Ashes of Honor

  Tybalt breathed out slowly. Then he nodded. “For her sake, I am glad. Cait Sidhe justice can be cruel,” he said. “For mine…I am troubled.”

  “Yeah,” I said quietly. “If it wasn’t her, who was it?”

  We stood in that flame-blackened room, looking at each other. Someone had snatched Chelsea. Someone was pursuing her, for reasons we still didn’t know. And whoever it was, they were able to follow her into the Court of Cats, and they didn’t care who got hurt.

  ELEVEN

  WE STEPPED FROM THE SHADOWS onto the hard-packed earth edging the creek that runs through the heart of the UC Berkeley campus. The creek’s small footbridge shielded us from mortal eyes; between that and the hanging ivy threatening to block the sun, we could practically have pitched a tent and had a cookout down there.

  “I should go.”

  “I wish you didn’t have to.” I turned to Tybalt. He was standing in the deepest part of the shadow. I could still see the bruise on his cheek and the exhaustion in his slumping shoulders. “Are you sure you don’t want a cup of coffee or something?”

  “Your love of artificial stimulants will be the death of you one day,” he said, a smile turning up the corners of his lips. “I must attend to my Court, and you must attend to matters here. I will find you when I have the freedom to do so.”

  “Okay,” I said reluctantly. The smell of pennyroyal and musk rose as he opened the door onto the Shadow Roads, and he was gone, leaving me alone.

  If any of the students who saw me emerge from beneath the bridge thought it was strange, they kept their thoughts to themselves. This was UC Berkeley. Strange women in leather jackets with ash-stained hands probably crawled out from under their bridges all the time. The student body continued about its business, and I continued on mine.

  Even if Walther didn’t have anything useful for me yet, he had my squire, and I wanted him back. Quentin was a smart kid, and that extended to going where I told him to go, as long as he didn’t think I was trying to be heroic and self-sacrificing. “Walther had better have coffee on,” I muttered, and kept walking.

  As a junior faculty member, Walther barely rated an office. He didn’t rate one that was easy to find. It was located in a maze of twisting hallways that seemed to have been designed by an architect who dreamed of one day having a real Minotaur lurking to devour the unwary. No legendary Greek monsters leaped out to grab me as I walked, finally stopping in the open doorway of a small, cluttered room that held two legendary monsters of its own. I rapped my knuckles against the doorframe.

  “If one of you doesn’t have coffee for me, I’m going to be cranky,” I announced.

  Walther and Quentin had been bent over something on the counter. They straightened and turned at the sound of my voice. Walther smiled. Quentin didn’t bother with the preliminaries. He grabbed a paper cup and trotted over to me, holding it at arm’s length.

  “Here,” he said. “Coffee.”

  “And thus am I reminded why I allow you to live,” I said. The coffee was cold and the “creamer” had never seen the inside of a cow, but I didn’t care. The caffeine was all I needed. I lowered the cup after chugging a third of its contents, asking, “What’s our status?”

  “Come in, come in,” said Walther, beckoning me forward. “And close the door.” His glasses were askew, and his hair was mussed. Not enough that anyone who didn’t know him would notice, but Walther worked very hard to maintain his superficial “I am the perfect professor” appearance. Mussed hair didn’t go with that ideal.

  “Long night?” I asked, doing as I was bid. The office was considerably dimmer once the light from the hall was blocked. All the overheads were off, leaving us in a room that would have been substantially too gloomy for mortal eyes.

  Good thing none of us had mortal eyes. I sipped my coffee as I walked across the room, drinking more slowly now that the first rush of caffeine was in my system. With the ambient light blocked by the door, it was apparent that whatever Walther was working on was glowing faintly, like a light stick the morning after Halloween. It was a steady glow, at least, and not a candlelight flicker. I hate candles.

  “I was already here when you called, tinkering with some personal projects. You just focused me,” said Walther. He turned back to the counter. “I’m not technically supposed to be here today, but I knew no one else was using my office, so I just kept going.”

  “He took a break for breakfast,” said Quentin helpfully.

