Twelve
“I THINK I’M GOING TO be sick,” I said, turning to Tybalt. He was already rising, turning away from me. He was always pale—being nocturnal will do that for a person—but now he was almost waxen, looking genuinely unwell.
“Tybalt?” I asked.
“You’re not alone,” he said. Then he folded inward on himself and, cat-form, ran for the nearest stretch of trees.
I followed, not fully sure what was going on, but absolutely sure that I didn’t want to let him out of my sight.
By the time I caught up with him, he was back on two legs, bracing himself against a tree as he emptied the contents of his stomach into the briars.
I hung back, trying to give him the pretense of privacy, and waited for the gagging to slow before I walked over and began rubbing the small of his back in small, concentric circles.
“Hey, babe,” I said. “Talk to me. You get upset when I don’t talk to you. Show me the same courtesy.”
He straightened, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, and turned to give me a blank, despairing look. His pupils were mere slits, almost invisible against the striped green of his irises. He looked like a man who’d just seen a ghost. He looked like he was about to topple over.
He looked like something had managed to hurt him deeply, and whatever it was, I wanted to destroy it. My hands itched for my knives.
“One hundred and fifty-eight,” he managed to rasp, before he turned and began retching into the bushes again, clinging to the nearest trunk for balance. There was nothing left in his stomach. That didn’t stop him from trying, heaving hard.
I kept rubbing his back. There didn’t seem to be anything else I could do.
When the retching stopped again, I leaned closer and asked, “One hundred and fifty-eight what?”
“I know the West Coast believes itself to have been the sole target of Michael’s Rides, because he focused here so tightly for the past hundred years or so,” he said, voice dull.
“Once he determined where his last daughter had gone to ground, he Rode near her more frequently, seeking her return. It’s easy to believe that all anyone had to do to evade him was be elsewhere. But that was never so.”
“What do you—”
“The first time I heard of Michael’s Rides, I was a kitten in Londinium, and woke one evening to find the court in disarray.
Two kits had been plucked from their beds the day before, leaving their parents frantic to find them.
But the smell of wax lingered where they had been, and my father ordered that the matter be dropped, lest Michael should hear of our interference and return to take more of his due.
They had been my playmates and my friends, inasmuch as my father allowed me to have friends, and I don’t even remember their names.
” He scrubbed at his face with one hand, then murmured, more quietly, “I don’t remember their names. ”
“I still don’t understand,” I said, but I was dreadfully afraid that I was beginning to.
“I don’t remember their names, but I remember their numbers,” he said.
“One hundred and fifty-eight kittens have vanished from my court since I grew old enough to become aware of the threat posed by Blind Michael. One hundred and fifty-eight Cait Sidhe from my court alone, tortured and transformed and finally wiped clean by that monster’s magic.
I haven’t seen nearly enough Riders here to account for that number, which means most of them have long since stopped their dancing. ”
I winced. “Tybalt, I am so sorry.” I was, too. I had never considered how many people he must have lost, to have been a King for as long as he had, with no way of shutting Michael out of his halls.
“You, of all the people in all the world, have no need to be sorry,” he said.
“You not only brought it to a close, you made that number smaller for the first time in my life. You stopped the Rides, October. I already loved you by the time you did that, was already struggling with the reality of my affections, but if I hadn’t, I would have pledged to wed you anyway, solely for that gift to me. ”
“Yeah, well, I would have said no if you’d only wanted to marry me because I did something stupidly heroic,” I said.
“And I love you, too. And I think … talking to Eutychia gave me an idea. Maybe we can make that number a little smaller again, if any of the children Michael stole from your court are still here.”
The last time I’d been here long enough to think about it, Michael had been alive, and I didn’t have the power or the practice to unweave a spell cast by one of the Firstborn.
Now, though … any of his children who still wanted to go home, I could at least offer to help.
Maybe I couldn’t help them all. But I could try.
Tybalt nodded, clearly following the direction of my thoughts. “I would like that,” he said. “For now, what do you want to do? We can’t return to the bonfire after leaving the way we did, not without it being seen as a sign of weakness—”
As if in answer, the pocket of my gown began to ring.
I blinked at it for a moment, so startled that I didn’t realize it was my phone at first. It kept ringing, and brought understanding with the sound. I squeaked and dug it out of my pocket, unlocking the screen with a swipe of my thumb.
