“Yeah. Probably. I’d forgotten how much it hurt—that’s all,” I said quietly. “I’d forgotten how much I loved him. How much I wanted him to be proud of me.”

“Children are vulnerable,” Lea said. “They are easily deceived and notoriously subject to such delusions. You are no longer a child.” She leaned forward slightly and said, with slight emphasis, “I am bound to answer two more questions. Will you ask them now?”

“Yes,” I said. “Give me a moment to consider them.”

“As you wish,” Lea said.

I closed my eyes for a moment and tried to clear my thoughts. Asking questions of inhuman entities can be a tricky and dangerous business—with the fae more than most. You almost never got direct answers from one of the lords of Faerie, the Sidhe. Asking them direct questions, especially questions touching on information relevant to a conflict of some sort, was likely to elicit obscure and maliciously misleading answers. I was on good terms with my godmother, as human-Sidhe relationships went, but that was no reason not to cover my bases.

So I thought over recent events for a while and looked for the blank spots, but I kept getting distracted by the memories of that night in the convenience store. They chewed at me and refused to be pushed aside—especially the conversation with He Who Walks Behind.

“Priorities,” I said out loud. “This is about priorities.”

“Oh?” Lea asked.

I nodded. “I could ask you a lot of questions about my past—and you’d answer them.”

“That is true.”

“Or I could ask you about what is happening right now in the city. I could find out how I could best help Murphy.”

Lea nodded.

“But I was sent back here to find my killer,” I said. “I’m supposed to be hunting down whoever killed me, and yet I’ve been doing a whole lot of everything but that.”

“In point of fact,” Lea said, “you’ve been doing little else.”

I blinked.

She gave me an enigmatic, feline smile.

“Oh, you bitch.” I sighed. “You just love doing that to me.”

Lea demurely lowered her gaze. She fluttered her eyelashes twice.

I scowled at her and folded my arms over my chest. Lea had been involved in my life since I was born, and probably before that. She could tell me any number of things I’d been quietly dying to know since I was old enough to ask questions at all. She was up on all the current events, too. All of the high Sidhe are fanatic gatherers of information, and my godmother was no exception. Of course, they tended to guard their knowledge as ferociously as a dragon guards its gold—and they parted with it almost as reluctantly.

The Sidhe aren’t dummies. Information is a great deal more valuable than gold, any day of the week.

So I circled back to my earlier question. Where did my priorities lie? What was more important to me: Digging up secrets from the shadowy bits of my past? Getting the information I needed to move on to my future? Or helping my friends and loved ones right now?