A Killing Frost Page 17

  “I certainly do,” I said, unable to keep the statement from coming out fondly. I was still sort of pissed at her, but Dianda was a menace by any reasonable standard. She was remarkably restrained for an Undersea noble, at least according to everyone I knew who had much to do with the Undersea, and I attributed her good behavior to the influence of her husband, who probably wouldn’t have been comfortable with her going around assaulting people all the time, whether it was culturally appropriate or not. They both made concessions when they got married. He moved to the bottom of the sea, where the environment wanted him dead, she stopped punching people quite as much.

  “Wise.” Simon turned to gaze at the roses as we walked. “Some of what I saw in your blood was . . . confusing. Difficult to believe.”

  “But it was blood memory, which means it’s true.”

  “Indeed. Blood memory can’t be altered, unless it’s by someone as powerful as my lady. And you are nowhere near her league.” He turned to look behind us, firing an arrow before I had a chance to react. There was a soft sound of impact, followed by the much louder sound of someone crashing to the ground. Quentin yelled in wordless dismay, telling me who Simon’s target had been.

  I grabbed my knife and had it almost out of the sheath before Simon shoved me away, sending me staggering into the nearest wall of roses. I didn’t fall through into the void beyond the Rose Road, which was a good thing. I did get stabbed by several hundred tiny thorns, drawing more blood than seemed possible for a garden verge, which was the opposite of a good thing.

  “Simon! What the hell are you doing?” I tried to lunge for him. The thorns snagged in my skin and my clothing—and my hair—refused to let go. The vines had yet to wrap around my arms, but they were still intentionally restraining me.

  “What must be done,” snarled Simon, grabbing Quentin and yanking my squire back, until he rested against the other man’s chest. Quentin had gotten substantially taller over the past few years. He was still shorter than Simon himself, and when Simon produced a second arrow, resting its point against Quentin’s cheek, Quentin froze, eyes going wide and cheeks going pale. He strained both against the arm that was locked across his neck, and to pull his face away from the arrow.

  “Don’t move too much, Prince Sollys,” said Simon. “You wouldn’t want to cut yourself. And as for you, October, when you let Amandine modify the memory in your blood, you should have been more careful. She left in some things you probably didn’t want me to see. She inserted others you should have known I would never believe. Married to your mother? Foul enough, but to claim I was the one who cast my lady into slumber . . .” He shook his head. “Blasphemy. Vile slander. I could never.”

  Oh, oak and ash. He’d seen himself being the one to elf-shoot Evening. Of course that would seem unbelievable right now. He was too deep in her thrall.

  “Simon, please,” I said. “Let my squire go. We can still salvage this.”

  “Let the Crown Prince of the Westlands go? When I know there’s a cure for elf-shot? When my lady could wake tomorrow, tonight, and not in a century’s time? I think not. This child will be the coin that buys me everything I’ve ever wanted. I’ll have my lady and my place back, and she’ll help me locate Oleander.”

  “You know it’s not going to happen like that,” I said, still struggling against the thorns. They were definitely working their way deeper, fighting to keep me in place. I kept my eyes on Simon. The rose in his pocket had blood on its thorns now, and I was willing to bet it was mine. He’d saved it for the moment when he needed me out of the way. “You said it yourself, we have a cure. If all you can threaten him with is elf-shot, Queen Windermere’s army will take you down and wake him after the fact.”

  “Ah, but that’s ordinary elf-shot. As we’ve already discussed, mine is more powerfully brewed. There’s no guarantee your ‘cure’ would work, or that the target would survive.”

  “Toby, he shot May,” said Quentin miserably.

  “I know,” I said. “Just hold still. Don’t give him an excuse to shoot you.” May couldn’t be killed. Even Simon’s extra-special terror-blend elf-shot wouldn’t be enough to take her away from me. I thought. I hoped. Honestly, it was difficult to say. As was so often the case, we were in uncharted waters.

  Simon looked at me and smiled. It seemed like a sincere expression, close enough to the man I’d been getting to know that for half a heartbeat, I could almost let myself believe in it. I sagged, ceasing my fight against the thorns.

