A Red-Rose Chain

“If Arden did not want to risk being invaded, as you say, ‘twice as hard,’ she would have sent someone else.” We emerged onto a stretch of street that I recognized. The alley where we were supposed to meet the others was right up ahead. I felt myself untense. Maybe we were going to make it back to King Rhys’ Court without any serious damage done.

I should really learn to stop hoping. We stepped into the alley to find ourselves alone . . . but the faint smell of ashes and cotton candy hung in the air. May had been here recently. I stopped, bewildered, and took a deep breath. I could smell the faint, nearly indefinable strains of her heritage, mixed with an overlay of Daoine Sidhe. Fear gripped me in an almost physical hand, squeezing until I felt like all the air was being forced out of my lungs.

“Tybalt, drop the don’t-look-here,” I said, making no effort to keep my voice down. If May and Quentin were in the alley, I didn’t want them to be surprised by our sudden appearance.

Tybalt nodded. He clapped his hands, and the spell burst around us, filling the air with the musk and pennyroyal scent of his magic. Not for the first time, I wished that Quentin shared my sensitivity for magical signatures. He could pick up the broad strokes, but there was no guarantee he’d be able to smell the spell from wherever he was and know that we had arrived.

“Quentin?” I called, taking a step forward. “May? Are either of you here? It’s Toby and Tybalt. You can come out now.”

There was a scuffling noise from behind the dumpster. I took another step forward.

“I’m sorry we’re a little late; we had to take the bus in order to get here, and that slowed us down . . .”

Silence. Then Quentin’s face peeked around the dumpster’s corner, eyes narrowed warily. “How do you take your coffee?” he demanded.

“I stopped drinking coffee after I got hit with an evil pie,” I said. “Before that, I took it however I could get it. The more the merrier. Look, do you want a blood sample? That’ll confirm my identity faster than any quiz you can give me, and maybe then you can explain why you’re hiding behind a dumpster instead of greeting me like a normal person.” I couldn’t keep the edge from my voice as I reached the end of my sentence. Something was terribly wrong. Quentin had been my squire long enough to have learned that sometimes bravery gets you killed, but he didn’t hide for no reason. If I didn’t encourage senseless bravery, I didn’t encourage senseless cowardice either.

“I, too, am happy to give you a taste of my blood, if it means you will be able to relax yourself and tell us what has happened,” said Tybalt. He didn’t step forward, recognizing that Quentin wouldn’t find his presence as comforting as I did.

Quentin closed his eyes, an expression of relief washing across his face, only to be quickly replaced by bleakness. “Come over here,” he said, and withdrew behind the dumpster again.

That was when I knew. There was only one reason he could be acting like this, only one thing that could have happened that would explain his skittishness and his sorrow. So I knew, but I still didn’t admit it to myself: not until I had stepped around the dumpster and seen with my own eyes, which had lied to me in the past, when they’d had good enough reason. They weren’t lying to me now.

May, still draped in the hazy outline of her human disguise, although it was beginning to fray around the edges, was propped against the alley wall like a forgotten toy, limp and unmoving. The arrow protruding from her left shoulder formed a tight seal against the skin: there wasn’t even any blood on her shirt, and wouldn’t be until someone pulled that arrow out. Her eyes were closed, and her chin rested comfortably against her chest. She looked like she had just stopped to take a nap, pausing for a moment before she resumed racing through her life.

It was really a pity that the nap was going to last for a hundred years.