The Brightest Fell Read online

  Annwn may have been a place where people lived once, but that was a long time ago, in a world that might as well have been a fairy tale for all the impact it has on people like me. Annwn is a myth and a legend and a lie, sealed off by Oberon like all the other deep realms of Faerie. The fact that we were here should have been an impossibility. Would have been, if we hadn’t been willing to barter our freedom for the use of a candle. Not exactly a route that was available to everyone, or one that should have been emulated.

  And August had been here. The whole time Simon had been trading his soul away, one piece at a time, looking for a way to bring her home, she’d been here, locked away from her family but safe, outside the reach of anyone who might want to hurt her. August hadn’t been suffering like Luna and Rayseline had, or even like I had. She’d just been unable to find her way home.

  Home. I frowned. That was the odd part of all this—not that there were any really normal parts to the situation. August had traded her road home to the Luidaeg, saying that she couldn’t come back until she’d found Oberon. I was becoming convinced that she was back in the mortal world, even if she wasn’t back with our mother yet. Was that not close enough to count as “home”? How had she been able to do that without finding Oberon?

  Unless she had managed to find him, and things were about to get even more complicated. Because that was exactly what we needed.

  The trail of August’s magic led down the hall and to a curving staircase, winding its way upward through the castle. This, I recognized, despite Riordan’s extensive renovations. These stairs led to the cells where Etienne, Tybalt, and I had all been imprisoned, intended to be used as warm bodies to help her build her new vision of Faerie. Well. Some of us were going to be warm bodies. Tybalt had been marked for slaughter by her ally, Raj’s father Samson, who was going to make sure that his son was never truly a King of Cats, only a puppet.

  Thinking of Tybalt wasn’t good for me. Not yet. I shook the thought away as I climbed the stairs, looking for the place where August’s trail became something else.

  Behind and below us, someone shouted. Riordan had noticed that we were gone.

  “Perhaps speed is of the essence,” said Simon mildly.

  “Next time you misplace one of your kids for a century, I’m not helping you,” I snapped, voice barely above a whisper, and walked faster.

  August’s trail led us out of the stairwell and down a hall, the walls lined with closed doors that looked solid enough to stand up to a legion of ax-wielding Jack Nicholsons. That was a terrifying thought in and of itself. I slowed, testing the air again and again, before I finally stopped in front of one of the doors and thrust the candle at Quentin.

  “Hold this,” I said.

  Quentin has been my squire long enough to know better than to argue with me. He took the candle, staying close as I dropped to my knees and pulled the set of lock picks from inside my jacket.

  Simon raised an eyebrow. “Are you a common thief, then?”

  “I like to think of myself as a rare and exceptional thief, but sure,” I said. The last time I’d been here, I’d picked these locks with bits of twig and bracken. Real lock picks were a major step up. It made the job seem almost trivial. That was nice. Difficult things should always seem trivial, when they can.

  Moving as quickly as I dared, I pulled the appropriate lock picks from my set and slipped them into place, breathing slow and deep as I worked at the tumblers. These were old locks, preindustrial, tooled by hand instead of by machines. That meant that each of them was unique, with its own weights and balances. It also meant they were remarkably primitive compared to some of the locks I’d encountered in the mortal world. After only a few seconds, the latch clicked.

  I stood, tucking my lock picks back into my pocket, and took the candle back from Quentin before I opened the door.

  The cell on the other side was small and plain. Riordan hadn’t bothered casting any illusions here, maybe because she hadn’t seen the need: it wasn’t like the occupant was ever going to tell anyone how terrible her hospitality had been. The air reeked of piss and stale sweat. Heaps of straw and rough bracken lined the walls, providing bedding and a latrine at the same time. Quentin’s nose wrinkled. Simon hung back, clearly unwilling to enter the room.

  One of the heaps of bracken moved.

