when that oneproblem you wanted to avoid would rear its ugly head.

Or scream bloody murder.

Before a sharp feminine cry had even faded from an

"eek" to an echo, Walker had whipped around, pinpointedthe source of the sound, and launched himself toward it,sprinting through the trees in a blur of speed and swearwords.

CHAPTER 2

Fiona stepped out of the other side of the gate and intoan inky blackness, sighing in irritation. Darn it, one ofthese days she was going to have to get a handle onthose stupid time changes. She stepped forward into thedark, muttering to herself, and promptly tripped oversomething immovable laid directly in her path. It mighthelp her vacation relaxation plan if she didn't gostumbling around blindly and walking into things like anidiot. She paused for a moment to let her eyes adjustfrom the bright daylight of Faerie to the dimness of a Manhattan night, or at least one in the depths of the city'swildest park.

It only took a few seconds before she could see almostas well as she could have in the middle of a sunnyafternoon. Hitching her bag higher onto her shoulder, shescanned the area around her and stepped over the fattree root in front of her bare feet. She headed toward thepark entrance, confident she knew where she was going. This was the same gate she'd used on her other trips tothe human world, so at least things looked familiar. Andshe knew exactly where she wanted to go—straight intothe East Village to see if any of her favorite bands wereplaying. Some frenetic music in an overcrowded humanclub sounded like the perfect way to spend her evening. She couldn't think of much else that would be asdrastically different from a night at the Fae courts.

At this time of night, her path through the woodsappeared deserted, but Fiona didn't plan to jeopardizeher vacation by taking chances. She made a subtlegesture with her hand and stirred up a little of the magicinside her to cast a small glamour. She had plannedahead and brought a small reserve of magic with herfrom Faerie in case of emergency. She could havespared her reserves and tried to gather up some of thescarce fragments of Fae magic that managed to linger inthe human world, but such scraps were few and farbetween here, and what magic did exist in this world wasalmost completely inaccessible to her. No one had everreally explained why that was—why the Fae couldn't tapinto the magic inherent to the human world and why therare mortal witch who had visited Faerie over the lastcouple of millennia had found it equally impossible toharness the magic of that world. Something in themolecular fabric of the two worlds made their forcesincompatible. Like oil and water, Fiona and the magic of

the mortal world didn't mix, but she didn't expect to use much magic during her trip. That had been one of the reasons she'd opted to come here. She could afford to tap into what she'd brought with her.

The little shimmer that accompanied the spell barelyregistered in the darkness, but it made a significantimpact on her appearance. The long fall of her jet-blackhair turned into a close, shaggy crop of electric blue,moussed on its ends and tipped in shocks of brightfuchsia. Her pale, cream white skin took on a golden castfrom a liberal sprinkling of freckles on every inch of visibleskin, and her new outfit left a lot of skin visible. In place ofthe gown she had been wearing were a couple ofcasually layered and strategically torn tank tops in blackand blue. Below them, she wore a pleated plaid skirt in atartan Scotland had never intended and a length that wasguaranteed to make any man she met take a much closerlook. Her legs were covered in lacy black thigh-highstockings that ended just about where her hem beganand disappeared at the other end into heavy black bootsthat laced halfway up her calves.

Grinning, Fiona added a swagger to her stride. She wasin Manhattan. Now she would fit right in.

She let the twigs snap under her feet as she practicallyskipped down the path in anticipation of the amusementawaiting her. Once she got to the park's entrance, shecould hop a subway to 9th Street and see what she couldsee. Maybe CBGB would have a good show. Or therewere always Manitoba's as an alternative, or Mona's ifshe changed her mind and decided to go for Guinnessand songs that reminded her more of home. Somehowshe didn't think that would be happening.

Ooh! And maybe she'd try that little noodle house she'dspotted near Washington Square last time, just to see ifthey still made that
 
pad mi ga ti
 
dish…

Nearly tasting the coconut milk and hot chilies, Fiona senta pebble skittering down the path. She watched as itbounced off the cloven hoof of a very large, very black,very fiery-eyed, and very not-nice-looking creature withcurling horns and waves of heat rolling off its hulkingframe.

That was about when she screamed.

Right after that was about when she ran.

Her heart leaped into her throat and her stomach sankinto her boots as shock and fear and confusion took over,sending her sprinting for safety.

Sweet stars above, that's a demon!

Her mind raced along with her feet across the forest floor. She veered off the path and darted around trees, cursingas she heard the muffled thunder of the creature'sfootfalls echoing close behind hers. Not only was that ademon, but it was now chasing her over the uneventerrain.