Rosemary and Rue: An October Daye Novel - Softcover

Buch 1 von 20: October Daye

McGuire, Seanan

 
9780756405717: Rosemary and Rue: An October Daye Novel
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0756405718 ISBN 13: 9780756405717
Verlag: DAW, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

New York Times-bestselling October Daye faerie series • Hugo Award-winning author Seanan McGuire • "Top of my urban-paranormal series list!" —Felicia Day

The world of Faerie never disappeared; it merely went into hiding, continuing to exist parallel to our own. Secrecy is the key to Faerie's survival—but no secret can be kept forever, and when the fae and mortal worlds collide, changelings are born.

Outsiders from birth, these half-human, half-fae children spend their lives fighting for the respect of their immortal relations. Or, in the case of October "Toby" Daye, rejecting it completely. After getting burned by both sides of her heritage, Toby has denied the fae world, retreating into a “normal” life. Unfortunately for her, Faerie has other ideas...

The murder of Countess Evening Winterrose, one of the secret regents of the San Francisco Bay Area, pulls Toby back into the fae world. Unable to resist Evening’s dying curse, Toby must resume her former position as knight errant to the Duke of Shadowed Hills and begin renewing old alliances that may prove her only hope of solving the mystery...before the curse catches up with her.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Seanan McGuire lives and works in Washington State, where she shares her somewhat idiosyncratic home with her collection of books, creepy dolls, and enormous blue cats. When not writing—which is fairly rare—she enjoys travel, and can regularly be found any place where there are cornfields, haunted houses, or frogs. A Campbell, Hugo, and Nebula Award-winning author, Seanan's first book (Rosemary and Rue, the beginning of the October Daye series) was released in 2009, with more than twenty books across various series following since. Seanan doesn't sleep much. 

You can visit her at www.seananmcguire.com.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

ONE
 
December 23, 2009: fourteen years, six months later
 
There’s fennel for you, and columbines;
There’s rue for you, and here’s some for me. . . .
You must wear your rue with a difference.
—William Shakespeare, Hamlet
 
 
DECEMBER HAD COME to San Francisco in fits and starts, like a visitor who wasn’t sure he wanted to stay. The skies were blue one minute and overcast the next; tourists overheated or shivered in their prepacked wardrobes, while residents traded sweaters for tank tops and back in a single afternoon. That’s normal around here. The Bay Area exists in a state of nearly constant spring, where the color of the hills—brown with a strong chance of brushfire in the summer, green and suffering from chronic mudslides in winter—is the only real difference between the seasons.
 
It was half past six in the morning, and the Safeway grocery store on Mission Street—never much of a happening nightspot, no matter how you wanted to slice it—was virtually deserted. The usual rush of drunks and club kiddies had passed through several hours before, and now all we had was an assortment of early risers, grave-shift workers, and homeless people looking for a warm place to spend the tail end of the night. By silent, mutual agreement, the homeless and I ignored each other. As long as I didn’t admit I could see them, I wouldn’t need to ask them to leave, and we both got to avoid the hassle.
 
I’m getting good at ignoring things I don’t want to see. Call it an acquired skill. It’s definitely one I’ve been working on.
 
“Paper or plastic, ma’am?” I asked, not bothering to conceal the weariness in my tone. Half an hour and my shift would be over, leaving me with just enough time to get home before the sun came up.
 
“Plastic’s fine, honey,” said the woman occupying my lane. Running a hand through oily black curls, she gestured toward my name tag. “Is that really the name your parents gave you?”
 
Plastering a smile across my face, I began bagging her groceries with the automated ease that comes with long practice. “It is.” She was buying six pints of gourmet ice cream and a twelve-pack of Diet Coke. I’ve seen stranger.
 
“Hippies, huh?”
 
No; a faerie woman and her Irish accountant husband. But that was impossible to explain, and so I simply nodded. “Got it in one. That’ll be eighteen fifty-three.”
 
She swiped her Visa with a grunt, barely waiting for the machine to catch up before she was grabbing her groceries and heading for the door. “You have a good night, honey.”
 
