I choked on my beer.
“No,” I said, refusing the evidence of my own eyes as Dianda Lorden got up and took the microphone, to general cheers from the people at her table. She was wearing a short blue-and-green–sequined dress that showed off the legs she normally doesn’t have. It was weird. I didn’t like it. “How does she even know what karaoke is? I call shenanigans.”
Danny smirked.
Dianda is several things. Cheerfully violent. The Duchess of Saltmist. A frequent ally of mine. And, oh right, a mermaid—specifically, a Merrow—which means she lives under the Pacific Ocean and doesn’t have that many opportunities for exposure to human culture. I’d been surprised when she’d shown up at all. I certainly hadn’t been expecting her to sing.
I definitely hadn’t been expecting her to sing Phil Collins.
“I really don’t know how to deal with this,” I said, staring at the stage.
Danny plucked the empty beer bottle from my hand and replaced it with a fresh one. One nice thing about being the bachelorette: even if I was being forced to watch essentially everyone I knew play pop star while wearing illusions designed to make them look human, at least someone else was picking up my tab. I could drink until I forgot why I needed to keep drinking, let myself sober up, then do it all over again.
“So don’t deal with it,” he said. “She’s pretty good. Have another beer.”
“All my friends are awful and I hate you,” I said, handing the beer back to him as I slid off my stool. “Save my place. I need to pee before I do any more drinking.”
“You got it,” he said, and settled in to loom menacingly over my stool. The few people who’d been looking at it thoughtfully backed off, recognizing a lost cause when they saw one.
The Mint is designed to prioritize karaoke over alcohol, with the bar dividing the entryway—which served as a space for the serious drinkers to do their serious drinking—from the stage and performance space. The entryway side is narrow to the point of being a claustrophobic panic waiting to happen, and naturally, that’s where the bathrooms are, since that makes a poorly-timed flush less likely to disrupt someone’s Sondheim medley. I pushed through the crowd toward the back of the bar, feeling my buzz dwindle with every step I took.
Sometimes it’s nice to have a Timex watch for a body—I can take a licking and keep on ticking. But when I can’t stay drunk for more than ten minutes, or get enough of a jolt from a cup of coffee to actually wake myself up, it sort of sucks. It would be nice to be impossible to kill and capable of reaping the benefits of caffeine, but alas, we can’t have everything in this world.
There was a short line for the two unisex bathrooms. I took advantage of the opportunity to check my phone. It was barely past midnight. We’d been here for three hours, and May had stated, several times, that she intended to close the place out.
Swell.
Dianda hit a high note; someone whooped. It was probably her son, Dean, who was refreshingly not embarrassed by everything his mother did. They have a remarkably solid relationship, one that has only been strengthened by him moving out to take over the County of Goldengreen. His father, Patrick, is Daoine Sidhe, and Dean takes after his father’s side of the family, which means he can’t breathe water. Dianda clearly misses him, and every time I see her, she’s just as clearly relieved not to have to spend her time worrying about whether he’s going to drown.
Faerie makes families complicated. Mermaids have sons who can’t breathe water. High Kings and Queens send their children into hiding to keep them from being assassinated before they reach their majority. Fetches become sisters.
People like me, who mix their fae blood with human ancestry, wind up standing on the outside looking in, wondering what it’s like to have two parents who know and accept them for who—and what—they are. My father died a long time ago, and he died believing that my mother and I had been killed in a house fire. My mother . . .
Well, it’s complicated.
The bathroom door opened, and Kerry came wobbling out, a broad grin on her face. “Bachelorette party, woo!” she cheered, before pressing a wet kiss to my cheek and weaving away into the crowd. I smiled after her and slipped inside.
When I emerged from the bathroom several minutes later, Dianda had finished her song, and Quentin and Dean were on stage, gamely making their way through “One Week” by the Barenaked Ladies. I stopped to stare for a moment. Then I pushed my way back through the crowd to my stool, which Danny had managed to hold open during my absence.
I sat. He handed back my beer.
“This is a good time,” he said. “Stop looking like you expect to be ambushed.”
“Have you met me?” I asked. “I’m always expecting to be ambushed, and I’m rarely wrong.” I looked around the crowd. So many of the faces were familiar, even under the veils of their human disguises. “But we’ll probably have them outnumbered.”
Danny smirked.
Four years ago, after I woke up naked, confused, and freezing in the Japanese Tea Gardens, I would have sworn I didn’t have a friend left in the world. My human fiancé had moved on with his life after my unexpected, unexplainable disappearance had stretched into fourteen years; my two-year-old daughter had grown up calling another woman “Mommy.” I’d tried to go home to them. Neither of them had wanted me there. They had moved on, and I still couldn’t give them any answers about where I’d been. When the fae and mortal worlds collide, someone always suffers.
The changelings I’d known on the streets of San Francisco had viewed me as a lapdog of the nobility, thanks to my service to Duke Torquill of Shadowed Hills, while the nobility had viewed me as a failure, thanks to the circumstances of my disappearance. Everyone had gotten on with their lives while mine had been on hold . . . or at least that was how it had seemed at the time.
I was never as alone as I’d believed myself to be. If I had been, I wouldn’t have needed to work so hard to isolate myself from the people who still cared about me. But that didn’t change how I’d felt at the time. I’d thought my life was over. I’d thought I would die alone.
Instead, I was in a jam-packed karaoke bar, listening to my friends whoop and laugh while my squire and his boyfriend belted out a late-90s pop hit. Most of the people here were here for me. To celebrate the fact that I was getting married—finally—to the man who’d taught me that moving on was possible, no matter how improbable it had seemed, once upon a time. They were here because my life was moving on, and I was moving with it.
“I’m still not going to sing,” I said, and took a swig of my beer.