Tybalt’s hand closed on my shoulder, stopping me from stumbling any further backward. I leaned into it, clamping my own hands over the punctures in my throat. Etienne pulled the knife out and stabbed Samson again, and again.
And Samson raised his head, pupils narrowing to hairline slits. “This isn’t over,” he spat, and pulled away from Etienne, moving shakily, but still moving. He grabbed something from his pocket, throwing it into the shadows, and dove after it. The smell of apples and snowdrops rose, overlaying the more distant smell of Chelsea’s magic, and he was gone.
“Oh, goody,” I said faintly. “This is the best day.”
“Sir Daye, you’re wounded.” Etienne vanished, reappearing next to me in another wafting gust of smoke and limes. “Let me see.”
“It’s nothing. Really. It’s already starting to heal.” I didn’t actually know that, but recent experience told me the odds were on my side. I kept my hands where they were, feeling them turning sticky with blood. “Did you get my knife?”
“I did.” Etienne held it out to me, hilt first. “I am afraid you may need to clean it.”
I took a hand away from my neck and reached for the knife, relaxing as the weight of it settled into my hands. Then the weight of Etienne’s words hit me. Clean it. I needed to clean it.
The knife was covered in Samson’s blood, a thick coating of the stuff that looked almost black in the moonlight. Samson was working with Riordan. Samson knew enough to know where we’d be, and to be the one who had my knife. The thought was enough to turn my stomach. That didn’t mean I could just ignore it.
“What—what are you people?”
The panicked note in Officer Thornton’s voice was enough to make me set all other thoughts aside as I raised my head and looked at him. He was backed up against the wall next to the window, staring at us with wide, terrified eyes. The blood had drained from his face, leaving him as pale as the moonlight washing over him.
“This isn’t a cult,” he said. “This isn’t hallucinogenic drugs. You’re not human.” Then he turned and ran, heading for the end of the hall.
I groaned. “Etienne—”
“Of course.” The smell of cedar smoke and limes rose again, and Etienne was gone. He would intercept Officer Thornton, and if he couldn’t calm him down, he could knock him out. That might be enough to buy us the time we needed. I hoped.
Tybalt’s hand tightened on my shoulder. “You don’t have to do this.”
“Got a better idea?” He didn’t say anything. I sighed. “Didn’t think so. Come on.” I pulled away from him, heading for the dark alcove that had been my initial destination on this floor. With Samson running wounded, presumably for Riordan, and the Folletti somewhere in the hall with us, we didn’t have much time.
Tybalt walked with me, frowning. “October—”
“Just watch my back, okay?” I raised my knife before he could say anything else, and ran my tongue along the flat of the blade.
Samson’s memories slammed into me, a thick cloud of resentment, jealousy, and unresolved hatreds. They were a tangled mass of images, hard to sort through or comprehend. I staggered, trying to figure out why it was hitting me so hard, and felt Tybalt’s hands catch me. Then the world dropped away, taking reassuring hands and the Annwn night with it, and everything was the red haze, and the weight of Samson’s bitter memory.
Bastard. He gets everything he wants—he always has, Prince of Londinium, King of San Francisco, and how much of it has he worked for? How much of it has he earned? Not a bit, and yet there he sits, and here I stand, hoping he’ll exploit my son enough to grant me the power to pull us away from this cursed place, these cursed people who walk and talk and call themselves our equals.
I’d always known that Samson was a cruel, resentful man, but I’d never understood how angry he was until that moment. Angry about his place in Cait Sidhe society, angry at the accident of birth that made Tybalt a King and him a subject, angry at the fact that his only living child would eventually have that same level of power and privilege. He resented Raj, even as he viewed his son as the one opportunity he’d ever have to achieve the status he thought he deserved.
I was dimly aware that I was on my knees on the cold stone floor of the hall; I could feel a hand gripping my shoulder, fingers clutching hard enough that I could feel them despite the leather of my jacket and the distance imposed by the heavy veil of blood between us. I clung to that sensation—to the knowledge of self, and the even better knowledge that there was someone ready and waiting to call me back—as I forced myself deeper into the spell.
