A Killing Frost Page 26

  My blood ran cold. “That boy?” I asked carefully. It said something about how tense I was that I didn’t even point out that she and Quentin were practically the same age—calling him “that boy” made about as much sense as me talking about Danny that way. “Is he here?”

  Diva nodded vigorously. “He’s in the kitchen,” she said. “Having chowder with Elsa and Nathan and where are you going? Don’t you want to talk to me?” I’d pushed past her as soon as the word “kitchen” left her lips, barreling across the front room—packed with Roane, many of them holding musical instruments, none of them wearing human disguises—toward the kitchen door.

  I hit it with my shoulder, one hand going to the knife at my hip while I was still moving. The three people sitting around the kitchen table looked up from their chowder, blinking in varying degrees of confused surprise. Two of them were Roane, familiar in the vague way that all Roane are familiar to me now, whether or not we’ve been introduced. My magic went into the rebirthing of them. They’re not my descendants, with the exception of Gillian, but my blood knows them all the same, and sings to their presence.

  The third was Quentin.

  He was wearing a fresh shirt, one without any blood on it, but he looked unharmed—and untroubled, as he dismissed me with a glance and went back to eating his chowder, reaching for the bread bowl at the center of the table and extracting a yeast roll to start dipping in the broth. I stepped fully into the kitchen, letting the door swing shut behind me.

  “Quentin,” I said, in as loud and carrying a voice as I could manage without shouting, “what the fuck?”

  The two Roane pushed their chairs back and got to their feet, looking at me with obvious alarm. “Is something wrong?” asked one, a girl with hair the color of sun-bleached driftwood and eyes even greener than Diva’s.

  “Yeah, my squire’s sitting here eating soup when I’ve been running all over the Bay Area looking for him.” I knew from talking to Marcia that he’d been at Goldengreen; how could he be this calm when Dean had been transformed into a tree?

  Easy: magic. Sometimes that’s the only answer anyone’s going to offer you. I took a deep breath, forcing myself to calm down, and walked toward him.

  “Was there a man with him when he got here?” I asked. “A red-haired man with yellow eyes, and a big-ass bow?”

  “Yes,” said the other Roane. He looked a little older than Quentin, dark-haired and dark-skinned, and as baffled as his counterpart. “He went down to the shore, but he said Quentin was hungry, and he was right.”

  “He’s had six bowls of chowder so far,” said the girl, glancing at Quentin, who was back to eating like he was afraid his food was going to be taken away. Which wasn’t an unreasonable concern, under the circumstances. “Is something wrong?”

  “Yes,” I said curtly. “Quentin, I want you to leave the bowl behind and stand up.”

  His only response was to pull the bowl closer to himself and start shoveling chowder into his mouth even faster than before, like a starving dog who knew with absolute certainty that once this food went away he was never going to get more, ever, for as long as he lived. I scowled and moved toward the table, sniffing the air.

  There, under the smell of chowder and fresh-baked rolls, was a ribbon of smoke. It was subtle; if I hadn’t been looking for it, I would have missed it, and Simon would have gotten away with this.

  “He’s under a compulsion,” I said, for the benefit of the two Roane who’d been keeping an eye on him, however unintentionally. “Is Liz home?”

  “She’s upstairs, um,” said Elsa.

  “Drinking,” said Nathan, more baldly.

  Elsa smacked him in the arm. “We’re not supposed to tell outsiders that,” she snapped.

  “This is October. She’s beloved of the sea witch,” he said. “She can’t be an outsider anywhere in the presence of the ocean. It doesn’t work that way.”

  I sort of wanted to ask him how it did work, if I had been somehow adopted by the sea because I spent too much time around the Luidaeg. Was there a membership card or something that I was supposed to flash? But for the moment, Quentin was more important.

  “Can you please go tell her I’m here?” I asked, fighting to keep my voice both level and pleasant. The two of them looked unsure. I ground my teeth together, forcing a smile. “Please? I haven’t seen her in a while.”