  “I bet he did.” By the time Quentin got to campus, he was probably so focused on food that he could have convinced an invading army to stop long enough to get some oatmeal and bacon. Teenage boys are good that way. “Is it safe to assume we’re all standing here in the dark because you managed to make something we could use?”

  “I wouldn’t use the word ‘safe’ when talking about this stuff, but yes.” Walther picked up a beaker with excruciating care. He was wearing heavy gloves, and he still looked uncomfortable holding the thing. It was half-full of a viscous liquid glowing a soft, somehow menacing shade of orange. I looked at it and had absolutely no desire to get any closer.

  Too bad I was going to have to get closer—a lot closer—if I wanted the stuff to be of any use. “Is this the power dampener?” He nodded. “Tell me about it.”

  “For a start, do not ingest. The only way this could be more toxic is if I milked a rattlesnake into it to add a little extra zing.” Walther put the beaker down, looking relieved when it was safely on the counter. “It’s meant for topical application. Skin contact triggers its effects.”

  “Which are…?” I prompted

  “It blocks all access to higher magic for a year and a day. No illusions, transformations, blood workings, anything. I’m not sure what would happen if you spilled it on a shapeshifter, so let’s try not to find out.” Walther grimaced. “If there’s a counter for the stuff, I haven’t been able to find it. It takes about twenty minutes for the effects to stabilize, but they’ll kick in almost immediately.” He picked up another beaker. This one was filled with pale green liquid that didn’t glow at all. “Scrub off all traces of the potion with this and you should be fine—stress on should. I wouldn’t want to wait until minute nineteen before I started looking for a place to rinse my hands.”

  “Got it. At least there’s a window.” I eyed the open beakers. “Is there any way you can decant those into something we can carry without worrying about spilling things on ourselves every time we hit a pothole?”

  “I was working on that when you showed up.” Walther traded beakers again, waving me and Quentin back. He didn’t have to tell us twice. We stepped clear before he began pouring the glowing liquid into a set of thin-lipped glass jars. “This isn’t the most stable thing in the world.”

  “Is it going to explode?”

  “No, but it may modify its own properties if you wait too long to use it.”

  That didn’t sound good. “Modify how?”

  “Maybe it’ll stop working. Maybe it’ll turn permanent. I have no way of telling. Alchemy is half science, half magic—and when it’s something like this, all guesswork.” Walther’s shoulders sagged as the last of the glowing liquid trickled into the final jar. He turned to place the beaker gingerly in a waiting basin. Catching my curious expression, he said, “Milk. That should neutralize the potion on the glass, and if I leave it overnight, it’ll be safe to handle.”

  “This becomes a more and more exciting adventure.” I finished my coffee, setting the empty cup down on the nearest desk before saying, offhandedly, “Someone tried to flood the Court of Cats with lava. Chelsea was there, but I don’t think she did it.”

  “Was anyone hurt?” asked Walther.

  “Tybalt was killed, but he got better. Kings of Cats are annoying like that.” The words felt odd. It was odder still to realize that they made total sense to me. “There weren’t any other serious injuries that I saw. I was a little distracted trying to figure out where Chelsea had been.”

  “Did y
ou?” asked Quentin.

  In answer, I dug out the charm the Luidaeg had provided and held it up, letting him see the way that it was glowing. Then I paused. “Hey. Get yours out. I want to see something.”

  Quentin frowned, looking puzzled, but did as he was told. His charm was still dark. I leaned over and tapped it with my own charm. There was a chiming sound, and the charm in Quentin’s hand flared into sudden light. He yelped, nearly dropping it. I made a grab with my free hand, closing my fingers around his before he could let the charm go.

  “Careful,” I cautioned.

  “What did you do?”

  “My charm was already tuned to Chelsea. Touching it to yours passed the tuning along.”

  “You could’ve warned me,” he grumbled, giving the glowing charm a mistrustful look before sliding it back into his pocket. “Now what?”

  “Now we take what we came for, and we go.” I turned back to Walther. “I swear I’m not trying to be rude, but I have two missing teenagers, and—”

  “Two?” interrupted Quentin. “What do you mean, two?”

