Whether this was Tír na nÓg, Elphame, or whatever other type of Otherworld, or if it was a weird magic bubble smack dab in the middle of a city, there was a way out. My life had been saved, that was lovely, and now I needed to get back to good old Silver Spring, Maryland, and back to the rest of my life.

The sound of a knob turning and the movement of a door made me jerk my head to the doorway, staring at the person coming into the room. She looked human, but so had the three who'd found me. Unlike the men in the woods, though, she wasn't beautiful. She had a horsey, plain face, with thin brown hair in a ponytail, ears like a jug, and watery blue eyes. Even her clothing looked drab, all browns and grays.

Her eyes landed on the empty bed with a look of surprise, and she scanned the room until she saw me, jumping from the surprise of finding me under a side table. "Oh!" she exclaimed. "Your highness! Are you alright?"

Nope. That was not okay. Strike two against Fairyland: being accorded status as royalty—strike one obviously being the mystical eye thing.

"I'm not a highness," I informed her, not moving out from under the table. "I am a regular person, who does ordinary things like loading the dishes and commuting to work in godawful traffic."

She smiled and started walking towards me, stopping only when I started scooting myself even further back. The woman held up her hands. "I know it's weird at first," she said, with a sympathetic tone. "Finding out magic is real sets everything on its head. I'm here to help. Really," she added. I must not have looked convinced.

"So you're human," I said, eyeing her.

She nodded. "I'm human, my name's Susan Carter, and I was born in Düsseldorf, in Germany. I was in a bad car accident, and I was going to die. When the fae need servants or soldiers, they sometimes give the dying a second chance."

"You don't sound German." I wasn't the sort of rube that believed NPCs were always trustworthy, and while Susan wasn't a video game character, I still didn't trust her to tell me the truth. Lots of people have ulterior motives, and Susan didn't speak with an accent at all, using what my mom always called TV English.

"I'm speaking Faery, the same as you," she said carefully, as if she expected me to lose it at that piece of information. "Magical knowledge of languages doesn't come with accents installed."

If I hadn't already lost it several times, I indeed would have lost it at that fun fact.