Free Pomegranates full and fine by Unknown Author

influence. Now it was one of the trendiest parts of Toronto. The once-filthy flophouses had been restored, if not to their original elegance, then at least to a kind of acceptable modishness. No one lived there, of course. Instead, the buildings housed fashionable restaurants, stylish clubs and expensive shops. The only signs of protest were the second- and third-floor offices of special interest lobby groups, their names posted on engraved brass plaques. Where hippies had hung out, there were sidewalk patios. More patios clustered on rooftops and balconies. Alleys between the buildings had been renamed “lanes” and “mews” and boasted tasteful street signs. In their shadowed depths lurked more shops. Everyone wanted a place in Yorkville.
    Tango turned down one of the mews and crossed over to another street, letting her instincts guide her toward the other Kithain. Kennings, like so much other magic, didn’t come easily to her. In her youth, she had known Kithain whose talents in kenning were so strong that they could sense the tiniest drop of old faerie blood in humans, or feel the lost remnants of dancing circles buried under the asphalt of parking lots. Of course, those had also been the first Kithain to sink into depression, sick and dying, poisoned by the mundane Banality that sought to erase the last remnants of enchantment from the world.
    Sometimes it was good not to be too sensitive.
    She turned again, walked another half-block, and stopped. She cursed. The other Kithain felt farther away now than they had before. Tango resisted the urge to think that such a thing was impossible. Nothing, or almost nothing, was impossible around Kithain, and especially around the concentrated Glamour of a Kithain freehold. It was entirely possible that the feelings she had been chasing were like echoes, ricocheting around Yorkville before fading away.
    She sat down on a bench, letting the flood of humans that crowded Yorkville wash past her. Teenagers in fashionable clothes bought with their parents’ money. Students from the university a few blocks away. Thirty- and forty-somethings in business suits and dresses, in spite of the heat. Hip tourists in summer clothes, laughing and chatting brightly, bumping into people. Locals walking in little pockets of polite isolation, never touching anybody, apologizing to the tourists who bumped into them. Tango watched them as the tingling feelings of Kithain presence waxed and waned. She took a deep breath. She was thinking like a human... or an old grump. The court was hidden with Kithain magic. She wasn’t going to be able to find it or even another Kithain simply by looking.
    Tango stood up, closed her eyes, and spun around three times. Then, trying to ignore the stares of the tourists, she apologized to the businessman she’d bumped, and went into a gourmet ice-cream store. When she came out again, a cup of ginger ice cream in hand, a Kithain was parking his car outside the store. Tango stared, then closed her eyes with a quiet groan.
    The Kithain was tall, lean and young —- maybe twenty-one or twenty-two. He wore a white T-shirt that set off his deep tan to perfection and clung to the flat muscles of his torso as his sun-faded jeans clung to his legs. His face, sharp and sculpted, was without flaw. A diamond stud flashed in his ear. His hair was like Rumplestiltskin’s straw under the sun. He was driving a vintage white Mustang convertible. Even without kenning him, Tango knew that his fae seeming would be as handsome and perfect as his human seeming. He was a sidhe, one of the aristocracy of the Kithain, very likely one of the nobles of Duke Michael’s court. As arrogant as a unicorn with a poker up its butt, and twice as proud.
    A sidhe was the last kind of Kithain Tango would have wanted to meet. It had been inevitable that she would encounter one at court — Duke Michael was a sidhe himself — but she had been hoping to meet some other lowborn Kithain first. A gossipy