“And I get that. Look, do me one favor and I’ll drop it, okay?”
“What do you want me to do?”
“You said you had to bleed to get wherever you are right now. That’s all I want you to do. Bleed for me again. Bleed one time, enough to let you see any illusions that might be screwing with your perception. If I’m wrong, if nothing changes, you can wake her up. Okay?”
It was a reasonable request. The fact that it irritated me as much as it did was a sign that he wasn’t wrong to make it. I swallowed my anger, trying to focus on the reason I didn’t want to bleed. There didn’t seem to be one. Walther was asking me to be careful, that was all. I’d promised Quentin I would do exactly that. So why was the idea infuriating me?
I drew my knife with my free hand. Keeping the phone pressed to my ear, I drew the blade across my lower lip, wincing as it parted delicate skin and brought blood bubbling to the surface. Quickly, I sucked at the wound, filling my mouth with the coppery new-penny taste of my own pain.
The room changed. I had time to register the shift—how much darker it seemed, how much more advanced the rot on the walls was—before the creature on the bed was howling her displeasure and lunging for me.
This wasn’t the first time some terrible thing had pretended to be my little girl in order to get to me. I didn’t know why it was such a surprise. But it was, and I was dimly afraid that it would continue to be, every time it happened. In the moment, my greater focus was on keeping myself alive. If there was any mercy to the situation, it was that she no longer looked like Gillian. I wasn’t fighting my own little girl.
I brought my knife up, dropping the phone in my haste to block the attack. The creature howled again, dancing back from the touch of silver. She was emaciated, a husk of a woman, with skin the color of spoiled cream and hair like rotting gorse, a tangle of brown and gold and slimy, filthy green. Her eyes were holes leading into an abyss, and her mouth was a horror of teeth and hunger.
“Toby?” Walther was shouting now. “Toby, what’s going on?”
“Little busy here!” I yelled, as the creature—the Baobhan Sith, sweet Oberon, this was a Baobhan Sith—lunged again, her howl like the rush of wind around the walls of a crumbling keep. Her outline flickered even as she was attacking, and I knew if I let it, the illusion that had made her appear to be my child would reassert itself. I wouldn’t be able to fight back. I’d just stand there and let her rip my throat out.
I shoved the sleeve of my leather jacket up to my elbow and slashed my own arm, not taking any care to avoid the major arteries. Blood sprayed the room in a hot gush before the skin scabbed over, healing faster than I could cut. The Baobhan Sith paused, sniffing the air with a speculative look on her face. She was hovering easily three feet off the floor, because what I like in an opponent is the ability to fly.
“Hi,” I said. “I am Sir October Daye, Knight of Lost Words, and I command you to stand down, in the name of Duke Sylvester Torquill of Shadowed Hills and Queen Arden Windermere in the Mists.”
That got her attention. The Baobhan Sith shrieked and dove for me, mouth open and aimed at the thick smear of blood coating my arm. I danced backward, bringing my knife up to block her. It wasn’t as good as a sword, or a shield, or running the hell away, but the door was somewhere behind me, and I didn’t want to turn my back on her. In my experience, letting something with that many teeth get the jump on me was a good way to lose more skin than I liked.
She slapped my knife to the side, hard and fast enough that I barely had time to parry, and then her mouth was clamping down on my arm, her sharp, serrated teeth reopening the closed wound and making dozens of new wounds at the same time. I shrieked in surprise and pain, slashing at her shoulder in an effort to make her let go.
The blow landed, my knife slicing into her arm and embedding itself against the bone. She didn’t let go. If anything, she bit down harder, suckling at my arm like an infant. I struggled to pull my knife free as a wave of dizziness washed over me, nearly dropping me to my knees.
The smell of blood permeated the room, somehow enhancing the faded magical scents that were already there rather than overwhelming them. The cold and rowan remained: I wasn’t wrong. No matter what Walther said, I wasn’t wrong. The smell of mold and char also remained, and I realized through the growing dizziness that it was the scent of the Baobhan Sith’s magic. She was an ambush predator, and this trap had been set specifically for me, putting her in a place where her magic would blend into the environment, making her impossible to detect unless I was actively looking.