  Casting uneasy glances at Quentin all the while, the two teenage Roane stood and left the kitchen, leaving me alone with my squire. I didn’t have time to do this subtly, not with Simon down at the shore and working on a way to get himself to Saltmist. I drew the knife from my belt, eyes on Quentin the whole time to be sure that he wasn’t about to bolt or throw his chowder at me or something equally stupid.

  He didn’t move. When Simon had enchanted him, he’d done so with no functional knowledge of what a Dóchas Sidhe was capable of. He’d forgotten August entirely, and he didn’t remember being my ally or almost-friend, so why would he know the tricks of my bloodline? This spell had been constructed under the assumption that it would be taken down in the normal manner, assuming it was taken down at all.

  I ran the edge of the knife along the pad of my thumb, splitting the skin, and waited to start bleeding before sticking my thumb in my mouth, sucking greedily. I wanted as much blood as possible, but I wanted to avoid cutting myself a second time if I could manage it. The smell of copper and cut grass began gathering around me. Quentin didn’t look alarmed; far from it. Quentin didn’t look like he necessarily realized I was still there. All his attention was focused on his chowder.

  It seemed odd for Simon to have hit him with such a strong compulsion and given it such a narrow focus, instead of building something more useful and complex. Then again, if Simon was still using Evening’s blood to boost and modify his magic, he might not have meant to hit Quentin that hard. Controlling strength borrowed from a Firstborn isn’t exactly easy, and the few times I’d done it, I’d been working with the blood of a Firstborn who actively wished me no ill will. I couldn’t say the same of Evening.

  The wound in my thumb had already healed. I pulled it out of my mouth and swallowed, taking another step toward Quentin as I raised my hand and hooked my fingers, like I was preparing to jerk away a net. In a way, that was exactly what I was doing.

  The kitchen door slammed open as Elsa and Nathan returned, now with a clearly inebriated Elizabeth Ryan in tow. Diva’s mother was a tall, blonde-haired woman whose face had already started to youthen, courtesy of her transformation from part-time fae to actual pureblood. Unlike most Selkies with children of her own, Liz hadn’t needed to give her skin away if she wanted her child to be immortal. Diva got Faerie from her father’s side of the family.

  Hopefully, she’d inherited more than that from him, and would dodge her mother’s alcoholism. Liz was holding a tumbler of amber liquid in one hand, a baffled look on her face that only deepened when she saw me.

  “October,” she said. “You’re really—they said, but I thought—I didn’t think you’d come here so soon. Show your face here so soon. What’re you doing here?”

  Sometimes I envy people whose metabolisms are slow enough to let them drink. Other times I wonder if I looked that ridiculous back when alcohol was an option for me, and I’m privately grateful for my limited options. This was one of the second times. “You have my squire,” I said, swallowing my mouthful of blood and trying to hold fast to the magic I had raised in the kitchen. “I wanted him back, and that meant I had to go where he’d been taken.”

  “Oh.” Liz blinked, bewildered. “Well, what’s your squire doing here? He doesn’t live . . . he’s not . . . he shouldn’t be here.”

  “I didn’t ask you to go get her,” I said, glaring at the two young Roane who flanked her. “I asked you to tell her I was here. Not the same thing.”

  “You said you hadn’t seen her in a while,” said Natha
n. “That made it sound like you wanted her to come. We were trying to help.”

  I resisted the urge to put my hand over my face. “Good job, kids,” I said. “All right, Liz, Quentin is under a compulsion spell, and I don’t have a lot of time before the man who cast it causes some pretty serious problems between us and the Undersea. Can you take your teenagers and give us a moment’s privacy so I can take the spell down?”

  “No.” Liz crossed her arms, nearly spilling her drink in the process. “I can’t do that. I’m not leaving you alone to hurt this boy.”

  Elizabeth Ryan has never particularly cared for me. First, I was the changeling of no particular status or bloodline who was trying to have a relationship with one of her Selkies—my old boyfriend, Connor O’Dell. Then, after we’d been safely dissuaded from getting involved and Connor had been married off to Rayseline Torquill, I had been the semi-disgraced knight responsible for the loss of a Selkie skin when it was caught, along with myself and Quentin, in an exploding car in Tamed Lightning. As if that wasn’t enough, I had been dating Connor again after his marriage ended, and I was with him when he died. Elizabeth Ryan had plenty of reasons to dislike me.