  I jumped, unable to help myself, putting out my free hand to keep Quentin where he was. Then, cautiously, I crept forward. Riordan would be here soon enough. Anyone she had felt the need to lock up was probably going to need our help . . . and August’s trail led here. She had been in this room. She had left from this room.

  “Hello?” I said cautiously.

  The heap of bracken moved again, pulsing almost, like something beneath it was trying to sit up. Then it shattered, resolving itself into a thin, wild-eyed man sitting in a pile of sticks and soiled grasses. I gasped.

  “Officer Thornton?” I asked.

  His eyes fixed on me. “You!” He lunged onto his knees, grabbing my forearms with bony hands. All the excess weight seemed to have been melted off of him by his time in Annwn—and there hadn’t been that much to spare in the first place. “You came back! You came back! Did I finally prove that I wouldn’t tell? I won’t tell! I’ll never tell!” He began to laugh unsteadily.

  As he slumped forward, head against my shoulder, I realized that his laughter had become indistinguishable from tears.

  Dammit.

  “Is that a human?” asked Simon, sounding disgusted and fascinated at the same time, like he couldn’t believe what his eyes were telling him. “How is there a human here? This is Annwn!”

  “This is Officer Michael Thornton of the San Francisco Police Department,” I said, patting Officer Thornton awkwardly on the back. He was wearing the soiled, tattered remains of the clothes he’d had on when he had first tumbled through one of Chelsea’s portals and into Annwn, a place where a human had no business being. He was here because of me. When we’d saved our own, we hadn’t been able to save him. I’d told the Luidaeg where he was and washed my hands of the problem.

  Riordan must have been feeding him. Humans aren’t like fae. Humans won’t suffer endlessly, never quite giving in to nature’s laws and dying: humans will eventually be released. It can take a long time, especially in the lands of Faerie, where time and causality aren’t always logical. But she still must have been feeding him. Not much. Just enough to keep body and soul together.

  “Sweet Maeve,” whispered Quentin. “What did she do?”

  Officer Thornton was still collapsed against me, still crying. I shook my head and replied grimly, “She kept him.” She could have killed him. That wouldn’t normally have been my go-to, especially not where a member of the police was concerned. Devin had drilled it into my head often and early that messing with the mortal cops was always more trouble than it was worth. At the same time . . .

  This wasn’t the Summerlands, where signs of humanity could be found everywhere, from pieces of their tech to stolen mortal servants working in the larger noble households. This was Annwn. This was a land that had never been intended for humanity’s use. Being here must have hurt him, every day, as the very land tried to reject his reality. Killing him would have been kinder.

  Which was exactly why Riordan hadn’t done it.

  “Put him down and follow the trail,” said Simon, a thin line of impatience slithering through his words. “We need to move before Treasa returns.”

  “I’m not putting him down,” I snapped. “We can’t leave him here again.”

  “He’s not worth our lives.”

  “That’s not your decision.” There were voices in the distance now, voices on the stairs. They were going to catch us soon. “This is where August’s trail ends. We need to move.”

  “The human—”

  “Is coming!” I raised my candle. “Now get over here, or get your as
s left behind. Quite honestly, I’m good with either right now.”

  Simon scowled as he walked across the room to stand beside me. Quentin stepped closer. Fog began to rise from the candle, and with Officer Michael Thornton—lost to Faerie, now found—sobbing against my shoulder, the soft, misty gray closed in, and we were gone.

  SEVENTEEN

  WHEN THE FOG CLEARED, we were standing against the wall of a graffiti-festooned alley. Leaning forward gave me a perfect view of Valencia Street. Time had continued marching on in the mortal world while we were running around the various layers of Faerie: the sun was hanging low in the sky, and the ashy, charred scent of torn-down magic still lingered in the air. We had arrived in San Francisco immediately after dawn.

  After which dawn? The human world and the Summerlands don’t always align perfectly where time is concerned, and deeper Faerie is even worse. It could have been days since we’d started down the Babylon Road. Our time could already be up, and we didn’t have August.