My arm was going numb. I twisted and slammed my head into hers as hard as I could, hearing the distinctive sound of bone cracking. She howled as she ripped herself away, leaving blood to cascade freely across my skin. My knife was still embedded in her shoulder. I grabbed for it, and she jerked away, taking the knife with her.
The skin was already beginning to knit itself closed at the edges of the ragged, terrible wound she had made in my arm. That was good. It was happening more slowly than I expected, and I was losing a lot of blood in the meantime. That . . . wasn’t good. Something crunched underfoot as I lunged for my knife again, and I knew without looking down that I had just stepped on my phone.
There would be time to worry about that later, when I wasn’t covered in blood and fighting for my life. The Baobhan Sith lunged again, her hands outstretched in front of her like talons. The smell of her magic was getting stronger the more she flew, almost as strong as the smell of my own blood, which seemed to be enraging her.
She was no longer as emaciated as she had been. She was slim, not skeletal, as if something had melted away the worst of her hard edges, smoothing increasingly healthy-looking skin over increasingly well-padded bones. Her hair was growing lusher, less like dead, rotting flowers gone to brown in the winter and more like the first delicate flowers of spring. She was rebuilding herself by devouring me.
I can recover from almost anything, given time. According to some people, I’ve risen from the dead at least once. But magic is in the blood, mine even more so than most. What would happen if, when I collapsed, I had no blood left to raise me?
I wasn’t in the mood to find out. As the Baobhan Sith lunged, I grabbed her by the hair and swung her, hard, for the wall. She shrieked as she slammed into it, and shrieked louder as she ploughed right through it, taking out chunks of waterlogged plaster and fire-damaged beams on her unplanned journey to the hall.
This was it: my one opportunity to run. But run where? There was a window. Getting it open and getting myself out it would take too long, and my throw had put her between me and the front door.
And she still had my knife.
I’m not all that hung up on material possessions, but I need my leather jacket, and I need my knife. They were gifts. They matter. I shook the sleeve of my jacket back into its normal position, hissing as it touched the slowly-sealing wound. The leather was thick enough that if she bit down again, she’d have to chew hard to get to my skin. That was good. She was probably going to have the opportunity. That was bad.
Howling, she came at me again. Her hands latched onto the collar of my jacket, jerking me toward her, and I realized what she was about to do too late to get my elbow up, too late to do anything but shriek as she clamped her surprisingly strong mouth down on the side of my throat, biting through the skin and burying her teeth deep in the flesh. I tried to scream. I couldn’t find the air. Everything was pain, pain, pain, and for some reason, it wasn’t fading at all. It was like my body wasn’t even trying to heal while she was biting me. That was . . .
That was not good. I had been stabbed in the heart and kept healing. Now some flying fairy leech was trying to drain me dry, and I couldn’t even breathe.
I tried to push her away, hands slapping futilely against her shoulders. My fingers brushed the pommel of my knife. I groaned and focused on grasping it, trying once again t
o pull it free. The activity seemed to have jarred it loose, at least a little, because I yanked, and it shifted. I yanked again. It came free in my hand.
Hesitation was only going to weaken me, and Arden wouldn’t prosecute me for violating Oberon’s Law when it was so clearly self-defense—I hoped. Without stopping to ask myself whether this was the right move, I brought the knife around and stabbed the Baobhan Sith in the neck, feeling the blade sink home.
She stiffened, hissing hard around the seal her mouth had made against my skin, but didn’t pull away. I worked the knife free, drawing back to stab her again—
—only to swing wildly as hands grasped my shoulders and yanked me away from her. She didn’t let go without a fight, biting down harder as I was pulled from her embrace, so that her teeth shredded what felt like half my neck. Then I was flying, flung away from her so hard that my back slammed into the far wall before I could fully register what was happening. My skull hit the wall a bare second later, and the world became a dancing blur of light and shadows, undercut by the sound of a tiger roaring in full-throated rage.
