Page 21 of Practical Boots

Another road, honestly. Half-hidden in the greenery, with stone walls on either side of it, and a cast iron gate across its narrow mouth. It led higher into the hills, to a presumably magnificent Topanga Canyon house, but to Cat, the curious part was that the compass had brought her tothisside of the gate. Unless her father was hiding in the shrubbery, she didn't understand why it hadn't led her directly to Grace's home.

A thought struck her and she turned to peer down the side of the canyon, almost hoping she might see her father's body squished on the hairpin road below, or broken across the rocks.

Tragically, it was not to be. Cat waited for traffic to clear, then darted across the street into Grace's secluded driveway, keeping an eye on the bushes to see if her father would pop out of them.

He did not.

A simulacrum, however, did.

It was good. It wasawfullyfucking good, if her compass led her to it instead of him. It had her father's height and elegance, and a few-strands-wide braid of his deep copper hair wound around its earth-colored head. A hand print, stained reddish-brown with blood, spread where its face should be. It wore clothes of her father's cut, with new embroidery added by his own hand; nothing less than his own labor could make clothes cling to the thing. It carried a blade at its side, silver and marked with jewels. It heaved, as if for air, and its chest moved: he had imbued it with his own breath, and if he had not wept tears over its making, she had no doubt he had spat on it, imbuing it with more of his essence.

If he had shed bone as well as breath and blood in the making of the thing, not even Cat would have known the difference between the simulacrum and her real father until it was too late. But he was too vain, too hurried, or too delicate to have made that decision; the shaving of bone hurt like a motherfucker, and the healing from it was not quick, even for an aelf lord.

The fact that he'd gone even this far told Cat two things, one of which surprised her. He had expected her to track him using a physical link, such as his hair. He would have been stupid not to, and her father was a variety of things, but stupid wasn't one of them.

But that he'd gone to this much trouble, created a simulacrum so good she would be led to it instead of him…that much effort implied that herespectedher. Respected her talent, at least. Respected her ability to find him, even when he didn't want to be found. Respected the possibility that if she caught up to him, she could thwart his plans.

For something less than a heartbeat, she took all of that in—the simulacrum, its makeup, the implications of its existence, reveling in the pleasure of knowing that her father fundamentally grasped that if she caught him she was not only planning to, butableto fuck. him. up—and then the simulacrum did what it was made to do, which was try very hard to kill her.

Its blade leapt from the sheath like a living thing, glittering bright and dangerous in the late afternoon sun. Greenery fell before its deadly edge, but Catsteppedout of its way, coming back to the World again with her cold iron knives in both hands. It ducked as one left her hand; the blade stuck in a tree, and Cat swore. The simulacrum came at her again, snicker-snack. This time she simply ducked and rolled, swearing again as prickly underbrush found the small of her unprotected spine when her jacket shifted. She came to her feet beside her knife, wrenched it from the tree, and flinched aside as the simulacrum thrust its sword toward her. She lunged inside its reach and shoved a knife into what would be its lungs, if it had any.

It lacked the ability to exhale, which was almost worse than a sound. It couldn't stare, and neither could it stop, even as the cold iron began to unravel the magic that held it together. It slashed again, more wildly this time, now lacking all of her father's elegance. Cat rolled again and it spun a wobbling circle after her, each stab growing more frantic as, from the chest outward, it began to crumble into the earth it had been shaped from. Within seconds it dropped the sword, its falling-apart body no longer able to support the weapon's weight; a moment later, it was a pile of dirt wrapped in an aelf lord's clothes.

Cat, beneath her breath, said, "Should've added the bone, Dad," and because she was half of the World and could, placed one hand on the cast iron gate and vaulted it.

* * *

Grace's goddamn driveway was two and a half miles long. Two and a half miles in the blazing sunshine while wearing leather and carrying no water. If Cat had known how damn long it was to begin with, she would have used the compass andsteppedright away, but some vague movie-born sense of dramatic approach didn't even let her think of it until she'd sweated her way through most of a mile. Then she realized what she was doing, said, "Fuck," aloud, andstepped.

She bounced back out of the Waste ten feet behind where she'd started, her head ringing and her vision blurry. It took a second try before she realized her father had donesomething—put up a shield, surrounded himself with a mirror-spell,something—that wouldn't allow her to magic her way any closer than the now-dead simulacrum. She yelled, "He's not supposed to be able to do that!" into the oppressively hot afternoon air, and felt how her words were muffled in it. Swearing, sweating, sunburning, she stomped along the driveway until she finally rounded a corner and let out a laugh like Elizabeth Bennet seeing Pemberly for the first time.

Grace's home was an architectural dream, even by the standards of someone who'd grown up in a living manor of the Torn. All windows and soft edges that belied the 1960s concrete building material, it nestled down between fruit trees and local greenery. Bees buzzed audibly. Birds rendered their opinions on everything. A brook that Cat thought couldn't be natural babbled near a covered hot tub. The view, gazing out toward distant mountains, was to die for.

Maybe being an involved big sister would be a good idea after all.

Assuming Cat survived dealing with her damn father, anyway. Still sweating but now faintly awe-stricken, she walked the rest of the way up to the house, calling, "Grace? Ms. Law?"

"I'm sorry," her father's voice drawled. "Grace Law can't come to the door right now." He stepped out from one of those floor-to-ceiling windows. Or doors, as they all proved to be: it looked like every single one of them rotated so the whole front of the house could be opened to the air. Cat felt another stab of envious desire. She didn't even like Los Angeles, but man, if she could live here….

"What have you done with her?"

"Nothing permanent," her father promised. He wore a glamour, one that softened his least-human features into something less alien. His hair remained the same glorious deep shade of red, but his ears were no longer pointed, and his eyes were a more earthly green. His features were less fine, more masculine by Western human standards, and his overall build, a little broader.

He was, Cat realized with dismay,smokinghot. She’d never seen him as a human before, and she couldn’t lie, it messed with her a little. No wonder her mother had thrown everything away to join him in the Torn.

"You should not have betrayed me," he went on in the exact same cool, arrogant tone she'd heard all her life.

Six words, Cat thought. It took six words to scale him down from a ten to something like a three. He was still hot, but if he'd spoken to her mother that way, never mind, it made no sense for Lilibeth to have goneanywherewith him. "I didn't freaking betray you. Somebody used one of my Artifacts to call me, which, honestly, I think you know perfectly well."

Irritation sluiced through his eyes. "You swore me an oath."

"I didn't swear you a goddamn timeline on delivery. You're looking for the slightest chance to have your cake and eat it too, but the oath goes both ways, Dad. Honestly, you've broken it just by being here. Which wasstupid, because while I was in the World I got the materials I need for your damn lie projector."

A flare of greedy anger shone in her father's face. "I've done nothing to the human woman."

"Where is she?"

He stepped aside, leaving the door open for Cat's entrance. She pushed through to find a big, cozy room done up in wood with round corners, thick rugs, and durable, textured cloth in comforting colors. It wasn't at all what she thought of as Hollywood fashionable, but it looked as though it had been decorated in mind of keeping a kid from bashing its head on hard corners or puking on the expensive leather couches. Cat, thinking of her own childhood, would possibly have also put baby gates or maybe just plywood in front of several built-in, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, but given that the child in question was still a solid nine months from even being born, she guessed Grace had time to deal with that kind of thing.

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