A Red-Rose Chain

“You’re lying!” The false Queen lunged for me, and only Rhys’ arms around her chest kept her from clawing my throat open. She struggled against him, face set in a mask of hatred that had nothing in common with her mild amusement of only a few minutes before. “You give back what you took from me! You give it back right now!”


“I can’t.” I didn’t take any pleasure in the words, strange as that might sound. She was clearly desperate, and I was starting to wonder whether I had made things that much worse for her. Sirens and Sea Wights were both descended from Maeve, while Banshee were descended from Titania. When she had been the daughter of three bloodlines, she might have been in a strange sort of internal truce, tilted so much farther toward Maeve than toward Titania that she had been able to remain relatively at peace. Now her bloodlines were equally weighted, and there was a good chance that they were tearing her apart.

I took a breath. “I can’t,” I repeated. “But I can take more away. I can make you purely Banshee, or purely Sea Wight. I know you’re hurting. Maeve and Titania . . . their bloodlines don’t blend. If you let me take one of them out of you—”

“You’ll touch me again over my dead body,” she snarled. She broke free of Rhys, and there was a knife in her hand, the silver clean and glinting in the light from overhead. She slammed it into my chest in a hard overhand arc, and I gasped, shock racing through my body only a few beats behind the pain, which was immense and unrelenting.

She must have hit a lung, I thought desperately. I couldn’t lift my arms to claw at the blade. I couldn’t do anything but close my eyes, and let the world drop away.

So I did.





TWENTY-ONE




THE WORLD CAME BACK like the fuzzy picture on a badly tuned television, gradually illuminating itself until I could see the room around me in washed out, under-defined color. It wasn’t the right room. This was my living room at the house, complete with thrift store sofa and dozing Cait Sidhe still gripping the remote control. Raj looked utterly at peace, and utterly unaware of my presence, which meant I was either dead or dreaming. There was no other way I would have been able to sneak up on him.

“Let’s go with dreaming,” I said, and my voice echoed like I’d been shouting down a long tunnel. My mouth still tasted like blood. I swallowed. The taste remained. Not dead, then. I couldn’t imagine that my death would be as bloody as my life had been.

Then again, when I died, I would go to the night-haunts. It didn’t get much bloodier than that.

“Dreaming is close enough,” said a voice behind me.

I turned. “May!”

My Fetch was standing behind me, wearing a long gray dress belted with a length of rope. Her hair was as long as mine, and the colored streaks were back, blue and green and lovely. She smiled at me, but not happily; she looked like her heart was breaking. “Sort of. Technically. Karen’s here, too. She’s just staying out of the way because it’s all she can do to shift me from my dreamscape into yours. Adding herself to the mix would complicate things too much, and she might lose her grip on the whole house of cards. She says hello, by the way.”

“Karen’s here?” Karen was the middle daughter of my friends Stacy and Mitch: sweet, friendly, fifteen years old, and an oneiromancer. She could move through dreams, manipulate them, and use them to communicate with others, even when those others were supposedly outside of her reach. No one knew where the gift had come from—according to the Luidaeg, there hadn’t been any oneiromancers in Faerie in centuries.

We’d first learned about Karen’s talent when she was taken by Blind Michael. There was nothing like being kidnapped by the monster under the bed to make you really embrace what you could do, no matter how strange it might seem.

May nodded. “She came as soon as I’d been elf-shot. I guess she keeps an eye on us.”

“That’s good to know.” I paused. “Wait—have I been elf-shot?”