  “The people who sent you to find me did you no favors,” he said, voice almost kind. “They should have built you a better set of false memories. Something with no lies too big for me to swallow. But I’m grateful to you all the same. Patrick is alive. I believe that much—no one could have modeled the man so well without proof—and I might never have known that without you.” He began walking backward toward the other wall of roses, pulling Quentin with him.

  I resumed my struggles, drawing more blood as the thorns worked their way deeper into my flesh. Try as I might, I couldn’t break free.

  “Simon!” I yelled. “If you do this, I’ll hunt you to the ends of the earth! Don’t think for a second that I won’t!”

  He smiled again, and once again, the expression verged on kindness. He was so much the man I’d come to find that it hurt, because he wasn’t that man at all. Not right here, and not right now. Right here and right now, he was someone else altogether, and I didn’t want to hold this against him after we brought him home, but I knew I was going to.

  I knew it as he pulled Quentin up against the roses, and as the roses unfurled, the vines unlinking, the flowers spreading until they had created an opening wide enough for a man to walk through, dragging a half-frozen teenager with him, and I was alone.

  The thorns were digging in too deep, and the pain was making it hard to focus. I closed my eyes, inhaling the scent of my own blood, and followed it to the root of the spell Simon had cast on the roses. It was simple sympathetic magic, tying their thorns to the rose he was carrying, and since that rose was somewhere else now, it was even simpler for me to snap the threads binding them together. The strange tension went out of the vines holding me, and I was able to pull myself free, only losing a little more blood in the process.

  I spun on my heel and ran for the spot where May had fallen. She was crumpled in a heap on the leaf-strewn floor of the Rose Road, an arrow sticking out of her shoulder. The bastard. The predictable, enchanted bastard.

  With normal people, leaving the arrow in place would have been the right thing to do. May wasn’t normal people. May was a Fetch, and more, May was my Fetch, meaning the rules for her were different. I gathered her into my arms, lifting her off the ground, and snapped the arrow’s shaft off about six inches from her body, gouging my palm in the process. My blood made the remaining arrow slippery and hard to hold as I grasped it, adding splinters to my current list of complaints, and shoved as hard as I could. May didn’t react, not even to twitch or gasp. She was under that deep.

  The arrowhead emerged from her back. I kept pushing, careful not to let it touch my skin, until enough of the shaft had passed through her body for me to grab it and pull the entire arrow free.

  She bled. That was a good sign—it probably meant the elf-shot hadn’t killed her after all, since corpses don’t bleed—and also a bad thing, since I had no medical supplies. Lowering her to the ground, I grabbed my knife and used it to hack off the bottom of her already-shredded shirt, which had been so horribly damaged by the tree branch that it was destined for the rag bag no matter what I did to it now. It only took a few seconds to come up with a functional cloth bandage.

  Of course, it was already soaked with blood, but at least that blood was dry. I wrapped it around her shoulder, packing the wound. The hole in her stomach was almost closed, skin stretched taut and new across an abdomen slightly too concave to contain all the organs it was supposed to
hold. Maybe this was a good time for her to take a little nap. It would give her body time to recover from the hell it had been put through since we left.

  May would be unconscious until I could get her to Walther, the only alchemist I knew who stood a chance of brewing a version of the elf-shot counteragent strong enough to contend with elf-shot brewed in the presence of Eira Rosynhwyr. I refused to let myself think of her being asleep any longer than that. I no longer had a model for any version of my life that didn’t have May in it, the sister I’d never gone looking for, the one I’d never realized I was going to need.

  My heart was beating too fast, but my eyes were dry as I gathered her in my arms and stood. She was the same height I was; cradled against my chest like this, she felt much smaller. She had always been my responsibility. I was the reason she existed, in more ways than one.

  “Spike, get us out of here,” I said wearily. The rose goblin chirped and took off at a run. I followed more slowly, trusting it to wait when it reached whatever exit was going to take us home. We wouldn’t be able to access the Rose Roads again without a Blodynbryd’s help, but I could go to Portland and ask Ceres if I had to. Not that it mattered. Simon wasn’t at the other end of the Rose Road anymore. He was loose in the world, ready to wreak havoc on behalf of his sleeping lady, and he had my squire.

