Late Eclipses od-4

by Seanan McGuire

  Danny picked up on the second ring. “McReady’s Taxi.”

  “Danny? It’s me.”

  “Toby!” His voice boomed through the phone loudly enough for everyone to hear. “Fuck’s sake, girly, I thought you were—” He cut himself off. “Never mind what I thought. You safe? You need me? Where are you—no, wait. Don’t tell me where you are if it’s not safe. When they said you’d escaped, I thought—”

  “Danny!” I hated to interrupt, but I didn’t have time for him to calm down on his own. “Connor and I need a ride to Shadowed Hills. Are you available?”

  “You, ah, sure that’s a good idea? What with the Queen and the sentence of death and everything? Not saying I won’t do it—pretty sure she’s gunning for me already, after the way I mouthed off at your trial—just it might not be the safest thing you could do.”

  “I have to.”

  “In that case, I’m yours. Just say where.”

  “Great.” I cupped a hand over the receiver. “Tybalt? Where are we?”

  He sighed, muttering, “I shouldn’t tell you,” before adding, in a normal tone, “The exit will place you at the corner of Derby and Telegraph.”

  “Okay.” To the phone, I said, “Berkeley. Derby and Telegraph.”

  “Be there in ten,” said Danny, and hung up.

  I tossed Quentin his phone. “Come on, Connor. He’ll be here in ten minutes. You guys … just be safe. I’ll be back as soon as I can.” I spread my fingers, filling them with shadows, and almost lost hold again as my magic rose eagerly to answer. It was too fast; I didn’t know how to control it. Forcing myself to keep breathing, I wove the cut grass and copper strands into a human disguise, throwing it over myself and letting my hands unclench. It was easy; too easy.

  “Your magic smells funny,” said Raj, bemused.

  He was right. The copper was too sharp, like freshminted pennies. There’d be time to think about that later. Not letting myself hesitate, I turned, gesturing for Connor to follow. We almost made it before Tybalt caught up with us, grabbing my arm and spinning me to face him. I raised my eyes to his, barely aware of holding my breath.

  “Come back to me,” he said. Then he let go, shoving me away as he turned and stalked back to the table. Quentin had his head down and his shoulders locked as he pretended to focus on his breakfast. Raj was staring after us, looking heartbroken. I looked at them. Then I shook my head, mouthed, “I’m sorry,” and kept going.

  The transition between the Court of Cats and the Berkeley street was smooth, depositing us outside in the cool of evening. I breathed deeply, realizing as I did that this was the first time I’d been allowed to breathe mortal air since my trial. I didn’t have to look back to know that the entrance to the Court of Cats would be gone; Tybalt was too smart to leave it open, no matter how much he didn’t want us to leave.

  “Hey.” Connor touched my elbow lightly.

  “Hey.” I slanted a smile in his direction. “Like the new look?”

  He laughed unsteadily, dropping his hand away from my elbow and threading his fingers through mine. I didn’t pull away, but stepped closer, resting my head against his shoulder and letting the heat coming off his skin warm me through. “To be honest, I don’t know. But you’re not dead, and that’s good enough for me.”

  There didn’t seem to be anything I could say to that. We stayed that way, waiting, until a battered green taxicab roared around the corner and screeched to a stop in front of us. It had barely stopped when Danny launched himself out of the driver’s-side door, charging around the car and sweeping me into a massive hug. My feet left the ground, and I found myself faced with an interesting predicament: kick my ride to Shadowed Hills in the knee, or suffocate?

  Connor solved the issue by tapping Danny on the arm—as high as he could reach—and saying apologetically, “I don’t think she can breathe.”

  “Aw, hell!” Danny put me down, grinning ear-to-ear as he clapped his hands down on my shoulders. “You’re alive!”

  “I am. But we need to get moving. Can I fill you in on the way?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Here.” He opened the passenger door for me, waving me to get in. “Seal-boy, you’re in back. Not that I don’t like you, but it’s a chivalry thing.”

  “I understand,” said Connor. He started toward the car, only to stop dead as two of Danny’s Barghests stuck their heads out the window. They were panting, venomous fangs retracted and tongues lolling.

