“Okay, Dad,” I said, “it’s time you clue me in on what we’re going to do about this invitation.”
Dad shook his head, the corners of his mouth tight with displeasure. “There isn’t much we
can
do about it. As I’m sure you figured out, it wasn’t so much an invitation as a summons.”
“So? I’m not a member of the Seelie Court.” Despite everyone’s assumption that because my dad was Seelie,
I
was Seelie. “And
you’re
a citizen of Avalon,” I reminded him, though I didn’t expect it to do much good. My dad was Seelie to the bone, and no amount of time living in Avalon was going to change that.
“You wouldn’t be in danger,” Dad said, ignoring my argument completely. “If you’re appearing in Court in answer to the Queen’s summons, you’d be protected by the laws of courtesy. It wouldn’t matter if you were her worst enemy—she’d make sure you were safe until you returned to Avalon.”
“Hold on,” I said, stopping in my tracks, because I really didn’t like the sound of that. “You’re not seriously considering
going,
are you?”
Dad looked at me grimly. “We’re going,” he told me, making no attempt to sugarcoat the truth that I had no say in the matter. “If Titania has chosen to honor you with a presentation at Court, you have to go.”
“But she wants to kill me!” She’d let me know that when she’d sent a couple of her Knights into Avalon to jump me, only it hadn’t been
me
who ended up getting hurt. To get her message across, the Knights had beaten my bodyguard, Finn, to within an inch of his life, and he hadn’t defended himself because they’d threatened to kill me if he did. They’d then pinned him to the floor by driving a knife through his shoulder and warned that I would be next if I didn’t get out of Avalon and stay out. The knife had had a white rose—the symbol of the Seelie Court—inlaid on its handle.
“I’m no longer so sure about that,” Dad said.
I shook my head. “Those Knights left that dagger behind for a reason,” I argued. “I think the message was loud and clear.”
“Yes, but there’s no guarantee they were sent by Titania. Certainly they meant to imply it, but that doesn’t mean that it’s true.”
None of this was making a whole lot of sense to me. “Let me get this straight: just a few hours ago, you were completely convinced Titania wanted me dead, and now a few words from Prince Henry has you convinced it was all a big misunderstanding?”
“Convinced? No. But I’m willing to entertain the possibility. And even if she
was
behind it, this summons suggests she’s changed her mind.”
“And you’re willing to risk my life based on what could be wishful thinking.” My dad was so overprotective I lived underground and had a bodyguard. It made no sense that he’d suddenly be okay with the idea of me waltzing into Faerie.
Dad put his hands on my shoulders, focusing his intense blue gaze on me. “I’m afraid you don’t understand, Dana. We don’t have a choice. Henry insinuated that we might have been involved in Grace’s plot and that he has orders to arrest us if we decline the invitation.”
I blinked in surprise. “Where was I when this happened?” I asked, although I’d been at Dad’s side all night.
“‘One would not want to foster the impression that there is bad blood between your family and the Queen after your sister’s unfortunate actions,’” Dad quoted in a fair imitation of Henry’s pompous tone.
I shook my head. “And that meant he was threatening to arrest us?”
“He went out of his way to bring it up, and he made sure to remind us she was a member of our family. It might not have been an overt threat, but he knew I’d understand exactly what he meant.”
Something told me that the Fae had no problem with “cruel and unusual” punishment, and that I didn’t want to find myself a prisoner in Faerie. “But he couldn’t
really
arrest us, could he? He doesn’t have any authority in Avalon.”
“Authority, no. But he has influence aplenty. If he requested extradition, I doubt the Council would find grounds to deny him.” He smiled gently at me. “It is not only the Fae who feel threatened by you.”
That was a reminder I could have done without.
“You see now why we have to accept,” my dad said. “Our choices are to go as honored guests or reviled prisoners. I prefer the former, don’t you?”
“I still think going is a bad idea,” I said, though with considerably less conviction than before.
“I’ll take that under advisement,” he said, then urged me to start walking again.