  “Quentin—”

  “Why was it so important that Tybalt had to come and see you? The Court of Cats does just fine without our help all the time. Who’s the other missing kid, Toby?”

  The cold edge on Quentin’s questions told me he already knew the answer; he just wanted to hear me say it. I sighed. “Raj disappeared when Chelsea tore through the Court of Cats,” I said. “Tybalt thinks he was knocked through the portal she used to leave. He obviously can’t access the Shadow Roads wherever he is, or he’d be back by now. That’s why Tybalt thought I needed to be involved. Because I’m already looking for Chelsea, and Raj is…”

  If he weren’t Cait Sidhe, I’d have claimed him as my squire a long damn time ago.

  “…my responsibility as much as he is Tybalt’s,” I finished, with barely a pause. “We all know that. This is just making it a little closer to formal.” And when we got Raj back, we were going to make it all the way formal if we possibly could. I was already training both of them. I might as well be allowed to send them both to pick up Chinese food.

  Quentin scowled. “We have to get him back.”

  “I know.”

  “This will help.” Walther stepped between us, holding a disposable Styrofoam cooler. “You have four jars of the dampening solution and four jars of the counter solution. Do not drop this. I don’t think I could handle mixing that stuff again.”

  “Noted.” I tucked the Luidaeg’s charm into my pocket and took the cooler. “You do good work,” I said, avoiding the forbidden “thank you.”

  “I like a challenge,” he replied, with a small smile. He knew what I wasn’t saying, and he appreciated it.

  “Good, because I think we’re going to have plenty of challenges ahead of us. Quentin?” But he was already halfway to the door, not looking back as he made his way out of the room. I cast Walther an apologetic look and followed him. Not only was time something we couldn’t afford to waste, Quentin was the only one who knew where the car was.

  Walther walked me as far as his office door and stopped there, waving tiredly as Quentin stalked down the length of the hall and I followed. Soon Walther was out of sight, and soon after that, we were outside and Quentin was charging down a gravel path toward the faculty parking lot.

  I didn’t dare run with the cooler full of jars, so I settled for walking as fast as I could. When it became clear that I wasn’t going to catch up with him like that, I stopped, tucking the cooler under one arm as I placed the first two fingers of my now-free hand in my mouth and whistled shrilly. Every visible head—human, canine, and squirrel—turned toward me. Every head but one. Quentin just stopped where he was, hands fisted at his sides, head down.

  He stayed there as I walked the rest of the short distance between us. Once I pulled up alongside him, he started to walk again, pacing me.

  “We’re going to find him.”

  Silence.

  “Tybalt wouldn’t have told me Raj was missing if he didn’t think we could help.”

  Silence.

  “If this is going to interfere with your ability to help me look for Chelsea, I swear by the root and the tree, I will send you back to the house right now.”

  Now his head came up, eyes narrowing. The sunlight cast bronze glimmers off the metallic halo of his hair. I remember when he was a cornsilk blond, wide-eyed and innocent, and would never have dreamed of looking at his sworn knight like that. Good times. And I wouldn’t trade a single glare to have them back again.

  “You wouldn’t,” he said.

  “I would,” I replied calmly. “What’s more, I would make sure May and Jazz were under strict instructions to keep you in the house, no matter how much you argued. So how about you keep on working with me, and we bring them both home?”

  Quentin sighed, seeming to deflate. “He’s my best friend,” he said, like he was admitting something strange and surprising.

  I blinked. “Yeah. I know. So?”

  “So he’s…he’s who he is, and I’m who I am. People like us aren’t friends. We’re passing acquaintances. Maybe. If we’re not busy hating each other all the time.”

  “Ah.” Raj was a Prince of Cats; Quentin was the son of some unidentified noble family. They weren’t the sort of people who should have become friends. But they had. I liked to think I had something to do with that, although, if I were being honest, I had to admit that a psychopath named Blind Michael had more to do with it than I did. As a Prince of Cats, Raj had been pretty sequestered until Blind Michael kidnapped him. If that hadn’t happened, we might never have met at all. It’s funny how people can change your life without meaning to. Even the fucked-up, crazy people leave everything different when they go away.