“You, too, ma’am,” I called. Grabbing her receipt off the register, I held it up. “You forgot your—”
 
Too late; she was gone. I crumpled the receipt and dropped it into my trash can, leaning against the divider separating my lane from the next. She could come in later and complain to my manager about not getting a receipt, if she felt like it. With my luck, she’d feel like it, and I’d wind up with another black mark on my record. Exactly what I didn’t need. This was my third job since I won free of the pond; the first two were abject failures, largely thanks to my limited working hours, general lack of cultural awareness, and incomplete understanding of modern technology. Who would’ve believed that it could take so much computer know-how to be the night clerk at a 7-Eleven? Not me, that’s for sure, until my inability to reboot the register got me fired. Checking groceries on the graveyard shift might not have been my last chance, but it sure felt like it. At least at Safeway, there was a manager to fix things when they broke.
 
My fellow employees were nowhere to be seen. Probably hiding in the stockroom again, smoking Juan’s reportedly excellent marijuana and trusting me to hold the front of the store. I didn’t mind. I didn’t take a job as a check-out girl because I wanted to make friends; I did it because I wanted to be left alone.
 
A flock of pixies was circling the display produce near the side door, flitting in wide circles as their sentries watched for signs of danger. Dressed in scraps of cloth and bits of discarded paper and armed with tooth-picks and sandwich-spears, they looked ready to go to war over a few grapes and an overripe pear. I braced my elbows on the conveyor belt and dropped my chin into my hands, watching them. I don’t care much for pixies as a rule. They’re pretty but savage, and they’ll attack if you provoke them. Maybe that doesn’t sound like much of a threat, considering that the average pixie is about four inches tall and weighs three ounces soaking wet. They’re like mice with wings and thumbs, except for the part where mice don’t usually come armed with knives carved from broken beer bottles and homemade spears that may have been dipped in equally homemade poisons. At the same time, I had to admire the way they’d adapted. They had an entire community thriving inside this downtown grocery store, and nobody knew about it but me.
 
Me, and the members of San Francisco’s fae community who chose to shop here. I’d chosen this store specifically because it was so far away from the likely haunts of the people I’d known in my other life. I hadn’t considered the fact that some of them might come looking for me.
 
“Is this lane open?”
 
The voice was gruff, familiar, and more than enough to shake me out of my reverie. I jerked back, one arm going out to the side abruptly enough to knock my chin against the conveyor. Vainly trying to recover a shred of my dignity, I forbade myself to rub it as I straightened up, pasted on a smile, and turned toward the source of the voice, replying, “Yes, sir. Just put your groceries on the belt.”
 
The man at the end of my lane stared at me, concern evident in his expression. “Root and branch, Toby, didn’t that hurt?”
 
I forced my smile to stay in place. It wasn’t easy. Through my teeth, I said, “I’ll put some ice on it later. Can I have your groceries, sir?”
 
The man sighed, beginning to unload his cart. “Are we still doing this? I really hoped we’d be done by now. You sure you don’t want to be done? I can wait around. You can come home with me after your shift. I’m off for the night, and Stacy would love to see you. She’d even make pancakes if I called and told her you were coming...”
 
I didn’t answer him, busying myself instead with running his groceries across the scanner. I’d been doing the job long enough that it didn’t require any concentration to take care of such a simple task. That was a good thing, because he didn’t take my lack of answer as a reason to shut up; he kept rambling, trying to catch my interest as I focused on ringing and bagging his groceries.
 
Once upon a time—not my favorite phrase by a long shot—I let myself admit that the man now standing in front of my register had a name. Mitch Brown. We were kids together in the Summerlands, the last of the fae countries, the place that exists on the other side of every mirror and beyond every unpierced veil of mist. We were both changelings, mixing human blood with stranger things; Nixie and Hob in his case, Daoine Sidhe in mine. We were about the same age, and both of us were struggling to figure out who we could be, living in a...

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Verlag
DAW
Erscheinungsdatum
2009
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0756405718
ISBN 13 
9780756405717
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
368
Kontakt zum Hersteller
DAW
https://www.aeuln.top/

Kl?nenfeldstr. 22
Muttenz
4132
Schweiz
Verantwortliche Person
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