  What we did have was a sobbing, shaking, seriously malnourished member of the SFPD. That would have been a problem no matter what the circumstances. People notice that sort of thing. Unfortunately for us, Officer Thornton had been working out of the Valencia Street station when he’d gone missing, which meant we had a sobbing, shaking, malnourished cop less than three blocks from a whole building full of people who would be very interested to hear what had happened to him.

  I was trying to figure out our next move when the impossible happened: the candle went out.

  That should have seemed like a small thing—candles go out all the time—but it wasn’t. This was a Babylon candle, designed to keep us on the Babylon Road, and it shouldn’t have gone out unless it had been dropped, or we had reached our destination. I looked wildly around, almost expecting August to step out of a mural. No such luck. No one else was here, not even a representative sample of the city’s homeless population.

  “Well, crap,” I muttered, and handed the candle to Quentin before digging my phone out of my pocket.

  “What’s going on?” asked Simon.

  “Toby’s calling the Luidaeg because her candle went out,” said Quentin.

  “Not quite,” I said, and raised the phone to my ear. It was ringing. That was a good sign; following the Babylon Road hadn’t drained my battery.

  “Hello?” rumbled a voice like a mountain coming to life.

  “Danny, it’s October,” I said. “I’m in an alley at Valencia and I think 17th. I have Quentin, Simon Torquill, and a traumatized mortal with me. Can you come pick us up?”

  There was a pause while Danny absorbed all this. I stood silent and perfectly still, hoping that I hadn’t finally discovered the place where Danny’s amiable goodwill ran out.

  I did a favor for Danny’s sister a long time ago, before the whole thing with the pond and the fourteen missing years of my life. He’s been trying to repay me ever since, despite my endless insistence that he doesn’t owe me anything. I try not to lean on him too heavily, but I also try never to forget that he’s there, because of all the allies I’ve made since my return, he was among the first, and he’s always been among the most dependable.

  “I’m almost offended that you felt like you had to ask,” he said finally. “Your human, they going to be a problem?”

  “Just spin a quick deflection over the cab, and I’ll keep him quiet,” I assured him. Officer Thornton was still clinging to me and crying. He might cause a scene if he realized we were back in the human world—but this was the best possible time to keep him from realizing that. There was no one else around. “Hurry.”

  “I’ll break some laws,” said Danny, and hung up.

  When I lowered my own phone, both Simon and Quentin were watching me, the first with wide-eyed dismay, the second with understanding. Naturally, it was Simon who spoke.

  “We’re taking him with us?” he demanded.

  “Yeah, we are,” I said, putting my arms protectively around Officer Thornton. He was a big man, even emaciated as he was: I felt like I was trying to use myself to conceal a wall, instead of the other way around. “It’s our fault he was there, and what happens if we give him back to his people in this condition? He could blow the whole ‘keeping Faerie secret’ routine just by opening his mouth.”

  That wasn’t going to happen. I was raised to fear the human world becoming aware of Faerie’s existence, and sometimes the habits of paranoia were impossible to break. Sometimes I flinched away from people, even knowing that they were more likely to look at my ears and think “Star Trek fanatic” than “actual proof of inhuman intelligence.” But when I was being rational, I knew the former was infinitely more likely. If we dropped Officer Thornton on the doorstep of the SFPD right now, in his current condition, he wouldn’t betray the existence of Faerie. They’d blame a human cult, or a terror cell, or both.

  And my name would be smack dab in the middle of it all, because I was the person he’d been investigating when he disappeared, and there was no possible way he wouldn’t name me when he started describing his rescue. They might dismiss his stories of magic and beautiful people with pointy ears as the ravings of a madman, but me? They knew I existed.

  There was no way I could have left Officer Thornton behind a second time, not and live with myself afterward, but I wasn’t going to let him do what so many others had tried and failed to do. I wasn’t going to let him take away my mortal life. If the SFPD decided I was a person of interest in his kidnapping and subsequent return, that was exactly what would happen. Fae don’t do well in human prisons. Too much iron, not enough opportunity to hide.

