Ashes of Honor

  Between the two of them, they were able to lever him off me. I scrambled out from under him, terrified that every move I made was just going to make things worse. He didn’t move. I took off my—his, it was his to begin with, and, oh, Maeve, he couldn’t die on me—took off my jacket and folded it into a pillow, sliding it under his head before fumbling with blood-sticky fingers for his pulse. It was there, but it was nowhere near strong enough for my liking.

  “We need a healer,” I said, standing. “This isn’t going to be fixed with aspirin and gauze.”

  Li Qin looked sick. “We have no healer. The closest we ever came was Yui, and she…”

  “Died the same time January did, I know.” Tybalt wasn’t moving. The closest healer I knew of was Jin, at Shadowed Hills.

  Shadowed Hills.

  “I’m an idiot,” I said. “Quentin, give me your phone. Mine’s dead.” Quentin fished his phone out of his pocket and tossed it to me. I clicked it open, scrolling to the contacts. As I expected, Shadowed Hills was second on the list.

  The phone only rang twice before Etienne picked up, beginning, “Shadowed Hi—”

  “I need you to grab Jin and get to Tamed Lightning right now,” I interrupted. “It’s an emergency.”

  Etienne hesitated. “October? I don’t…”

  “Tybalt’s hurt! Don’t argue with me, just get over here.”

  “I can’t run off with the Duke’s personal physician without better reason than a friend of yours being injured.”

  “How about he got hurt because we were looking for your daughter, huh?” That wasn’t strictly true. For the moment, it was close enough. Etienne didn’t say anything, and so I pressed on, saying, “There’s no healer here. I can’t drive him to a place where he can get cared for. Duchess Riordan is one of the people who snatched Chelsea, and she has her right now. Now please, get Jin, and get over here.” I glanced at Tybalt. He was so still…“Please. We don’t have much time.”

  “Tell Countess O’Leary to open the wards,” said Etienne. Then the line went dead.

  I clicked Quentin’s phone shut, handing it back to him. April was nowhere to be seen. I cleared my throat and said, as calmly as I could manage, “April, I need you.”

  There was a popping sound, accompanied by the strong smell of ozone, before she said, from behind me, “Yes?”

  There was a time when that would have been enough to make me jump. How times have changed. “I need you to open an exception in the wards,” I said, turning to face her. “Sir Etienne is going to be teleporting in, accompanied by an Ellyllon healer. I apologize for inviting them without checking with you first, but it’s an emergency.”

  “Ah,” said April. Her gaze went to Tybalt. She frowned. “Is he damaged?”

  I nodded, trying to deny the sinking feeling in my chest. “I think he is, yeah,” I said. “Can you please open that exception?”

  “Of course,” said April. “I do not want anyone else to leave the local network. We are too sparsely distributed.” Then she was gone, leaving the air to rush back into the place where she’d been standing.

  I stayed where I was, eyes going to Tybalt. He hadn’t moved. There was a bloody fingerprint on his cheek that I recognized as my own, standing out in vivid red against the pallor of his skin. Mine. This was my fault. If it hadn’t been for me distracting him, Samson wouldn’t have decided Tybalt was neglecting his Court. Tybalt wouldn’t have been running through the shadows; he wouldn’t have been vulnerable to an attack. He got hurt because of me. This was mine, and I had to own it, just like I had to own what happened to Connor. This was my fault.

  “October.” Li Qin touched my wrist. I whipped around so fast I almost hit her; the wind from my motion actually ruffled her hair. She looked at me impassively and said, in a low, firm, tone, “This is not your fault.”

  “What—how did you—?”

  “I’m not a mind reader, but I spent quite a few years married to the kind of woman who thinks the best way to adopt a daughter is to break the rules of nature. Jan took responsibility for everything that happened within a mile of where she was standing. In the end, I think that’s what killed her.” A flicker of sorrow crossed Li Qin’s face, only to be wiped away by sternness. “You don’t have much in common with her, and that’s for the best—she could never have done the work you do—but you share her fondness for taking blame. You didn’t do this.”

  I took a breath, letting it slowly out before I said, “I guess we’ll see about that. I’ll let you know whether it’s my fault or not when we know whether or not he’s going to live.”