  Well, Raj wasn’t getting off the hook that easily. He might be missing, but he wasn’t free of us yet.

  We were at the mouth of the faculty parking lot. The Luidaeg’s car was nowhere in sight. I squinted around at the few open parking spots before giving up and turning to Quentin. “Okay, where’d you park?”

  “Over here.” He led me to a seemingly empty space under one of the big oak trees that dropped dead leaves and acorns with impunity on the vehicles below it. After glancing around to be sure we weren’t observed, he waved his hand. The brief smell of heather and steel rose around us, and the illusion that had been concealing the car popped like a soap bubble.

  “Very good,” I said. Quentin’s illusions had been improving steadily since he finished with the worst parts of puberty and settled in to maturing into an adult Daoine Sidhe. I wasn’t in charge of that part of his education—Daoine Sidhe illusions are so far beyond me that I would have been barely more than useless—but Sylvester was doing an awesome job. I’d have to tell him so, the next time I got the chance.

  Normally, Quentin would have taken a moment to preen and look pleased with himself. Instead, he smiled wanly and offered up the keys. “I didn’t want to bother Walther for a parking pass when he was working with dangerous chemicals.”

  “Hey, what’s the point of having magical powers if you can’t use them to avoid parking tickets?” I took the keys before handing him the cooler. “Don’t drop this.”

  “I won’t,” he said. That seemed to exhaust our possible conversation; we were both silent as we climbed into the car. He put the cooler on the floor, anchoring it between his feet. I fastened my seat belt, stuck the key in the ignition, and started the car. Time for us to go.

  We drove away from campus and down Shattuck Avenue in that same frozen silence. Quentin didn’t even turn the radio on—something that was practically unheard of in my experience. I stole a few glances in his direction, but decided not to push the matter. He’d talk when he was ready, and we were both going to need our strength for what was ahead of us.

  Possibly sooner than I’d thought. I hit the brakes when I saw the police cars parked outside Bridget’s house. Quentin yelped as he was thrown forward against his seat
belt. “Ow! Hey!”

  “Sorry. Sorry.” I took a deep breath, steadying myself, and drove on until I saw an open space about halfway down the block, sandwiched between a red sports car and a silver-gray VW station wagon. I eased the Luidaeg’s car up to the sidewalk and killed the engine, not bothering with a don’t-look-here.

  Quentin checked the cooler to be sure its contents were intact before twisting in his seat and staring, wide-eyed, at the police cars behind us. “Toby…”

  “I saw them.”

  “What are they doing here?”

  “I think we’re about to find out. Leave the cooler.” I undid my belt, leaning over to open the cooler and pull out one dose of the power-dampener goo. I tucked it into my jacket pocket, ignoring Quentin’s puzzled look, and climbed out of the car. Quentin followed, and together we walked along the sidewalk to Bridget’s house.

  The door was standing open. I heard voices as we came up the walkway—Bridget’s and two others, both unfamiliar. The owner of one of those voices appeared as we walked up the porch steps: a frowning, brown-haired man in a Berkeley Police Department uniform.

  “Can I help you?”

  I forced myself to smile. “Hi—I’m a friend of Bridget’s. She asked me to come over?” Hopefully, the fact that I looked faintly worried despite my smile would work in my favor. Anyone who was actually a friend of Bridget’s would look worried if they found the police in her house. Quentin didn’t say anything, but he stepped closer to me, letting his obvious youth speak for him. He was the right age to be one of Chelsea’s friends from school.

  We must not have looked too suspicious, because the officer didn’t reach for his handcuffs. He just shook his head, and said, “Ms. Ames is not prepared for company at the moment. Perhaps you should come back later.”

  “Who’s there?” Bridget appeared behind the officer, blinking when she saw me. “October. I wasn’t expecting you until later.”

  “I thought you could use a little help.” My eyes flicked to the officer and then back to her. “What’s going on?”