A Red-Rose Chain

“Not yet,” I said. I had to struggle not to snap at him, but he didn’t deserve that. He was the one who had found her lying there—I paused, turning to look at him. “Why didn’t you call me when you found her? I had my cellphone.”


“If someone was able to track May back to this alley and put an arrow in her, they had to have been following us,” he said. “I didn’t want to bring you back here if it meant they might get you, too.”

“That was brave and stupid,” I said. “You should have hidden yourself and called me. Next time, you call me, understand? You’re my squire. It’s my job to protect you, not the other way around.”

“I thought we protected each other,” he said, in a very small voice.

I thawed, just a little. “We do, honey. But sometimes you have to remember that it’s my job to protect you. It’s basically the most important thing a knight does for their squire. We teach you how to be better knights, sure, but that doesn’t matter if you’re dead.” I turned back to the alley wall. Something was wrong with this picture, something apart from the obvious. It was gnawing at me, biting down with sharp little teeth and refusing to let me go.

It was almost hard to imagine how carefree we’d been when we were first all together in this alley. Tybalt and I were going to meet his friend, Quentin was going to the bookstore, and May was going to—

“The laundry.” I straightened up, feeling as if I had just been electrified. “She didn’t have the laundry bag when Tybalt picked her up, and it’s not here. Did she leave it at the dry cleaner’s? Do you know which dry cleaner’s she went to?”

“They’re right up the street,” said Quentin.

“Do you have the name?” I pulled out my phone. When he blinked, I said, “If I send you to check and stay here, I feel like a coward. If I go to check and leave you here, Tybalt loses his shit when he gets back to find me gone. Neither of these is a good thing. So I’m going to pretend I’m a normal person, and call them.”

“I . . . that makes really good sense,” he said. “Sunshine Cleaners, on West Burnside.”

“Got it.” I dialed information, and when the polite, faintly robotic voice of the computer-generated “operator” picked up, I gave the address. Thirty seconds later, the phone was calling the cleaner’s for me. Sometimes I really do feel like we’re living in the future, and just haven’t fully accepted everything that means.

“Sunshine Cleaners, we put the sun back in your shirts,” said a voice that clearly felt it had better things to do with its time than answer phone calls, even if it was being paid to pick up the phone.

“Hi, this is October Daye. My sister, May, was supposed to drop off some laundry for me a few hours ago, and I was just wondering if you were able to get the stains out of my dress? I really love that dress.” I tried to match the voice’s disinterest with earnest need-to-know. Standing in the alley where my Fetch had been elf-shot and pretending that the most important thing in my world was laundry.

“Please hold.” There was a clunk as the phone was set down. I heard rustling. Then the phone was picked up again, and the same bored voice said, “No one named after a month has dropped anything off today. Either your sister sucks at doing her chores, or you need to call another cleaner. Have a nice day.”

The connection went dead. I lowered my phone, turning to look at Quentin. “She didn’t drop off the laundry, and she’s been elf-shot,” I said. “You know what this means?”

“Yeah,” he said, looking miserable. “King Rhys has an awful lot of your blood, and May’s going to be asleep for a hundred years. Toby, what are we going to do?”

I looked at him, and I didn’t have an answer.





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