No. Not a tiger. There couldn’t be a tiger in here, there wasn’t any room. I tried to get my eyes to focus, to see what was going on as the tiger roared and the Baobhan Sith shrieked. Blood was still oozing down my neck, hot and sticky. I put my hand over the wound, trying to keep at least some of the blood inside. That seemed like the sort of thing I should be worrying about, since I needed blood to live. Applying pressure seemed to help, somewhat, even as it made the pain worse.
Oddly, that pain made focusing easier. It was like my mind was so desperate for a distraction that it was willing to seize on whatever it could get. I blinked, and there was a man in the room with me, lean and fast and dark-haired, leaping to avoid a blow from the Baobhan Sith. She was bleeding now, too, from vast claw slashes that ran across her chest, leaving holes in the tattered gown she was wearing.
The man—I squinted, trying to see his face. The Baobhan Sith lunged for him, teeth gnashing, and he danced back with another roar. The motion turned him so that his face was half in profile, turned toward me just enough to let me see the familiar slope of his cheekbones, the curve of his lips. I gasped.
Tybalt glanced toward me for barely a beat, only long enough to be sure I wasn’t in danger. Then he was slashing at the Baobhan Sith again, the battle continuing as he tried to drive her back, away from him, away from me and the so-tempting smell of my blood.
The wound at my throat felt like it was starting to heal. I risked pulling my hand away, wincing as another gout of blood oozed free. I was going to need to eat a hamburger after this. Maybe two. Or twelve. I staggered to my feet, knife gripped firmly in my hand, blood running down my arm inside my leather jacket, so that I felt like I had been utterly doused in the stuff.
“Hey!” I snarled. “Get the fuck away from my fiancé!”
The Baobhan Sith turned, hissed, and launched herself in my direction. Tybalt let her get past him, stepping aside to let her gain momentum before he grabbed her by the feet and used that same momentum to slam her, hard, into the bedroom floor. She howled. He stomped on the small of her back, scowling at me.
“Can’t you seize an opportunity for escape when it’s offered to you?” he demanded.
“Excuse me for not wanting to leave you to get eaten!” I snapped and kicked her in the head as she tried to raise it. “What are you even doing here?”
“Entertaining as it would be to repeat your own words—” he began, then faltered when he saw the way I was looking at him. “Quentin called me.”
There was a lot in that sentence to unpack. I settled for kicking the Baobhan Sith in the head again. She tried to bite my foot. “I had things under control.”
“You’ll forgive me if I doubt you.”
I stopped looking at the Baobhan Sith to look at Tybalt instead—normally one of my favorite activities, and now, suddenly, something I wanted to avoid for as long as possible. He looked back at me, and I didn’t know whether it was trust or exhaustion that allowed me to see the shadows in his malachite-banded green eyes. He looked haunted. His hair, always dark brown, was streaked with darker stripes as his natural tabby patterning carried over into his human form. That wasn’t normal. His stripes only showed when he was comfortable, or when he was under too much strain to properly design his human form, which was a far more voluntary thing than most people realized.
Young or weak Cait Sidhe sometimes carried aspects of their animal shapes over into their human ones, tails or actual cat ears, markings more blatant than the usual cat-slit pupils and retractable claws. Tybalt wasn’t that far gone, but he looked more animal than I had seen him in a very long time, with an aura of wary skittishness around him that made me think of stray cats glimpsed at the mouth of alleyways, there one moment and gone the next.
“Tybalt . . .” I began.
The Baobhan Sith struck.
Launching herself away from the floor with a single convulsive shove of her wiry, well-muscled arms, she knocked us both backward before lunging for my throat and clamping down. She moaned triumph as she began to suck, teeth grinding against my windpipe. I tried to grab her shoulders, but all the strength had gone out of my arms. I couldn’t get a grip. I dropped my knife, to no avail; my fingers refused to close.
“Forgive me.”
Tybalt’s voice was barely louder than a sigh and was all the warning I had before he wrapped his arms around my waist and dragged us—me, and the Baobhan Sith—backward, into the darkness of the shadow roads.