“So you can get me the girl?”
“I can.” I do not brag—cats do not brag—but I still speak the truth. Riordan came to me with rumors, and I proved them to be reality. An untrained, unwatched Tuatha changeling. She could have amounted to nothing. Instead, she came to be so much more.
“How?”
“She walks the same route every day. I can take her into the shadows and bring her to you before she musters her senses enough to run.”
“If you fail me…” She does not complete the sentence. She doesn’t need to. I know the price of failure better than she does, because I understand what this is. She thinks it’s an escape from the eyes on her borders. I know it for something more.
This is a coup.
“I will not fail.”
Riordan says nothing. She simply nods, and I think again that power is the one thing the Divided Courts got right. They understand that power should belong to the strongest—if you can take a thing and hold it, it should be yours. She would have made a fine cat. A pity, then, that she must belong to the lesser Courts. Unlike some, I will never dirty myself.
But still, she’s lovely in the moonlight.
Seen through Samson’s assessing eyes, Duchess Riordan was a beautiful tool, as clueless and malleable as the rest of the Divided Courts but with a strength of character that he found himself compelled to admire. The taste of his admiration was alien in my mind, so cold and calculating that I would have mistaken it for another flavor of hatred if I hadn’t been wound so deeply in his memories.
Too deeply; I was seeing Riordan in her own territory, and not in the moonlight of Annwn. I forced myself to move forward through Samson’s memory, clawing my way through the blood-soaked veils of recollection until the red shattered and re-formed into something more familiar. The cliff at the edge of the moor, overlooking the sea.
The mongrel girl is flagging. I thought she would collapse long before this, but fear, it seems, is a grand motivator; a few threats to the mother she loves and the father she’s never known, and she was so much more willing to work with us. Still, holding a portal this size open for so long is doubtless…draining. I doubt she will live. Through his eyes, I watched Chelsea struggling to keep a passageway large enough to drive a car through open. I could see Riordan’s garage on the other side—and they were driving a car through, of a sort. A footman in Riordan’s livery was steering a cart through the opening, drawn by fae steeds and laden with farming equipment. From the tracks crushed into the bracken, it wasn’t the first, either.
“How much longer?”
Riordan turns her back on the supply train as she looks toward me. Behind her, that mongrel bitch’s spoiled little squire is bound and gagged in a wicker chair, watching helplessly as the wagons roll through. “Why in such a hurry, my friend?” she asks. “We’re both getting what we want. Shouldn’t you savor your victory?”
“I’ll savor it when that door is closed, and I never need to see your face again,” I snap. “How much longer?”
She sighs, looking disappointed. “You never did have a sense of humor, Sammy. Most of the supplies and livestock are through, and all my people. Why don’t you make yourself useful? Go check on our prisoners. Make sure they’re not getting into any mischief.”
Her laughter follows me out as I use her blood charm to access the Shadow Roads that would otherwise be locked to me in this place, the cold and
the dark numbing the sting of being mocked by a member of her debauched Court. And then the light, and sweet Titania, what a gift—they’re here, and this time, no one will stop me from doing what needs to be done—
I jerked myself free of the blood when my/Samson’s eyes fixed on the four of us standing in the darkened hall. There was nothing he could tell me after that, except for maybe what it felt like to get stabbed with my own knife. It probably wasn’t going to be that different from getting stabbed with anything else, and none of those stabbings were much fun. Pass.
“That’s why she was willing to kidnap a police officer,” I muttered, half-gasping. “I knew she wasn’t planning on going back, but this…this…”
“October?” Tybalt’s hand tightened on my shoulder.
“We need to get back to the cliff.” I spat on the floor, trying to get the taste of Samson’s blood—of Samson’s life—out of my mouth. “Riordan’s there, she’s got some sort of supply train going. This was never just a kidnapping.”
“What is it, then?”
I managed to lift my head, twisting around to look at him. “It’s a colonization,” I said. “Riordan is recolonizing Annwn, and she’s using Chelsea to do it.”