  “He’s going to be okay,” said Quentin. “He has to. He’s Tybalt. You’d be all weird and irritating if he wasn’t around.”

  “Weird and irritating?” I raised an eyebrow. “What gives you that idea?”

  Quentin shrugged. “That’s already how you get when he isn’t around.”

  The smell of cedar smoke and limes swirled through the air, saving me from needing to reply. I turned to see Jin stepping through a circle in the air, her gauzy mayfly’s wings buzzing anxiously until it looked like she might actually leave the ground from sheer nerves. It wasn’t going to happen—adult Ellyllon are too heavy to fly without using magic—but it was the sort of reflex that told me how little she enjoyed traveling via teleportation portal.

  Etienne stepped through behind her, closing the portal with a wave of his hand.

  “Where’s the—” Jin began, and stopped when she saw the state of my clothes, her eyes going wide.

  Etienne was less restrained. “Maeve’s teeth, October, did you bleed to death and just not notice? You’ve got more blood outside than you have room for inside!”

  “Hello to you, too,” I said, too relieved to get annoyed. “Jin…” I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything at all. I just stepped aside, pointing mutely toward Tybalt. He still wasn’t moving.

  “Ah,” said Jin softly. Her wings stilled their buzzing as she studied Tybalt, assessing his condition from a distance. She’s been Sylvester’s personal physician for a long time—long enough to see most of the damage that a body can sustain and still survive. So it was more than a little unnerving when she shook her head and said, “You should have called for me sooner.”

  My mouth went dry. “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying you should have called for me sooner.” She stepped toward me, reaching out to touch my wrist, much as Li Qin had. Unlike Li’s touch, hers sent a wave of serenity washing over me, dimming and dulling my fear. Ellyllon can secrete both sedatives and stimulants through their skin. It’s what makes some of them such great healers, even as it makes the rest of them such great hedonists.

  I glared at her, or tried to, anyway. With her artificial calm spreading through my body, the most I could manage was faint peevishness. “Don’t drug me.”

  “Would you rather I knocked you out? Because I could do that. And I will, if it looks like you’re going to interfere.” She took her hand away, leaving tingles of chemical peace dancing over my skin. “Etienne, Quentin, get over here. I’m going to need the two of you to help me lift him onto the table. I need him higher.”

  “Sure,” said Quentin, moving to join her. Etienne didn’t say anything. He just went.

  Li Qin was abruptly at my side, taking my elbow and turning me away from the sight of Jin and her makeshift assistants descending on Tybalt’s unmoving form. “Let’s make some coffee,” she said, soothingly. “Wouldn’t you enjoy that? You like coffee.”

  “Yes, I do,” I agreed. My voice sounded distant. I was aware, in an almost academic fashion, that I should be more upset than I was—that I should be doing something to help, not going to fix myself a cup of coffee. Now that Jin wasn’t adding to the calm, I could feel the shape of it in my blood, smooth and foreign. I could remove it if I wanted to. I might not have seen that if I hadn’t been so relaxed, but I was too calm to get in my own way. If I wanted it to stop, it would.

  And that w
as why I couldn’t want it to stop. The only thing I could do to help Tybalt was stay out of the way and let Jin do the job I’d begged her to come to do. If he was going to be saved, she was going to be the one who saved him, not me. Not even a hero can do everything.

  Li Qin led me to the coffee maker, where my current serenity turned the process of grinding beans and pouring water into something slow and ritualistic. It was like watching my friend Lily, the Lady of the Tea Gardens, setting up a formal tea service. Only this time, the end result wasn’t going to taste like licking the lawnmower.

  “You like strong coffee,” observed Li Qin.

  “Don’t sleep much,” I said. “Need the caffeine.”

  “Jan didn’t sleep much either. She always said she could sleep once she was dead.” Li’s voice didn’t quaver. She kept watching me, smiling just a little. “I suppose that means she’s well-rested by now.”

  “Jan was weird,” I said, pouring coffee into my cup. The part of me that was still aware that insulting a dead woman’s memory might not be a good idea cringed. The fact that Li Qin was Jan’s widow just made it worse.