  And that was all before she had become de facto guardian of my teenage daughter, a formerly mortal girl who had abruptly hopscotched over dozens of patiently waiting Selkie kinfolk to find herself draped in one of their lost skins, granted admission to the waters by none other than the Luidaeg herself—Elizabeth’s former lover. And then I’d accompanied the Luidaeg to the Duchy of Ships to help her call in the bargain that originally created the Selkies.

  It was no wonder that I wasn’t Elizabeth’s favorite person. It was something of a miracle that she didn’t have standing orders for me to be shot on sight.

  “Fine,” I snapped, and drew my knife again. “Just don’t get in the way. I need my squire back.”

  Quentin was still eating his chowder, not appearing to notice any of the drama unfolding around him. It was a well-crafted compulsion, if a bit more brute force than I tended to prefer. I could almost admire it, and probably would have, if it hadn’t been cast on my squire.

  The two Roane teens flinched, looking worried, as I ran the blade of the knife across the ball of my thumb again. I winced at the pain. The original wound was healed, but it sometimes feels like my body remembers and resents it when I cut myself in the same place more than once in a short period of time. Blood welled to the surface of the skin, and once again I stuck my thumb in my mouth, calling my magic back out of the air.

  A bolt of pain shot through my temples. The strain I’d placed on my magic when I’d involuntarily changed the balance of my own blood was still there, ready and eager to make things difficult for me. I swallowed anyway, trying to coax more blood out of the already-healing wound. It didn’t want to come, and I didn’t want to cut myself a third time, so I abandoned the attempt, pulling my thumb out of my mouth and taking a long step toward Quentin.

  The air around me was practically crackling with my magic. It was hard to say whether Liz and the teens could smell it—the capabilities of the Roane are still a little unclear to me, and the Luidaeg hasn’t exactly been forthcoming about the strengths and weaknesses of her reborn descendants—but I knew Quentin should have been able to. And yet he ignored the swelling static in the air in favor of reaching for another roll, still eating like he thought he was never going to have another opportunity.

  I stopped a foot or so away, close enough that I could have reached out and touched him if I’d wanted to, and allowed my eyes to unfocus until a sickly web of gray-and-orange lines appeared around him. They were more tightly woven than the spell in the shard realm had been, maybe because the spell was smaller and simpler and didn’t need to stand up to as much strain, or maybe all spells had the same number of strands and I just hadn’t looked at enough of them to know what I was seeing. I hated using Quentin as a test subject. I didn’t see any other option.

  Reaching out, I hooked my fingers through the top layer of the web and yanked it apart as hard as I could, wrenching and ripping until the strands began to fray and snap, releasing the smell of smoke and rotten oranges into the air. I gagged but refused to let go. I was only going to get one shot at this; I might be able to attempt tackling the spell again, despite my growing headache, but Quentin might know what I was doing, and I couldn’t imagine the spell wouldn’t at least attempt to protect itself from me if it was aware that it was being broken.

  It’s safest when working with magic to assume that everything is at least a little bit alive. I kept yanking and ripping, until a new sound appeared—one that would normally have been unwelcome, but which was, under the circumstances, proof that I was doing something right.

  Quentin started screaming.

  The spell wasn’t visibly harming him, not transforming him or wrenching out chunks of his magic. It was just fighting back, trying to work its hooks more deeply into the tender parts of his psyche. I continued pulling, hard and unmerciful, until it came apart under my hands. Quentin stopped screaming and stared at me, cheeks pale, eyes wide and glossy and filled with unshed tears. He glanced at the bowl in front of him and his pallor turned greenish as he shoved it away and lurched to his feet.

  I couldn’t see any fragments of the spell left in the air around him, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. I allowed my eyes to focus properly again. “Hey, kiddo,” I said cautiously. “How are you feeling?”