“Hello?”
“Oh, she does have her phone!” said May. “I told Quentin you probably didn’t, since you would have called home by now if you had it, but I guess he was right and I was wrong. Anyway, where the hell are you? I’ve run through the breast milk in the bedroom, and I’m starting in on the kitchen supply.”
I winced. “Hi, May. I’m sorry I didn’t call. Things have gotten a little messy here.”
“Things are always a little messy when you’re involved. What the hell is going on that’s so important you can’t come home and take over caring for your daughter?”
“Quentin told you Raysel got snatched?”
“He did.” Her tone softened. She had a real soft spot for that girl. I hated to exploit it, but not so much that I wasn’t going to try. “You find her?”
“Not quite. Tybalt and I followed Luna’s trail to Blind Michael’s skerry, figuring she would have taken her daughter to her own mother. She did, but someone else got here first.”
“What?!” May’s voice was an ice pick to my ear.
I winced again. “Luna and Acacia were attacked before we could get here. They were both severely injured. I was able to heal Luna, enough that she’ll live.
Whoever led the attack didn’t use the right tools to kill one of the Firstborn: Acacia will be fine.
But to heal, she’s rooted herself in the woods. ”
“Meaning…?”
“Meaning we don’t have an exit from this place until she wakes up in the evening,” I said. “I’ve been talking to some of the locals, trying to get an idea of who might have known that Luna was planning to abduct her own child. What’s going on there?”
“Traumatized-teen slumber party,” she said shortly. “Chelsea’s here, along with Quentin and Dean. Raj keeps popping in and out as his duties allow. Dean’s threatening to call Diva.”
“Wow, a full house,” I said, trying to keep my tone light. “How’s Miranda taking it?”
“She’s mostly been sleeping. She wakes up periodically to fuss for food or a change, but she’s still enough of a potato that this isn’t totally upsetting her.
It’ll be a different story in six months.
Dean keeps trying to make off with her. He doesn’t get enough time with his new baby sisters, and he wants to practice holding a real baby while he has the opportunity. ”
“All right, that sounds adorable,” I said. “We’ll be home as soon as we can, I promise. But we can’t go anywhere until Acacia wakes up.”
“I want to help.”
“You said Chelsea’s there. Can you call her father and ask whether anyone in the knowe was asking questions about Raysel recently?
When she was coming back, what she was doing, anything like that?
Luna wasn’t exactly subtle about expecting Raysel to be coming back to Shadowed Hills soon, but that doesn’t mean everyone in the duchy is going to be a suspect. ”
Root and branch, please, let everyone in the duchy not be a suspect. The thought of trying to talk to that many people was enough to give me hives.
“I can do that,” said May, and she sounded relieved enough by the idea of having something to do that I almost felt bad.
Only almost. “If you need to go somewhere, I trust Dean to babysit,” I said. “If he’s free to stay. If he’s not, call the Luidaeg.”
As Miranda’s godmother, we could ask her for babysitting without winding up deeper in her debt. That was a small wrinkle of the situation that I hadn’t initially considered, but was now endlessly grateful for. The list of people I’d actually trust with my baby was phenomenally short.
“I think I’d need to physically remove him from the house, and I don’t have anywhere else to be,” she said. “I’m fine staying with her, but you’re going to owe me a really nice spa day when you finish running all over hell’s half-acre looking for answers, got it?”
“I got it,” I said, deeply relieved. “I owe you one.”
“Sister mine, by this point, you owe me so many that you should be grateful I’m not charging you interest,” she said.
“Get home soon and safe, okay? I am not explaining to your kid how Mommy and Daddy couldn’t stop messing around with the Firstborn and got themselves sucked into some sort of messed-up shadow realm for a thousand years. ”
“Even if you don’t trust me, believe that Tybalt is smarter than that, okay?”
“Yeah, sure,” she said, and hung up in a gale of raucous laughter.
I dropped the phone back into my pocket, turning to Tybalt. “We owe May a spa day,” I said.
“Noted,” he affirmed.
“But she knows we’ll be a while, and she says she’s fine with it, which means we can keep looking for information.”
“We’re stuck here. We’d be doing that anyway.”
“Yeah, but now we don’t have to feel bad about it.” I shot him what I hoped would qualify as a winning smile. “Come on. You get annoyed when I go to work without you. Now you get to go to work with me.”