* * *
I barely slept that night, my mind spinning as I tried to figure out how to convince my dad to see things my way—without having us both dragged off to Faerie in chains. There was a part of me that
wanted
to go to Faerie, to see the world that no other human being could ever see. That part of me said that maybe my dad was right, and maybe a trip to the heart of the Seelie Court would be perfectly safe and lead to getting my enemies off my back. But living with my mom and her alcoholism had given me a heavy streak of realism—or pessimism, depending on your point of view—and I felt little hope that things would go that well.
I finally fell asleep at some ungodly hour and was awakened the next morning by the ringing of my phone. Barely conscious, I reached for the phone and hit a few buttons until I got the right one.
“Hello?” I said in my lovely, too-early-in-the-morning croak.
“I heard the news!” Kimber said in a voice that was just short of a squeal.
Kimber is my best friend, and really the closest friend I’ve ever had. When I was growing up, my mom kept us constantly moving, because she didn’t want my dad to find us. (Not that Dad could have come into the mortal world, but if he’d known I was out there, I don’t doubt he’d have sent humans to track me down.) Moving so often made it hard enough to make friends, but when you add in my mom’s alcoholism and my desperate need to keep it hidden, you have a dedicated loner on your hands. In a lot of ways, Kimber was the best thing that had happened to me since I’d come to Avalon. Ethan, her older brother and my sort-of boyfriend, might object to me saying that, but my relationship with him was a whole lot more complicated.
“Heard what news?” I yawned and wished I could get a coffee IV. A glance at the clock showed me it wasn’t all that early, but I’d been deeply asleep and my body wanted to get back to it.
“You’re going to be presented at Court!”
The memory woke me up in a hurry. Too bad I couldn’t have at least a few minutes of sleep-addled amnesia before I had to think about going to Faerie. “Why do you sound so excited about it?” I asked. She sounded like she was going to start jumping up and down and clapping with glee at any moment.
Kimber hesitated, like she wasn’t expecting my surly response. “Um, well, it’s a big honor. You get to go to Faerie and meet the Queen and you’ll be a guest in the palace.”
I guess it did sound rather exciting, if you left out the part about potentially getting killed in the process—or the part about being arrested on some trumped-up charge if you didn’t go. I didn’t suppose Kimber knew about that, and I didn’t see any reason to rain on her parade with the grim truth.
“But the best part,” Kimber continued enthusiastically, “is you get to wear a court dress!”
I stifled a groan. Kimber is an incredible girly-girl when it comes to clothes. She loves to dress up, and the fancier and frillier the outfit, the more she likes it. Me, I’m more a jeans-and-hoodie sort of girl.
“I don’t know what a court dress is,” I said, “but if you’re this excited about it, I bet I’m going to hate it.”
She sighed happily. “You’re going to be absolutely stunning! But if you’re leaving in two days, we need to get you in with the dressmaker, like,
now
.”
“Dressmaker?” That sounded worse than I’d imagined.
“Of course, silly. You don’t wear something off the rack to be presented at Court. As if you could even
find
a court dress off the rack. Has your dad set up an appointment yet?”
“How should I know? I didn’t even know I was going to need some fancy dress for this thing.” I instantly regretted being so snappish about it. “Sorry. I’m not exactly down with this whole plan, but I shouldn’t take it out on you.”
“It’ll be all right,” Kimber assured me. “No one would dare attack you when you’re a guest of the Queen. They take matters of etiquette very seriously in Faerie. You’ll be perfectly safe.”
“Yeah, that’s what my dad said. I just have a bad feeling about the whole thing.”
“You always have a bad feeling about
something,
so you should be used to it by now.”
“Ha-ha. Very funny.”
“Well, someone got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning!”
I snorted. “No, someone hasn’t gotten out of bed at all yet. And some other people should know better than to call at oh-dark-thirty in the morning.”
Kimber laughed. “I don’t think ten o’clock counts as oh-dark-thirty. Besides, you have to get your butt in gear. You’ve got a lot to do before you leave. Now get out of bed and go see if your dad’s set up an appointment for you.”
“Let me guess, you want to come with me.”
“Well, you need someone with at least
some
fashion sense to help you out.”
“I think I’ve just been insulted,” I said, though her teasing had put a reluctant smile on my face. “I need some coffee in my system first.”