TWENTY-FOUR
ETIENNE DIDN’T COME BACK as the minutes ticked by, until we couldn’t wait any longer. Riordan’s wards couldn’t shut off the Shadow Roads completely—not here—but Tybalt hadn’t been in Annwn long enough to anchor them, and we didn’t have Luna’s favor to open the Rose Road for us. I was grateful not to be alone as Tybalt and I crept out of the hall and onto the moon-drenched moor together.
The bracken was so thick that don’t-look-here spells were useless; even if I were invisible, I’d be leaving a trail that would point our pursuers directly to us if I did anything but follow Tybalt’s lead through the brush. The way he blended into the landscape was unreal. Anyone following us would find him as hard to track as a tiger in the jungle, while I felt like a giant neon sign blundering across the field. “Hero incoming, look over here.” Even hunching over didn’t do me any good. Boughs of broom and heather disturbed by Tybalt’s passage kept slapping me in the face, and being hit with swinging greenery didn’t precisely help my attempts at stealth.
At least following his trail meant that I’d be a little harder to track. I could tell from the way our path twisted and curved that he was choosing the easiest terrain for both of us, while still moving us the way we needed to go. I wanted to break into a run. I wanted to order him into cat form and just go, stealing every bit of speed my fear could offer. I didn’t. Instead, I kept my eyes on the sky, watching for distortions in the starlight overhead. If the Folletti came for us, that might be all the warning we got.
I was so busy looking up that I ran straight into Tybalt’s outstretched arm, bringing myself to an abrupt halt. I managed not to yelp, biting down hard on my lip to smother the urge. Tybalt looked over his shoulder at me, pressing a finger to his lips. I nodded. Silence was the way to go. Then I looked past him, and my appreciation for silence died, replaced by the urge to start hurting people and not stop until I was sure there was no one left to hurt.
The scene was basically as Samson’s memory had shown it: Chelsea, struggling to hold open a glittering portal in the air; Quentin, bound and tied to a chair; Riordan, watching with smug delight as her wagons rolled through the gateway. What his memory hadn’t shown—maybe because he didn’t consider it important enough to bother remembering—were the bruises on Chelsea’s face, and the blood in Quentin’s hair. They’d been beaten, both of them. They were children, and she’d had them beaten.
Tybalt’s arm stayed extended, keeping me from charging forward. “Is she truly undefended?” he asked.
I took a breath to steady myself, and then took another breath as I tried to focus on the air around us. “No,” I whispered. “The Folletti are here. I just can’t tell you where ‘here’ is.”
“Charming.” Tybalt scowled at the patch of open ground where Riordan stood. “What, then, is our next move?”
“I don’t suppose you’ve got a flamethrower on you, huh?” Tybalt blinked before shaking his head, apparently taking the question seriously. “Didn’t think so.” I frowned at the portal, and then took a deep breath. “I have an idea,” I said. “But you’re not going to like it.”
Tybalt frowned. “Anything you introduce in that manner is a thing I am absolutely guaranteed to dislike.”
Still, he listened as I explained my admittedly idiotic plan, and although he didn’t like it, he saw the sense. At least that’s what I tried to tell myself as I shoved my hands into my jacket pockets and strode, whistling a jaunty tune, out of the bracken.
Riordan’s head whipped around at the first run of off-key notes, her eyes widening as she took in the sight of me. I pulled a hand out of my pocket and offered her a wave as jaunty as my whistle.
“Guards!” she shouted.
I’d been expecting that. It would have been nice to get a little farther into the open—I was only about five yards from the edge of the bracken—but beggars can’t be choosers. Her shout was still echoing when the Folletti appeared all around me, their weapons drawn and at the ready. I stopped where I was, putting my hand back into my pocket, and beamed at them.
“Howdy,” I said. “So you know, she’s not paying you nearly enough for this. Seriously, you guys should have renegotiated your rates the second I walked into Dreamer’s Glass.”
The Folletti frowned in confusion but didn’t lower their swords. I’d been expecting that, too.
