“Just what are you trying to pull, lady?”

It was my name that did it. He knew it because he’d been assigned to the case when I disappeared; he spent a year turning over rocks, questioning witnesses, even dredging the big lake in Golden Gate Park looking for my body and finding nothing, and he didn’t think it was very clever, or very funny, for me to be posing as a dead woman. He handed me a clean set of papers, ordering me to fill them out correctly, without any stupid jokes. I think that’s when I started understanding just how much trouble I was in. Numbly, I turned the papers over, starting to fill them out, and the first correction came before I even got to my name.

“You’ve got the date wrong. It’s June eleventh, two thousand and nine, not nineteen ninety-five. Christ, lady, pay attention.”

My fingers tightened, snapping the pencil in half as I stared at the attending officer, eyes wide and uncomprehending. “How long?” I whispered.

“What?”

“How long did he leave me . . . oh, no. Oh, oak and ash, no.” I closed my eyes, letting myself go limp as the enormity of it all struggled to sink in. Fourteen years. I’d been afraid the spell might have lasted weeks, maybe even months, but fourteen years? It was too much to wrap my mind around. But I didn’t have a choice, and it just got worse from there.

Everything was gone. Every single thing I’d built or worked for in the mortal world . . . all gone. Cliff sold my business to cover my debts after my investigator’s license expired; after I expired, since seven years on the missing list is the limit of a human existence. I’ve always found that slightly ironic—after all, seven years is also the traditional period of confinement for those humans who manage to find their way into the hollow hills. October Daye, rest in peace.

Thank Oberon for Evening Winterrose, known as Evelyn Winters in the mortal world. She was the only person I knew whose telephone number wouldn’t have changed in the intervening years. I used my one phone call to beg her to come and get me. I expected her to yell, but she didn’t. She just came to the station, confirmed that I was who I was claiming to be, and somehow convinced them to release me into her custody. Then she took me to a motel where I could get my head on straight. We both knew that taking me to her place wouldn’t have helped, and so neither of us suggested it; I wasn’t up for entering someone else’s domain.