  “What?” demanded Danny. I pointed to the Barghests, fighting to keep myself from laughing. Understanding dawned. Danny grinned. “That’s Iggy and Lou. Don’t worry; they don’t bite unless you poke ’em. They may drool a little, but it ain’t acid or nothin’. That’s a myth.”

  “They’re … Barghests,” said Connor carefully, in case we hadn’t noticed.

  “Yeah.” Tone turning crafty, Danny asked, “You want one?”

  It was too much. I burst out laughing, managing to say, “No, Danny, Connor doesn’t want a Barghest.” Then, because Danny looked so hurt by the idea that Connor wouldn’t want one of his pets, I added, “It wouldn’t get along with the rose goblins.”

  “True enough,” said Danny, mollified. “Well, get on in.”

  Connor shot me a frantic look. I shrugged, gesturing to the backseat as I climbed into the front. A little Barghest drool wasn’t going to kill him.

  One of the Barghests stuck its head up between the seats. I scratched it behind the ears while we waited for Connor to get over his monster issues. “Which one’s this?”

  “Lou,” said Danny. “She’s my good girl, aren’t you, Lou?” The Barghest commenced to licking his face with enthusiasm. “I tell you, even if I can find homes for the rest, these two are staying.”

  “Good to know,” I said. The back door shut as Connor finally got in, and I was saved from making any more small talk about Danny’s literal “pet” project as the Bridge Troll hit the gas and sent us rocketing into traffic.

  “Now,” he said. “Talk.”

  So I talked. Starting with what I’d been doing at Shadowed Hills when I was arrested, and jumping from there to the trial. Describing the cell where I’d been held was more upsetting than I’d expected; by the time I finished, I was staring fixedly at my hands to keep myself from seeing the looks on their faces.

  Silence held in the car for several minutes, broken only by the sound of traffic and the panting of the Barghests. Finally, Danny said, “Yeah, but … how in the hell’d you get run through the pencil sharpener?” I glanced up. Mistaking my surprise for confusion, he mimed a point over his own disguised ear. “Word on the street is you’ve got a hope chest you didn’t turn in to the authorities.”

  That startled me into a sharp, barking laugh. “Are you kidding? People think I did this to myself ?”

  “People talk when they don’t got the truth,” he said implacably.

  “I gave the only hope chest I’ve ever seen to the Queen,” I said. “My mother did this to me.”

  “Your ma has a hope chest?”

  “No, Danny. She did it to me on her own.”

  “Oh.” Danny paused to mull this over. Finally, he said, “So your ma, she’s not Daoine Sidhe, then.”

  “No.”

  “Oh. Well.” He paused again before shrugging. “That makes a lot of sense.”

  I stared at him. “Glad it makes sense to one of us.”

  “C’mon, kiddo, you thought what? That Daoine Sidhe were made of rubber or something? Half the shit you do shoulda killed you years ago.”

  “He’s right,” said Connor, abruptly. “I don’t know why we didn’t see it.”

  “Because we didn’t want to.” I slumped in my seat. “If we saw it, we’d have to deal with it, and with everybody saying she was Daoine Sidhe, and me being too weak to worry about, it got to stay invisible.”

  “A lot of things make more sense now,” said Connor.

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “They do.”

  We were approaching the Caldecott Tun
nel. Tunnels represent an essential difference between humans and fae. When the population of Berkeley and Oakland filled the available space and needed to expand, mankind found a way to run the road right through the mountain. The fae would have picked the mountain up and put it down someplace less inconvenient. The idea of driving a permanent road through the middle would have never occurred to us.

  When did that turn into an “us”? When did I stop thinking of myself as human?

  “Uh, Toby? Not to distract you while you’re brooding and all, but we may have a problem.” Danny’s voice was level. Too level. Anyone who sounds that calm and isn’t actually sedated is upset about something.

  I tensed. “What is it?”

  “Look in the mirror.”

  Connor leaned over the back of the seat as I craned my neck to see the rearview mirror, both of us studying the same view of the road behind us. Three of the visible cars were surrounded by an odd yellow haze, like someone had smeared honey on the glass. “What the hell is that?” I asked, twisting around to look directly at the road.