“Call me back when you know the when and where. This is going to be so much fun!”
I suspected that in this instance, Kimber’s idea of fun and mine weren’t going to be quite the same.
* * *
It wasn’t until I met Kimber outside the dressmaker’s shop—with Finn trailing in my wake, because I wasn’t allowed to go
anywhere
without a bodyguard hanging over my shoulder—that I realized the potential problem. You see, there was this mark on the back of my shoulder … A stylized blue stag that looked like a tattoo, but wasn’t. It was the Erlking’s mark, and he tricked me into triggering a spell that put it on me. The mark allowed the Erlking to find me wherever I was—kind of like one of those microchips you put in your pet dog.
I hadn’t told anyone—not even Ethan—about the mark, and the last thing I wanted was for Kimber to see the mark while I was trying on clothes. I gnawed my lip with worry as Kimber and I stepped into the shop together with Finn bringing up the rear. There were a lot of things about my encounters with the Erlking that I’d failed to tell Kimber. In fact, I’d out-and-out lied about some of them. I was the worst best friend ever. But guilty as I felt about the deception, I just wasn’t ready to tell her the truth yet.
The dressmaker’s shop was unlike anything I’d ever seen. The front of the shop was a cozy-looking sitting room with overstuffed blue velvet chairs and a side table with cups, an electric kettle, and about twelve million different varieties of tea. There were a handful of magazines on another side table, but otherwise the room was empty and not like a shop at all.
“In the old days,” Kimber told me, “this is where the gentlemen would sit while waiting for their ladies.” She gave Finn a saucy look. “Are
you
a gentleman?”
Finn is actually a really nice guy, even if he isn’t a big talker. But he’s a completely different person when he’s in bodyguard mode. He wears suits that would look just right on James Bond and wears
Men in Black
sunglasses even when it’s raining. And he rarely, if ever, cracks a smile.
“I’ll wait here while you girls meet with the dressmaker,” he said, dead serious though he had to know Kimber was teasing him, “but I’m going to check out the back before I let you out of my sight.”
Just then, the dressmaker herself emerged from the curtained doorway at the back of the shop. She was a drop-dead gorgeous Fae woman wearing a powder blue silk suit and killer heels. Both the suit and the shoes screamed haute couture, even to someone like me who generally wouldn’t know haute couture if it bit me on the nose.
“Good afternoon,” she said, in what sounded suspiciously like a fake French accent. “I am Madame Françoise.”
I blinked at her stupidly for a moment. There was no such thing as a French Fae. Not to mention that
I
could probably do a better fake French accent than “Madame Françoise” was doing.
“Bonjour, Madame,” Kimber answered for me, then rattled off something quick and much more genuinely French-sounding. My foreign language was Spanish, so I had no idea what she was saying.
Madame Françoise laughed lightly and said something in response, her accent still sounding phony as hell.
“Show off,” I muttered to Kimber, who winked at me.
“If you don’t mind,” Finn broke in before we were subjected to any more French, “I need to take a look around back before I allow the young ladies to proceed.”
“Why, of course,” Madame Françoise said cheerfully, holding the curtain open and inviting him back with a sweep of her arm. “I will show you.”
As soon as the curtain closed behind them, I turned to Kimber. “If her name is really Madame Françoise, then my name is Jack the Ripper. What gives?”
“This shop has been here for at least three hundred years. There was a time when high society thought having a French dressmaker was a status symbol. Madame Françoise is hardly the only person to have faked being French to lure in clientele.”
Sometimes, the Fae are just freaking weird. “Yeah, but no one would actually believe she’s French. And hello, it’s the twenty-first century. Who even
goes
to dressmakers anymore, much less cares if the dressmaker is French?”
Kimber shrugged. “From what I’ve heard, some of the English women who took on French names were just as blatantly fake. And I suppose once she’d been talking like that for a century or so, it became habit.”
Finn and Madame Françoise emerged from the back before I could come up with a witty response. Finn declared the shop safe, and then I was swept into the back with Kimber and Madame, and if it weren’t for Madame’s modern outfit and the electric lights, I might have thought I’d been swept back in time.