Tybalt nodded before leaning over to put an arm around me and kiss me theatrically on the cheek. Then he settled back on the bench, an expression of pure smugness spreading across his face. If I hadn’t been close enough to see the worry in his eyes, I would have believed that he was the happiest man alive.
After a moment, he murmured, “By the door. There is a man, blue shirt, brown hair. He has walked past three times. Each time he pauses just long enough to see that we remain, and then moves on again. If he’s not watching us, he’s planning to mug us later.”
“Let’s hope for a mugging,” I said, and shifted to rest my head against Tybalt’s shoulder, pretending to take a bite from my maple bar as I watched the spot he’d indicated. People wandered past, some going inside, others escaping the lure of fried dough and sticky frosting. Almost a minute ticked by, long enough for me to start considering an actual bite of my donut, before the man Tybalt had described appeared.
He was average-looking, almost to the point of becoming unrealistic. Brown hair, brown eyes, tan skin, and clothes straight out of a Macy’s ad—jeans, a polo shirt, and plain white tennis shoes. The smell of sugar was too strong to let me pick up any hints about his heritage, but now that I was looking, the faint glitter of his human disguise was impossible to ignore. He glanced our way, confirmed that we were still sitting there, and walked on.
“He’s not of my kind,” murmured Tybalt, voice close to my ear. “If he were, he would have come to announce himself to me. I have no authority here, but I am still a danger to those who would surprise me.”
“Right,” I replied, equally quietly. The man was continuing onward, apparently following a preset loop. “As soon as he turns that corner, we move. Got it?”
“Yes.”
The man turned the corner. We moved.
Dropping the maple bar back into the pink box—which I regretted leaving, I really did, but we couldn’t slow ourselves down with almost a dozen donuts, no matter how weird they were—I pushed myself off the bench. Tybalt rose at the same time, grabbing my hand, and together we took off across the little plaza and down the street, nearly knocking several bystanders over in our rush to get away. We weren’t being subtle; if our observer wanted to ask where we’d gone, plenty of hands would be pointed in our direction.
That wasn’t going to be a problem. We turned a corner, running onto an empty stretch of street, and Tybalt grabbed my hand. He didn’t bother telling me what was going to happen next: I already knew, and had time to take a deep breath before the world dropped away and we were running through the dark. It only lasted for a few seconds. Then we were back in the mortal world, in a parking lot behind what looked like a large grocery store. Tybalt stopped, his heels skidding in the gravel. I ran on for another few feet, using my momentum to turn myself around and start scanning for signs that we had been followed.
The only signs of motion came from the crows picking at the grass on the edge of the pavement. There was no guarantee that they weren’t working for King Rhys—living in Faerie means never knowing what is or is not spying on you—but they were far enough away that I was pretty sure they couldn’t hear us.
“Don’t-look-here, Tybalt, now,” I said, voice tight. My fingers were itching to go for my knife. I didn’t mind being watched while we were in the Court of Silences. I had expected that; it was part and parcel of being a diplomatic attaché to a Kingdom that didn’t want me. But the fact that we were being followed out into Portland itself, and followed by people who could track us even after we had passed through the Court of Cats? That wasn’t good. That showed a level of dedication to keeping me under surveillance that made me uncomfortable in ways I couldn’t even put into words.
Tybalt nodded. He pressed his hands together, rattling off a quick line of what sounded like Middle English. The smell of pennyroyal and musk rose and burst around us as he separated his hands, reached over, and grabbed my wrist. “Keep hold of me,” he said. “It works better when the spell doesn’t need to labor across open ground.”
I raised an eyebrow. “And there’s nothing in that casting about wanting to minimize my chances to go off and get myself hurt?”
He rolled his shoulders in a shrug. “I admit your nearness is a convenient side benefit, but no. I wanted to make the spell as strong as possible. That meant accepting certain limitations.”
“Okay.” I stepped closer. He switched his grip on my wrist to something a little less awkward. “Where are we?”
“Half a mile from our last known location, give or take a bit. We’re too far from the alley where we are meant to meet with the others, if that’s the true core of your question. We’ll need to take the Shadow Roads again.” He frowned a bit as he spoke.
I gave him a sidelong look. “How much are you wearing yourself out? You’re not a taxi service, Tybalt, and I don’t want you hurting yourself just because you’re trying to keep me safe. I’m harder to kill than you think I am.”
“Having been at your deathbed twice, I tend to disagree.”
“Having seen you dead, I don’t think you get to claim the moral high ground here.” I looked around again, and sighed. “All right. I have a solution. I don’t think you’re going to like it very much, and I don’t much care.”
Tybalt gave me a sidelong look. “What is this solution?”
“We’re going to walk until we find a bus stop with a bus that’s going in the right direction. Then, when the bus comes, we’re going to get on behind whatever passengers are coming on or off, and we’re going to make our way across Portland like ordinary people.”
Tybalt blinked slowly, looking like he couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing. “You want to take the bus,” he said.
“Yup,” I said. “I know, it’s pedestrian and plebeian and lots of other things that start with the letter ‘p,’ but it also works. Buses are designed to get people from one place to another. And more, if Rhys sent whoever it is that’s following us—and I think we can both agree that’s what’s going on here—then he’s never going to dream we would take the bus.”
Tybalt blinked at me again, even more slowly than before. Then, almost against his will, he began to smile.
“Very well,” he said. “Take me to your bus.”
The nearest bus stop was about a block away, on a corner where the pavement was cracked and the trees were less well-tended than the ones near the donut shop. I guessed that meant we’d been downtown before, and were now somewhere out near the fringes of the city. There was a map of the bus routes served by this stop, and one of them was definitely the one we wanted. That was good. There was no one at the bus stop. That was bad. I sighed, checked the direction of the bus we needed to take, and started walking again.
“Far be it from me to sound as if I am eager to ‘catch the bus,’ but where are we going?” asked Tybalt. “That was a bus stop. I saw it with my own two eyes.”
“Then you also saw that we were the only people there,” I said. “Buses don’t stop everywhere along their route. They stop to pick people up, and they stop to let people off. Bus driver isn’t going to be able to see us, remember? There’s no guarantee anyone would want to get off at that stop, so we need to find a place where there’s someone waiting. Hence the walking. We’ll come to the next bus stop on the route within a few blocks.”
Tybalt threw his free hand into the air, shooting a beseeching glance upward to the sky. I managed not to laugh, but it was a near thing, and I only made the effort because I knew he wasn’t trying to be funny. “How do mortals function in a world grown so complex?” he demanded.
“One day at a time,” I said. “Now come on.”
The next bus stop was on a slightly nicer stretch of road, reinforcing my belief that we had wound up in a part of town that was, if not bad, at least a little bit neglected. There were people at this one, three of them, standing in the weary, not too close clump known to bus riders everywhere. Tybalt and I slipped into position behind them, careful to stay just far away enough that we didn’t upset the delicate balance of the bus stop. The don’t-look-here Tybalt had cast would keep people from noticing us, but it didn’t render us invisible. Blending in mattered, and would make the burden on the spell lighter, which would help it to last longer.