  But Li Qin didn’t seem to mind. Her smile didn’t waver as she agreed, “That’s very true. Everyone in Tamed Lightning is weird, one way or another.”

  Living flesh being sliced open makes an unmistakable sound. Raw meat being cut is a kissing cousin, but it doesn’t really compare. Living flesh fights back. It resists in a way that dead things can’t, muscle and bone fighting against the invasion of the knife.

  The thick, wet sound of someone being cut open hit my nerves like a cattle prod. I didn’t drop my coffee cup—it would take a lot more than shock, fear, and hope, all mixed into a sick cocktail, to make me drop a perfectly good cup of coffee—but I did go stiff, my fingers locking on the handle until I would have sworn I felt the porcelain bend. Jin’s peace fled as quickly as it had come, chased out of my body by adrenaline and my own rising magic.

  “That’s gross,” said Quentin.

  “Never become a doctor,” said Jin.

  “I wasn’t planning on it.”

  “Good,” said Jin, and started to sing.

  The Ellyllon songs are strange things. They’re unique every time, because they bend to suit the needs of their subject matter. Ellyllon can sing both harm and healing, and what they can’t sing away, they can at least dull down. Jin kept singing long enough for me to raise my shaking hand, drink an entire cup of coffee without tasting a drop of it, and pour myself a refill.

  Jin stopped singing. Silence fell…and in the silence, Tybalt coughed.

  “And that’s how you perform home surgery,” said Jin.

  I forced myself to move slowly as I put my cup down on the counter, barely registering the suddenly silent Li Qin, and turned around to face them.

  The first thing I noticed was the blood, which covered the surface of the white plastic table and pooled on the industrial-blue linoleum floor. The second thing, oddly enough, was the glitter. A thick haze of silver and green glitter shimmered in the air around them, making them look like they were having a small, quiet, horror-movie-themed rave. Etienne and Quentin were standing on the far side of the table that Tybalt was lying on. Jin was standing in front of the table, blood coating her arms to the elbows, soaking into her shirt, and even covering the bottom half of her face.

  And Tybalt, for all that he still looked pale and unwell, was struggling to sit up, eyes open, and looking back at me.

  “Massive internal bleeding,” said Jin, tilting her chin up so that she was talking to no one in particular. “Damage to the liver and spleen. Three broken ribs, one of which managed to puncture a lung, which, let me tell you, takes talent. Also a cracked femur—shouldn’t have been walking on that—and a pretty severe concussion. Congratulations. It’s a nice, macho death, which nobody gets to die today.”

  “For that, I thank you,” said Tybalt, swinging his legs over the edge of the table, gripping it hard for balance as he stood.

  Jin glared at him. He was more than a foot taller than she was, but she still managed to look imposing as she gestured for him to sit back down. “No walking! No standing, no bending, no moving, no accessing the Shadow Roads, nothing. You don’t swim for an hour after eating, you don’t swan around like an idiot for an hour after narrowly avoiding death.”

  “Toby does,” said Quentin.

  “Toby is genetically predisposed to swan around like an idiot,” Jin shot back. “Now sit.”

  “Must everyone behave as if I am some sort of hound?” asked Tybalt. Still, he moved to the nearest chair and sat. “I simply wished to reassure October that my condition was improved.”

  “She can see you. She has eyes. There is no reason for you to be on your feet.”

  “Elliot is going to be furious when he sees the condition of the cafeteria,” supplied April. I didn’t need to look to know that she was behind me. “That is a perfectly valid reason to be on your feet and potentially running away.”

  I didn’t say anything. I just kept looking at Tybalt.

  Li Qin put a hand on my shoulder, nudging me forward. “You’re not the one who’s not allowed to move,” she said.

  It only took me four long steps to cross the stretch of floor between me and the chair where Tybalt was seated. Jin moved out of the way. The blood on the linoleum made it slippery, and when my feet started to go out from underneath me, I let them, hitting the floor on my knees. Somehow, in the course of the motion, I managed to get my arms around him. Jin had objected to him standing, but she didn’t object to this. He closed his arms around me in turn. I buried my face against his blood-soaked shoulder, struggling to keep my breath steady.

  “Thank you,” he whispered. “If you hadn’t called them here…thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” I whispered back.