  The three cars weren’t there—instead, there were three holes in traffic that could be easily blamed on cars with strong don’t-look-here charms on them, if I wanted to be that paranoid … and after the past week, I couldn’t afford not to be.

  “That’s a don’t-look-here,” Danny grunted, putting a hand on my shoulder and pushing me back into my seat. “Mirror’s Gremlin work. Same place as does my speed charms. You may wanna check your seat belt.”

  I wear a seat belt as a matter of habit. That didn’t stop me from double-checking the clasp. I could hear Connor doing the same thing. “What are you going to do?”

  “Just watch the mirror,” he muttered, gunning the engine and cutting off several startled drivers as we plunged into the tunnel. He was accelerating rapidly toward the tunnel’s main curve. There’s no following visibility around that turn—you have to go with it and trust you’re going slowly enough not to slam into anyone. Given that the taxi was rapidly cresting toward ninety miles an hour, “slowly” wasn’t a factor. “Second you can’t see them anymore, you throw down a hide-and-seek.”

  “But I can’t—”

  “Do it!”

  A hide-and-seek spell is like a don’t-look-here in the sense that both keep people from noticing you. The hide-and-seek is just a little more, well, advanced, which makes them a lot harder to cast. Anyone who’s looking when the hide-and-seek goes up won’t lose sight of you right away—although they will if, say, you go around a curve or otherwise break their line of sight. That makes hide-and-seek spells safer to cast in traffic, since they don’t lead to immediate accidents. It also makes them harder to follow.

  I’d never cast a successful hide-and-seek spell in my life, and this seemed like one hell of a time to start trying.

  Our car slid around the sheltering curve of the tunnel, blocking the following traffic from view. “Now!” Danny roared.

  There was no time to argue; they’d be around the curve in a second. I slammed my hands against the ceiling, chanting, “Go make thyself like a nymph o’ the sea: be subject to no sight but thine and mine, invisible to every eyeball else!” The smell of grass and new-penny copper filled the car. I dropped my human disguise, grabbing the freed magic and feeding it into the casting I was fighting against. “The Tempest, act one, scene two!”

  The spell gathered and burst as Danny turned us hard to the right, swerving around a minivan as we blasted into the daylight outside the tunnel. I slumped in my seat, panting and rubbing my forehead.

  “… I think it worked,” said Connor, sounding awed.

  I risked a glance at the rearview mirror. The yellowringed cars were still there, but they’d stopped actively following us, and were weaving in a search pattern. “Oak and holy mother-fucking ash,” I breathed, and paused, realizing that my head didn’t actually hurt. That was … wrong. I should have been groaning and digging for the Tylenol. More quietly, I muttered, “Just how much of my humanity did she take?”

  “Worry about that later,” rumbled Danny. I glanced toward him. His expression was grim. “They’ve spotted us again. Bitch must’ve given them tracker charms.”

  I looked to the mirror. The car at the front of the pack was arrowing after us, and two more flanked it. The fourth car hung back, probably waiting to see what we’d do.

  Danny hit the gas, swerving around drivers who didn’t see us and didn’t react to being cut off. “I didn’t want to do this,” he announced. “Seal-boy, hang onto the kids, will ya? I don’t want them getting banged around. Toby, hang onto the dashboard.” After a pause he added, “Also, praying to the sacred ash and all that shit might be good.” The engine screamed as he shifted gears. We couldn’t maintain this speed for long.

  I pressed my hands against the dashboard to brace myself. From the backseat, Connor demanded, “What didn’t you want to do? What are you doing?”

  “Hopefully proving my mechanic is as good as she says she is.” Danny turned toward the barrier in the middle of the upcoming freeway split, driving for the thickest part of the concrete. “Toby, watch the mirror.”

  “Danny, are you sure this is a—on the right!” One of the cars in the mirror was swerving toward us.

