Eighteen #4
This time when he moved forward, she stood her ground, and he got an arm around me, both of them holding me up when my wobbly knees threatened to dump me on my ass. I tilted my head back, smiling at him.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hello,” he replied. “Did it never occur to you to wait for me outside?”
“No,” I admitted. “I assumed you’d already managed to find a window and were waiting for me inside, and then once I found Raysel, I sort of stopped worrying about it. I know you can take care of yourself.”
“I found the entirely wrong building,” he said, voice doleful. “A stable, with walls of briar and horses penned within. I had to backtrack to where we’d been separated from each other to catch your scent and follow it to this place.”
“This is the Children’s Hall,” I said. “It’s where they put the children they’re trying to transform. It’s where they put Raysel.”
He looked at her, then at me, clearly taking stock of my condition. “I assume they put her here to change her.”
“They said … they said they’d make me back into what I was supposed to be,” said Raysel, voice shaking so hard that it almost broke.
“They said I’d never run away again, because there’d be nowhere I could go.
They were going to trap me here. In this place, and in my own body, and … and never let me go home again.”
“Oh, kitten,” he breathed. “The ones who would have done that to you forgot to account for the people who care for you. You are a part of our household, our court, and I am still a King of Cats. No one steals the kittens from my care.”
Raysel smiled, and the expression was so achingly sweet that it made me even angrier with Luna, who was her mother. Who should have known her well enough to care for her, not just for the idea of her.
“I know,” she said. “Toby … she saved me, and I’m sort of glad you weren’t here, because I didn’t need you to see me like that. I didn’t need anyone to see me like that.”
Tybalt nodded, expression grave. “I do understand. Some things are difficult to bear, especially when they were never meant to happen. Shall we go?”
Raysel and I both nodded, and, still holding me up, Tybalt turned to go back out the door he had just arrived through. We followed, letting him take most of my weight, and bit by bit, we left the Children’s Hall behind.
Raysel let out a sound somewhere between a sigh and a burst of laughter when she saw the star-filled sky above us, no longer filtered by the shattered remains of the roof.
She pulled away, taking deep breaths and exhaling hard, like she was trying to push every molecule of the Children’s Hall out of her lungs.
Tybalt, on the other hand, pulled me closer to him, bracing me, and in a low voice, asked, “How much blood did you lose?”
“I don’t know, exactly,” I said. “I was focusing on Raysel, and I got most of it by chewing a hole in my own cheek. Could have been a little, could have been a lot. I’m light-headed enough to think that it was probably a lot.
” There was no sense in lying to him. He knew me too well for that, and he would figure me out one way or another.
If I was honest, we could move past this a lot quicker.
“Little fish…” He sighed. “I wish you wouldn’t run away from me looking for opportunities to bleed.”
“We both knew Raysel was going to need help, and I’m not going to be sorry that I helped her,” I said firmly. “I know that’s not what you’re asking me for.”
“It’s not,” he said. “I wouldn’t have stopped you if I had been beside you. I would just prefer to catch you when you fall, not arrive after the fact to find someone else has already lifted you from the floor.”
It was a reasonable request, and not a new one. I flushed, feeling a little bad about making him ask again. “I’m trying,” I said. “You know I’m trying.”
“My patience, among other things,” he said, and looked over at Raysel. She was still looking up at the sky, but she was no longer breathing like she wanted to exhale everything that had happened to her in the last twenty-four hours. “Rayseline? Are you quite ready to go home?”
She turned toward him, brightening, and smiled.
“I would really, really like that,” she said.
“Can we go home? Now? Please? I want to tell Chelsea that I’m okay.
I want to tell everyone that I’m okay. I want to…
” She paused, a complicated expression crossing her face.
“I want to tell my father that I’m back. Can I call him?”
“Any time you like,” I said. “He’d really love to hear from you—and I promise, he had no idea what your mother was doing. He’s worried out of his mind right now.”
“I know,” she said, softly. “I mean, I know he didn’t know. I didn’t know he was actually worried about me. But she told me she acted alone, and I … I believed her. I know he didn’t know what she was planning to do to me.”
“So let’s go home and you can call him,” I said.
Raysel nodded and walked back over to us.
I looped my free arm through hers, pulling her along as I started toward the trees, Tybalt keeping pace.
And for a moment, I thought—I really thought—that we were going to be able to just walk out of there.
We’d go find Acacia, and she’d help us get back to the Luidaeg’s apartment, and we’d take Raysel home so her girlfriend could yell at her until the sun set again.
Miranda would cry and I would feed her and everything would be wonderfully normal and dull and perfect.
That was all I wanted. To go home to normal and dull.
“And where, exactly, do you think you’re going?”
Well, crap.