A Red-Rose Chain

“I was going to bed earlier when I did that, and fewer things were trying to kill me on a nightly basis,” he said, before yawning enormously. “Can I sleep in the car?”


“Until we get to Muir Woods, yes, you can sleep in the car,” I said. My waffles popped up, somehow managing to be soggy and burnt at the same time. I plucked them out of the toaster, juggling them from hand to hand as I waited for the hot parts to cool off and the frozen parts to warm up. “It’s not too late to back out, you know. You could stay here with Jazz. No one would blame you.”

His sleepy expression hardened into narrow-eyed suspicion. “Are we leaving this early because you don’t want me coming with you?”

“No, but it’s a good idea,” I said. I finally got both waffles settled in one hand, and walked to recover my suitcase. It was heavier than it looked. Spider-silk compacts small. It’s still heavy as hell. “My sword is in the car; this is all I need. Do the rest of you have all your things?”

“Yes,” said May.

“Yes,” said Tybalt.

“I really hate you,” said Quentin.

“Good. Get your stuff in the car.” I started for the door. Spike—having crept into the kitchen at some point when I wasn’t looking—followed, sticking close to my ankles and rattling its thorns like an angry maraca. It was almost soothing, in a weird sort of way. Here I was, diving back into the unknown, and my rose goblin was coming with me for the ride.

Quentin was asleep almost as soon as his butt hit the backseat. He put his head against the window, mouth hanging open, and fell back into the deep, slow breathing that signified a body fully at rest. May slouched into the other side of the backseat, yawning, and slumped slowly over to rest her head against his ribs. I paused in the act of opening the driver’s side door, looking at the pair of them.

“This is going to be a disaster,” I said.

“Have faith,” said Tybalt, opening his own door. “Perhaps we will all return home with our limbs intact and our souls unbowed.”

“Yeah, and maybe I’ll finally get that pony,” I said.

Spike followed me as I slid into the car. First it scrambled into my lap, and then it leaped onto the dashboard, where it paced and rattled before settling down in a catlike curl. I wasn’t worried about any of the human drivers we shared the road with seeing it: the smaller creatures of Faerie are protected from mortal eyes by almost unconscious illusions, making them seem like shadows and tricks of the light, not impossible creatures. It was a nice trick.

Sadly, it wasn’t a trick the rest of us shared. All four of us were roughly human, and could probably pass from a distance, but it wasn’t a good idea to push our luck. I reached up and grabbed a fistful of shadows and air from the roof of the car.

“I’ll do my illusion if you can put a don’t-look-here on the car,” I said to Tybalt, who nodded. He mimicked my gesture, and for a few seconds the car was filled with the mingled scents of our magic and the slightly disjointed sound of our chanting. We both chose Shakespeare: me, a passage from The Tempest, him, one of the sonnets. I couldn’t stop my own casting long enough to listen and figure out which one it was. That was a pity. Tybalt reciting Shakespeare was something that should have been savored, not ignored in favor of blunting the tips of my ears and shifting the color of my eyes to something that looked more blue, and less like the fog that hung in the early morning air.

I shouldn’t have needed a separate human disguise— not with a good don’t-look-here over the rest of the car—but someone was going to need to go and collect Walther when we got to the college, and that someone might as well be me. It was my fault that he was getting involved in all of this, after all.