ELEVEN
WE FELL LIKE STARS, plummeting into the freezing cold waiting on the other side of the light. I couldn’t breathe. That wasn’t much of a change. I already hadn’t been able to breathe, thanks to the Baobhan Sith crushing my throat. The blood covering my neck and arms froze almost instantly, becoming an icy shroud that wrapped around me and worked the cold even deeper, driving it all the way to my bones.
There was a sudden sharp heat as the Baobhan Sith’s hold on my throat broke and she tumbled away into the darkness. That heat faded as well, becoming another layer of cold as the blood stopped flowing. Everything was freezing. Everything was falling.
There was a sudden jolt beneath me, and I realized Tybalt still had his arms wrapped around my waist. I could barely feel them due to the cold. He swung me up and around, settling me into a bridal carry before he broke into a run. I didn’t fight. It might have been more accurate to say that I couldn’t fight. There was no strength left in me, no capacity to do anything other than huddle where I was and let myself be carried.
It was such a familiar position that it would almost have been pleasant if not for the blood drying at my throat and the knowledge that the Baobhan Sith was still out there, lurking somewhere in the dark of the Shadow Roads. It had been so long since Tybalt had carried me like this that I had almost forgotten how normal it was. Somewhere between my return from the pond and his proposal, this had become ordinary. I had probably spent more time in the shadows than any other non-Cait Sidhe in a hundred years.
“Almost there, little fish,” he murmured, and I didn’t try to argue. Between the cold and the blood loss, a pleasant lassitude was stealing over me, leaving me utterly relaxed. If we were attacked again, he would need to be prepared to defend us both.
Belatedly, I realized I no longer had my knife. It had fallen in the room where the Baobhan Sith had pretended to be my daughter, a perfect trap, perfectly laid for me. I would have to go back for it. I couldn’t lose it. I refused to lose it.
Tybalt leapt, clutching me to his chest as he jumped into the blackness. The shadows broke around us, and we emerged into a deserted classroom filled with potted lavender and rosemary plants. They covered every surface, encroached on most of the floor, so that we were utterly surrounded. Knotted ropes coated in flame-retardant wax hung from the ceiling, their lengths dotted with candles that glowed with fla
mes like the sun.
In case that hadn’t been sufficient warning of our location, Tybalt said, in a tone nonchalant enough to scream concern, “We are in the Court of Cats. Shade may not care for our presence, as this is technically her territory, but if she objects, I will explain. Are you awake? Can you hear me?”
For a moment, I considered refusing to open my eyes. Let him be the one to deal with the fear of his lover not responding to him. I dismissed the petty, pointless idea as quickly as it had come. He hadn’t been answering when I called for him. I was injured. The two situations were completely different.
“Yeah,” I rasped, and raised a hand to feel my throat, dislodging icy sheets of blood with every motion. There were still toothmarks there, smaller than they had been, but enduring despite the length of time since my injury. “What the . . . ?”
“The saliva of the Baobhan Sith slows healing. Their prey generally bleeds out rather than recovering and leaves them with a trail they can follow to a feast. Can you stand?”
“Try me.”
Gingerly, Tybalt lowered me to my feet, keeping hold of my arm as he straightened and let me test my balance. My legs wobbled but held. I clutched his arm, finally raising my eyes to meet his.
He must have seen the recrimination there, because he winced, glancing guiltily at the floor. “Quentin called me,” he repeated.
“I feel like there’s a chain of events you’re leaving out.”
“Raj had . . . informed me you were in Berkeley, investigating the disappearance of your child. I was attempting to convince myself that my presence would be welcome when he returned to say you had found something which should not exist and were planning to parley with my opposite number.” He rubbed the back of his neck with one hand, still not looking at me. “Then he threw his phone at my head and told me to behave more like a cat than a coward, and he left before I could scold him for his insubordination. When you began screaming, Quentin called Raj to ask if he could use the Shadow Roads to enter the house. He seemed quite surprised to get me instead. He called me some fascinating names. I was not aware he knew so many ways to belittle a man.”