  More, and maybe more immediately pressing, he knew Patrick Lorden was alive, and there was a chance that in his desperate fumbling for connection, for anything that would make him feel like home was an achievable goal, he’d go looking for his old friend. I needed to warn Patrick and Dianda. This whole fool’s errand was their fault, but that didn’t mean they deserved to be menaced by a frantic Daoine Sidhe who’d already demonstrated that he wasn’t above abduction and assault.

  “I really messed this one up, huh, May?” I asked my sleeping Fetch. As expected, she didn’t reply, just hung peacefully in my arms. Most of the time, it wasn’t upsetting to look at her and see my own face—I’d had plenty of time to come to terms with the fact that she looked like the woman I used to be. Now, with her fully relaxed into slumber and a smear of blood down one cheek, it was unnervingly like I was carrying my own past self toward an unknown future.

  But that’s what we’re all doing every day, isn’t it? We carry ourselves forward through time, with no possible way of knowing what’s on the other end. We have to keep going, because standing still isn’t an option. It never has been. That’s where people like my mother and Eira get it wrong: they think if they stomp their feet and hold their breath, they can keep the world from changing. And it doesn’t work that way. It never has.

  Spike had stopped just up ahead, waiting for me to catch up. It looked at me and rattled its thorns, giving an inquisitive chirp. I hesitated.

  “We don’t want to go back to Shadowed Hills if we can help it, not with me exiled and everything. I guess we can figure out a way to pick up the car later. Can you put us out in Berkeley? Is that possible?”

  Spike looked at me witheringly, like I was a fool for asking, and rattled its thorns again.

  “Oh, right, the Berkeley Rose Gardens,” I said. I would have slapped my forehead if my arms hadn’t been full of May. “All right, put us out there, and I’ll carry May to campus.”

  And hopefully I could cast a decent illusion with May in my arms, and we wouldn’t get busted by the local police for being the victims of a clearly violent assault. I don’t have the best relationship with the Bay Area police departments—pretty much any of them. Not only am I a private investigator, which means our paths have occasionally crossed in ways that made me look less than squeaky-clean to their trained eyes, but I’m an unsolved disappearance who has never been able to quite account for her fourteen missing years.

  Oh, and then there’s the little matter of my various arrests for disorderly conduct, and the fact that one of the SFPD’s officers vanished without a trace while he was following me around the Bay Area, something he shouldn’t have been doing, since I hadn’t been doing anything wrong. I’d been trying to find Chelsea Ames, who had been teleporting uncontrollably due to her powers being greater than her capacity to control them.

  But Officer Thornton hadn’t been able to leave well enough alone, and he’d decided I had something to do with Chelsea’s disappearance. He’d continued to follow me until his actions had brought him into the crosshairs of Duchess Treasa Riordan, who had been trying to use Chelsea to her own ends. As a consequence, he’d spent more than a year lost in Annwn, one of the deeper, supposedly sealed lands of Faerie.

  Human minds aren’t designed to handle the stresses of deep Faerie. Human bodies didn’t evolve to thrive there. Much as the mortal world slowly damages the fae, between dawn ripping down our magic and iron shredding our bodies and souls, deep Faerie harms humans. I still don’t know how he managed to survive for as long as he did.

  I’d stumbled over him when I went back to Annwn looking for August, and I’d brought him back to San Francisco. I hadn’t been able to give him back his life. He was still a missing person as far as the police were concerned, and any family he had was still mourning him, convinced he’d been swallowed by a world that isn’t always friendly toward law enforcement. Which, while technically true, didn’t extend to “and now he’s in a magically-induced coma in the Luidaeg’s spare bedroom, and we have no idea when he’s going to wake up, if ever.” So if my illusions didn’t hold, we were more likely to wind up in a police station than an emergency room.

