“Then I can bore them with all my names, just like they do me.”
Claire laughed. “They’ll probably enjoy it! If you stay still long enough, they’ll tell you all about how they got each of their names, and ask about yours. You can be trapped for hours.”
Okay, that was slightly alarming.
“So, anyway, back to Kjeld. Do you like it?”
“What does it mean?”
She spread out some wrinkles in the sheets. “Large pot.”
I grinned.
“Well, trolls like to eat! And a large pot of . . . whatever . . . means you aren’t likely to starve. And you can even feast others!”
“Sounds good to me. Or you could just ask him what he wants to be called.”
She shook her head. “I can’t. He speaks almost no English, and even Olga can barely understand his dialect. But he’ll be around a little while recovering, and I refuse to call him Wart the whole time!”
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. I had a kid named Stinky.
“Anyway, word is that the mountain tribes have been hit hard by the slavers, because they’re usually small groups, and too weak to fight back. But there’s a lot of them, and they’re spread over a large area, and sometimes they war with each other and”—she sighed—“it’s a mess. And with the little one’s condition, even if Olga does find his people, they may not claim him.”
“So what happens then?”
“I don’t know.”
She fluffed pillows.
“He’s very sweet, though.”
More fluffing.
“He liked my soup.”
I didn’t say anything; I wasn’t stupid.
I was seriously stiff, though. It felt like the years were finally catching up to me. A lot of years, I thought uncomfortably. All the freaking years.
Until I stretched, and oh. My. God. Oh yeah. Oh fuck yeah.
Claire was looking at me in sudden alarm. “Did you just crack every bone in your spine?”
“Yeah.” It felt so good that I did it again. And then rolled my neck around, hearing what sounded like miniature fireworks going off.
“How do you do that?” She looked disturbed.
I extended my arms, laced my fingers together, and cracked my knuckles. “Like that.”
“Stop it!”
I laughed, and contemplated chasing her around the room, cracking things at her. But that might impact the chance of breakfast, and I was out of sandwiches. “Food?” I asked hopefully.
“Get a shower. I’ll have something for you by the time you’re done.”
That, I decided, was a plan.
Twenty minutes later, I was clean, moisturized, and dressed. But not downstairs, because Claire had a tray waiting for me when I emerged from the bathroom. She’d also brought a chair for herself.
Uh-oh.
Not that I wasn’t happy to have company, but Claire wasn’t a big fan of bedroom eating. If this was a normal conversation, we’d be having it at the kitchen table. So it wasn’t going to be normal, and judging by the closed door, she didn’t want it overheard.
Well, crap.
“Relax,” she told me. “I just want to fill you in.”
“You want to fill me in?” I ambled over to the spread on the spread. “I thought that was my job.”
“Louis-Cesare brought you home. He told me what—” A phone rang. She sighed, pulled it out of a pocket, rolled her eyes, and put it back.
“What was that?”
“Nothing. Sit down and have breakfast. Or lunch, I suppose.”
“Lunch? Shouldn’t it be dinner?”
Which is how I found out that I’d slept the clock around.
“Shit!” I was halfway to my feet, when Claire pulled me back down. “Sit. Eat. Listen.”
Which is how I also found out some other things.
“So that’s why we’re talking behind closed doors,” I said.
I was looking at a newspaper pic of Blue’s latest activities. It showed an illegal market in some abandoned subway station. It didn’t specialize in the fey per se, but in forbidden ingredients, the kind of stuff you couldn’t walk into a normal potion shop and buy. But some of those did originate in Faerie.
Need a basilisk’s egg for an unbreakable ward? Got you, fam. Want kelpie blood for detection-proof glamouries? Step right up. How about naga venom, for a poison no antidote can treat? Sure, for a price.
It was exactly the sort of place where you’d expect to find fey bones and the fey supplying them. Because butchering a bunch of helpless slaves is safer than constantly going into Faerie, isn’t it? Or it was.
Until things suddenly got a lot Bluer.
All that was left now were broken cages and blood. Enough of the latter that I was assuming slavers number four and five had just bitten the dust. Along with probably a bunch of their crew.
What a pity.
Claire nodded. “If all this gets out—when it gets out—nobody knows what will happen. But that”—she fluttered a hand at the paper—“will probably get a lot more common!”
“I understand why Olga felt she had to tell the Elders,” I said. “This affects the whole Dark Fey community. I just wish she could have held off for a few days, until we know a little more. We don’t need riots—”
“Oh, there will be riots. You can count on it!”
I looked up. “You think it will be that bad?”
“The troll council does! That’s why they’re meeting now, to try to figure out how to spin it. But that’s just it—there is no way! The Dark Fey believe that these weapons are powered by the souls of their people, souls that will never again be able to reincarnate. You can’t spin that!”
She got up and started pacing.
“And the worst thing is, it’s not just some crazy superstition. Louis-Cesare said it had some truth to it.” She turned and put her hands flat on the bed. “He can’t be right, can he? Tell me he isn’t right!”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But Mircea confirmed that it was life energy. Vamps can tell the difference between that and regular magic. And there was plenty of it floating around, after the consul almost got incinerated.”
“I don’t believe it.” She abruptly sat back down on her chair. “I don’t believe it!”
She did, though. The green eyes had just gone incandescent.
“They’re killing us! And Faerie—”
She cut off, and then just sat there for a moment, trying to absorb the implications. Because, yeah. There were a lot of them.
If Caedmon was right about the symbiosis between Faerie and its people, then whoever was making these weapons wasn’t just using up the souls of individuals, but draining that of their entire world. Might explain why there were fewer vargar being born these days, I thought. And then I wondered how many more traits had been lost, how many more vital ways Faerie had been diminished.
I also wondered what had happened to all those souls that had been left behind through the years, but not used up. If the bones deteriorated enough, were they lost, too? Just dissipating into the ground of an alien world, and fading away?
I shivered, despite the warmth of the day and the residual heat of a very hot shower. How long had Faerie been bleeding out? Centuries? Millennia?
Because it had to be that long, right? Ever since our two worlds encountered each other, and people started going back and forth. And while the Light Fey seemed to have a policy of taking their dead back with them, what about the Dark?
They might have done it if left to their own devices, but they hadn’t been. Not those who had been used as slaves and killed for sport. And if what Caedmon said was true, the soul of a Dark Fey this incarnation might be that of a Light Fey the next, so every group was hurt, every group weakened.
It was kind of stunning. And appalling. Which probably explained why Claire looked sick as well as furious.
“They should string her up publicly,” said my pacifist roommate. “That bitch!”
“You mean Efridis?”
“Of course I mean Efridis! Who else?”
And there it was. The thing I’d been contemplating in the shower while my groggy brain woke up. The thing I’d been hoping to avoid, because I knew how this was going to go.
I didn’t say anything for a moment, because I am a coward. And then I sighed, and womaned the hell up. “Ermh.”
Chapter Fifty-two
Claire spun around, because she knows me, too.