  My jeans had almost dried while I waited for Jin to finish working on Tybalt. Now, they were getting soaked again, becoming heavy with blood. The feeling of it congealing against my skin was what made me let go and climb to my feet. I rested one hand on Tybalt’s shoulder, like I was afraid he’d disappear if I let go for too long. And maybe I was.

  “Chelsea was here,” I said, turning to Etienne. His eyes widened. There was a smear of blood on his forehead, spoiling his normally immaculate appearance. Oddly, that just made him look more like his daughter. Blood will tell. “She’s the reason Tybalt and I survived long enough to get here. We were attacked in Berkeley. We were just about done for when she teleported in, and we managed to get her to bring us back here.”

  “Is she…is she hurt?” asked Etienne.

  “She’s scared, and she’s running, but she wasn’t injured that I could see. She’s definitely teleporting without any problems.” Teleporting, and tearing her way through doors that were supposed to have been locked centuries ago. “She brought us back by way of Annwn. I think she’s starting to wear some seriously thin patches in the walls of the world.”

  “What?” asked Jin. She looked from me to Etienne, her wings beginning to vibrate rapidly again. “What are you two talking about?”

  “A Tuatha changeling—” began Etienne, then stopped when he saw my glare. He took a breath, and started again: “My daughter, Chelsea, is missing. Her human mother reported her disappearance to me, and I retained October to locate her. Unfortunately, there have been complications.”

  “You involved Toby. Of course there have been complications. If you don’t want complications, you buy her a bus ticket and send her to Vancouver to buy those coffee-flavored candy bars they have in Canada.” Jin said this in an almost distant tone, as if her mouth were keeping itself busy while her brain tried to process what it had just heard. “What do you mean, your daughter?”

  “Bridget,” said Etienne.

  Jin’s eyes widened. “You got the folklore professor pregnant? Are you an idiot?”

  “See, that’s what I said.” I blinked, leaning back against the table as a wave of dizziness hit me. “Whoa. Why is
the room spinning?”

  “Probably because you lost enough blood to count as exsanguination in a mortal hospital, and your body’s going crazy trying to rebuild itself,” said Jin. Her gaze turned accusingly toward the slashes in my shirt. “Did you decide to test just how indestructible you really are?”

  “Yup,” I said, as lightly as I could. “It turns out that I’m pretty damn indestructible. Me and cockroaches.”

  April appeared next to me in a haze of ozone and sparks. She had a bottle of orange juice in one hand and a pack of Twinkies in the other. “These will improve your current condition.”

  “Awesome,” I said, taking my snack from her. My fingers were so bloody that it was impossible to avoid getting at least a little bit on my Twinkies. I did my best to ignore that as I crammed the first one into my mouth.

  “While my dear October is preoccupied with restoring herself to a semblance of normalcy, if I may: Chelsea has been to Annwn at least twice. She opened a gateway into the Court of Cats. Her jaunts are becoming no less impossible with repetition.”

  “And the shallowing is becoming unstable,” added Li Qin. “We’ve had at least five microquakes today that weren’t mirrored in the mortal world.”

  “Seven, to be more precise,” said April. “I do not know how much longer I can maintain structural integrity of the grounds. We may need to evacuate for the sake of our own safety.”

  I blinked, swallowing my mouthful of Twinkie before I asked, “How can you evacuate? Isn’t your main server inside the shallowing?”

  “It is,” confirmed April. “I can survive on backup power for up to nine days before I encounter permanent systems failure. I am more concerned about our data storage and the employees in the basement, who cannot be moved into a mortal environ without raising questions we will be unprepared to address.”

  “Employees in the…oh.” I stopped talking, turning my attention to my orange juice instead. It seemed safer, or at least a little less macabre.

  The murders at Tamed Lightning two years ago weren’t the normal kind of killings. All the victims were purebloods, and they were killed in a way that meant the night-haunts wouldn’t come for their bodies. Faerie flesh doesn’t decay. The last time I’d been to Tamed Lightning, all the victims save one—January, who hadn’t been killed like the others, and whose body had been burned—were still in the basement, waiting for April to put together the necessary pieces and find a way to bring them back.