  Not that the emergency room wouldn’t be bad enough. May might be healing more slowly than I would have, but she was healing so much faster than any human, as well as missing several essential internal organs. The doctors would have no idea how she was still alive, or why her ears were pointed, or . . .

  No. Avoiding the police was our only good option. Spike paused in front of another patch of wall, which twisted and writhed apart into a familiar-looking opening. I took a deep breath, gathering my magic in a bloody haze. It came swift and easy, so thick I could virtually taste it. It tasted more like blood than ever before, coating my tongue and back teeth, and nearly making me gag. I swallowed and closed my eyes, grabbing the rising magic with mental hands, and spinning it around the pair of us like a veil of cotton candy, thin and tenuous and surprisingly sticky.

  Making us look human would have been more work than making us disappear entirely, and so I went with what felt like the easier option, draping us in the delicate folds of a hide-and-seek spell before I stepped through the opening.

  The world performed a sickening duck and roll, sending my stomach and my equilibrium spinning. I held tight to May, refusing to allow myself to either drop her or fall over.

  Eventually, the world calmed down, and my stomach calmed with it. I lifted my head, risking a deep breath of cool night air, and looked around at our new surroundings.

  There was no question of whether we’d returned to the mortal world: the streetlights a few yards away from and above me were a clear illustration of where we were, and if that wasn’t enough, telephone wires hung above them, heavy and black, blocking out swaths of sky. They wouldn’t have seemed so jarring if we hadn’t just been wandering around in Faerie, where that sort of thing has yet to take hold.

  We were in the rose gardens, as I’d requested, a sort of rustic amphitheater formed of rose beds and twisting pathways, all winding their way down toward a swath of green lawn. Spike’s door had let us out about halfway down one of the paths, which meant I would have to carry May all the way back up to street level. I adjusted my grip on her, glanced one more time at the rosebushes all around us, and started walking.

  These roses were almost reassuring, because healthy and vibrant as they were, they were roses I understood. They had been planted in mortal soil by human hands, and some of them weren’t perfect. There were holes in their leaves where the aphids had been at them, and there were bruised edges on their petals. These were ro
ses that would inevitably lose those petals and fade away, returning to the soil.

  Sometimes people assume I have a death wish, and in a way, I think they’re right: one of the first things I learned in Faerie was that to be a changeling is to be mortal. We burn bright because we don’t have a lot of time when compared to the elegant immortals around us. Changelings are mortal, and mortals die. So part of me grew up knowing I didn’t have forever, and that part is still with me now, motivating me, driving me forward. It’s an essential part of who I am, and on some level, I’m afraid that if I give it up, I won’t be October anymore.

  I couldn’t see May, but I could feel her, heavy in my arms, her hair tacky with half-dried blood. Everything we’d been able to research or deduce about Fetches told me she’d be fine, once she’d had time to recover from her injuries; she wasn’t going to die, because that wasn’t possible. She might be the only truly immortal being in all of Faerie. And still, I was terrified for her, almost as much as I was for Quentin. The thought that she might somehow slip away made me feel like my skeleton had been replaced with a block of ice, and I knew it couldn’t happen.

  Was this how Tybalt felt every time he saw me covered with my own blood and trying to yank someone else’s armory out of my intestines? If so, it was sort of a miracle that he hadn’t held me down and shouted until I agreed to remove my own humanity a long time ago.

  Carrying May to the top of the rose garden pathway was as difficult as I’d expected it to be: I didn’t drop her, and I only had to stop to rest and reposition her twice before I reached the fence that kept people from wandering into the rose garden when it was closed. Like, say, after dark. I freed one hand to shake the gate and check for weaknesses, then pulled away with a hiss of pain.

  Wrought iron. Of course it was wrought iron. The stuff isn’t even attractive—it’s like the bold type equivalent of a chain-link fence, all bulky and aggressive and unnecessarily prone to rust—but something deep in humanity’s genetic makeup remembers that the fae are out there, roaming the night, and that sometimes when we get bored, whole villages can disappear. So they deny we ever existed out loud, and they quietly ornament their homes and gardens with as much iron as they can yank out of the hills. They’re still working at keeping us out.