“Now, you may be asking yourselves, ‘How is she up and wandering around and coming to see what we’re up to after the beat-down we gave her earlier’?” I kept beaming. It seemed to be making the Folletti uncomfortable. Cool by me. “You may also be asking yourselves, ‘What do we know about her species?’ I mean, that’s what I’d be doing, if I were you. That, and maybe running like hell.”
The Folletti’s confusion turned into scowling. “Surrender,” commanded one of them, his voice almost vanishing into the wind blowing across the moor.
“No,” I replied genially, and pulled my right hand out of my pocket.
This close to Chelsea and one of her gates, the Luidaeg’s charm went into instant overdrive. It was red when I pulled it out, but as it hit the air, it turned a shade of incandescent scarlet that was almost bright enough to mistake for white if you tried to look at it from the side. The Folletti, who hadn’t known what I was about to do, weren’t looking at it from the side. Their eyes had been drawn to the sight of my hand emerging from my pocket, trained soldiers looking for signs of a weapon. I guess they weren’t expecting a pocket-sized piece of the sun.
They screamed in eerie unison, like a hurricane trapped inside an echo chamber. Riordan shouted, clapping her hands over her ears. I wanted to do the same. Sadly, that wasn’t an option. Instead, I broke into a run, heading for Quentin as fast as my legs could carry me.
I was almost there when Samson appeared in front of me, surrounded by the weirdly mingled scents of Chelsea and Riordan’s magic. Blood drenched his shirt, smeared over his face and neck. He snarled, face contorted with an inhuman rage, and drove the claws of his right hand into my stomach, bringing me up short. I felt things inside me rip and tear—things that were never meant to be ripped or torn, things I’m pretty sure you need in working order if you want to stay alive. Pain lanced through me, overwhelming enough to make the screaming of the Folletti seem like an understated counterpoint. Evisceration will really focus a girl’s thoughts.
Most of me wanted to black out. The rest of me wanted to live. It was the part that wanted to live that drew the knife from my belt, slamming it into Samson’s belly in a parody of what he was doing to me. His eyes widened, the reflection of the light from the Chelsea-chaser making them seem to glow. Then he twisted his fingers inside me, and I screamed.
Please, Tybalt, please, I thought, even as I struggled not to drop to my knees. The Luidaeg’s charm fel
l from my hand, rolling off into the bracken. The world was starting to go fuzzy around the edges. There was a time when this much pain would have been unimaginable; I would have been dead long before it could hit me. Please stick to the plan. Get everyone else out of here. Please.
“At least I’ll take you with me,” hissed Samson, and raised his other hand at an angle that would allow him to bring it down across my throat.
Maybe I could have survived that. Maybe. If I’d been running at full power, and hadn’t already used up most of my body’s resources healing from my earlier injuries. As it was, when that hand came down, I was going to die. I knew it, and so did Samson. I closed my eyes. Better that than watching the blow descend.
It never came. Samson made a choking noise, his fingers going limp as they released their hold on whatever vital part of my insides they’d been clenching. I opened my eyes to see Etienne behind him, with the iron cuffs that had been used to bind Tybalt’s ankles hooked around Samson’s throat. The skin of Etienne’s hands was visibly blistering. That was nothing compared to what was happening to Samson, who was trying to turn red and go pale at the same time. He settled for splitting the middle and going limp. He wasn’t breathing anymore. Etienne still gave the cuffs one last twist before he dropped them, a disgusted expression on his face.
“Are you—?”
“Don’t worry about me,” I wheezed, shoving my knife back into my belt without bothering to clean it before I clapped my hand over the hole in my stomach. I wasn’t sure whether I was trying to hold my insides in place or keep Etienne from seeing the extent of the damage. Maybe a little bit of both. One thing was for sure: I was never going to get into a hand-to-hand fight with a Cait Sidhe again if I had any choice in the matter. I like my internal organs to stay internal. “Get Quentin loose. Tybalt is taking care of Chelsea.”
Etienne nodded and disappeared, leaving the scent of smoke and limes behind him. I shakily straightened, looking down at Samson’s body for a moment before I started stumbling forward, toward where Quentin was tied down. Ahead, through the black spots clouding my vision, I could see Etienne appear next to my squire and start dealing with the knots.
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