  Quentin responded by sprinting past me to the kitchen sink, where he was loudly and vigorously sick. I turned to watch him go, raising an eyebrow. “Guess you had a little too much chowder, huh?”

  Liz belatedly seemed to realize my squire was throwing up on her household dishes. “Hey!” she objected. “Use the toilet like a normal person!”

  “I think it was either the sink or the kitchen floor,” I said. “He made the right choice.”

  Liz frowned. “He’s doing those dishes.”

  “No, he’s not,” I corrected. “As soon as he’s done throwing up, we’re leaving.”

  For a moment, I thought she was going to argue and force me to play the Luidaeg card. The fact that I was here on semi-official business for the sea witch had to count for something, even if I’d been the one to get her involved. Fortunately, I didn’t have to say anything. Liz’s shoulders sagged, and she took a swig from her tumbler—probably a larger one than was a good idea with what looked and smelled like reasonably decent whiskey.

  “Fine,” she said sullenly. “Just get him out of my house before he vomits on a couch.” She turned and strode out of the kitchen, shoulders back and head high, like she thought she was somehow making a dramatic exit.

  I guess enough alcohol can turn anything dramatic. Quentin was still throwing up. I walked over to him, rubbing his back with one hand.

  “Hey, buddy,” I said. “I’m sorry you got grabbed. Are you okay?”

  “He said he’d be back for me, and that until he came, I should sit quietly and have something to eat,” he said, turning to look reproachfully at me. “He said I didn’t need to worry about a thing until he came back for me. I knew I knew you. I knew you were important, but I couldn’t worry about that. I needed to eat, and I needed to wait, and I needed not to think about anything that could possibly be upsetting.”

  “That sounds like a very carefully considered compulsion,” I said. “Did you notice anything strange about it?”

  “You mean apart from the fact that it was heavier than it should have been?” He clutched his stomach, still green around the edges. “I think I would have kept eating until I literally burst, because I couldn’t stop. Normally, compulsion spells can’t make you hurt yourself unless that’s all they’re designed to do. They certainly can’t make you do it as a side effect.” The loathing in his voice was thick as heavy cream. He wasn’t going to be forgiving Simon for a while, if he ever did.

  “He’s using
Evening’s magic to supercharge his own.” Her name should be safe enough here, this close to the ocean, where Maeve’s magic overwhelmed Titania’s. “It’s going to hurt him soon, if it hasn’t already. But we can’t count on him running out of her blood, not when he had so long to collect it. Did he say anything about where he was going?”

  “Just that he wouldn’t need me as a bargaining chip.” Quentin paled further, eyes getting even wider. “Dean,” he gasped. “He . . . he hurt . . . we went to Goldengreen before he brought me here, and he hurt Dean. And all the others. I don’t think . . . I don’t think anyone’s alive in Goldengreen.”

  I’d been halfway hoping he wouldn’t remember that until we were done dealing with Simon himself. “They’re not dead, Quentin,” I said. “He turned them into trees and toadstools, but those are living things, and the Luidaeg is working on bringing them back right now.”

  “Really?” he asked, voice small and hurt and hopeful. It was painful to hear.

  “Really-really,” I said. “She’d be here if she didn’t need to wake them up. And he didn’t get everyone. Marcia got away.”

  Quentin frowned. “No, she didn’t,” he said. “I saw her in the courtyard. I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t do anything but watch what he was doing to them. I wanted to kill him. I still want to kill him.” He blinked, expression guileless. “Please may I kill him?”

  “I’d really prefer you didn’t kill him until he knows who he is and where he’s supposed to be going. Remember that he’s doing all this while under the influence of the Luidaeg’s spell.”

  “Which he took on himself voluntarily.”

  “Only to save his daughter,” I said. “If this is anyone’s fault, it’s hers. She’s the one who decided she knew better than anyone else, and that she could be the one to bring Oberon back. Simon didn’t do this to himself because he wanted power. He just wanted to bring August home. Now come on.”

  “Where are we going?” asked Quentin, still clutching his stomach.