  Danny jerked the car to the left. Not fast enough; something I couldn’t see slammed into us from behind, knocking me forward with enough force that I nearly hit my forehead on the windshield. Connor made a squawking sound, and the Barghests started to make a noise midway between a bark and a trash compactor. Danny hit the gas, adjusting our trajectory so that we were once again aiming straight for the wall.

  It was just a few yards away when we were hit again from behind. Danny shifted gears, and a strange whining noise began vibrating the car. “Trust me!” he shouted, above the sound of the engine, the mechanical keening, and the Barghests.

  Then he stomped on the gas, and we plowed into the concrete.

  THIRTY

  THE WALL FLOWED AROUND US LIKE MIST. I was too busy screaming to notice the moment when it changed from concrete gray to foggy white. Connor was doing the same thing, while the Barghests rattled madly around the backseat, howling their heads off. Danny swore steadily but calmly as he navigated the taxi through the paling gray.

  We still hadn’t splattered against the retaining wall. I stopped screaming, waving Connor to do the same as I cast a narrow-eyed look in Danny’s direction. “What is this?”

  “Remember when I said I had an awesome mechanic?” Danny’s grin revealed craggy teeth. The car continued to barrel forward. The Barghests and Connor were still making enough noise to constitute a public nuisance—if we’d been someplace with a public, that is. “Turns out I was right.” He hit the brake, bringing the car neatly to a halt.

  The last of the gray cleared away, revealing the marble birdbath directly in front of us. It was choked with clematis vines and climbing roses, much like the rest of the overgrown garden surrounding us. More roses did their best to block the pathway to the tall stone tower that rose against the skyline ahead of us. I blinked, barely noticing that Connor had stopped screaming. The pathway to my mother’s tall stone tower.

  “Danny?” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Did you just drive your taxi into the Summerlands and park it in the middle of my mother’s garden?”

  “Pretty much.” Danny unfastened his seat belt. “Good thing it worked, huh?”

  The implications of that statement were a bit more than I cared to think about just then. I twisted in my seat to face the back, asking, “Connor? You okay?”

  “I think I’m going to be sick,” he replied faintly. Danny opened the door and the Barghests went rocketing out, making as much noise as they possibly could as they began racing around the garden. Connor winced at the racket before asking, “Are we dead?”

  “Not yet. If you’re going to barf, don’t do it in Mom’s birdbath.” I undid my own belt and climbed out of the car, stretching to cover the fact tha
t my legs were shaking. “Root and branch, we can walk to Shadowed Hills from here.”

  “You’re gonna have to.”

  I looked toward Danny as Connor got out of the backseat and moved to stand behind me. “No roads?” I ventured.

  “That’s most of it. The rest is that Connie warned me when she set up the doohickey that it’d leave a trail a mile wide.” Danny shook his head, expression going grim. “The Queen’s got folks who can open doors to the Summerlands. It won’t take them long to track us.”

  “So we start walking. Come on.”

  “No. You’re going to need something to distract the folks that chased us in here, and I’m in the mood to punch something. Me and the kids are staying. You just tell your summer home over there,” he flapped a hand in the direction of the tower, “to let us in when we ask. We’ll hold off the guards till we can’t, and then we’ll go inside, shut the door, and have a nice nap.”

  “Danny—”

  “Don’t argue. It’ll just waste time, and they already know I was with you.” Danny shrugged. “We’re not exactly inconspicuous. Your ma have cable?”

  “Not last time I checked.” I walked around the car, hugging as much of him as my arms would allow. “This was good.”

  “Just squaring up for my sister’s tab,” he said, patting me on the head with one massive hand. “Now get out of here, both of you.” He pushed me away. I went.

  “Connor, come on.” I started for the gate leading to the woods between my mother’s land and Sylvester’s. He followed. I paused at the garden wall, tapping the stone and whispering, “These three are with me. Let them in, and no one else.” Nothing happened—nothing visible—but I knew the tower heard me. When the time came, it would do its best to offer sanctuary to Danny and the Barghests.

  The image of what they’d do to Mom’s furniture was enough to bring a brief but sincere smile to my face.

  “This is definitely turning into one of my more interesting nights,” said Connor, following me into the wood outside the garden wall. “What’s next?”