  Quentin’s don’t-look-here had dissolved somewhere along the Babylon Road. I grabbed a handful of shadows from the air, bearing down as hard as I could as I tried to hide us. The spell was slippery, trying to wiggle through my fingers and disappear, until a ribbon of smoke and spiced oranges wriggled past, not close enough to count as cast on me, but close enough for me to snatch.

  The rot is fading, I thought, and wove Simon’s magic into my own, casting the net of my illusion over the four of us. It wasn’t quite a don’t-look-here; those take more finesse than I was currently capable of dredging out of myself. I was exhausted. I was done. Instead, this was a simple overlay, showing anyone who looked the unobstructed alley. As long as no one tried to walk through us, we’d be fine.

  Officer Thornton wasn’t crying anymore. He was just slumped against me, barely moving. I resisted the urge to check his pulse. If he needed a hospital, I would feel compelled to take him to one, and that would end poorly for all of us.

  “Quentin,” I said. “What day is it?”

  My squire blinked at me, seemingly baffled, before his eyes widened in understanding and he pulled out his phone. It started to chirp and vibrate almost immediately.

  “I guess going to Annwn put me in airplane mode,” he said. “I have like, three dozen texts from Dean, and he isn’t usually—oh.” He paled. “It’s been three days.”

  “Not as bad as it could have been,” I said.

  Quentin didn’t look like he believed me. It must have been nice, still being young enough to see losing three days as a bad thing. As long as it was less than a year, I’d take it.

  “Three days gone leaves us with four days to find my daughter,” said Simon. “We can’t stand here guarding your misplaced mortal all day.”

  “We won’t have to,” I said. “Danny’s on his way. He’s going to take Officer Thornton to the Luidaeg.”

  “Alone?” asked Quentin. His tone told me that he already knew the answer, even as he was hoping to be wrong.

  Sorry, kid. “You’re going with them,” I said. “You need to tell the Luidaeg what we saw in Annwn. She should be able to put him back together.” And wipe parts of his memory, so that he thought he’d been kidnapped by ninjas or pirates or, hell, time-traveling cowboys. Anything, as long as the culpr
its were completely human, and completely not related to me in any way.

  “I don’t like the idea of leaving you alone with him,” said Quentin, glancing at Simon, in case I had somehow missed his point.

  “I’m safer alone with him than you are,” I said. “He can’t hurt me, remember?”

  “I am, in point of fact, standing right here, and am not currently intending to harm anyone,” said Simon. He sounded weary and exasperated, like he was getting tired of explaining himself to us.

  Tough. After the things he’d done, he could put up with a little explaining. “Your ideas of ‘harm’ don’t always line up with ours,” I said. “Still. I believe you, which is why I’m staying with you, instead of calling for backup. We’re going to follow August’s trail while Quentin gets Officer Thornton to the Luidaeg. Quentin, you can join us when you’re done. I’m sure Danny will be happy to give you a ride.” And if that had the extra added bonus of equipping us with both a Bridge Troll and a car, I would take it.

  Danny is not the most effective fighter I’ve ever known. He doesn’t have to be. When he hits something, it stays down, and most weapons blunt or break against his stony skin. He would be an asset, if this ever devolved into actual fighting.

  Quentin still looked unsure. I decided to sweeten the deal.

  “Officer Thornton is going to need things to be quiet and calm while you’re in the car. You should have time to text Dean and fill him in on what’s been going on. Let him know that you didn’t run off to Disney World for a dream vacation while he was stuck here, dealing with the usual gang of weirdoes.”

  “I don’t dream about going to Disney World,” said Quentin. “Too humid, not enough hockey.”

  “See, and here I thought the Canada pavilion in Epcot would be your go-to vacation destination,” I said.