Ashes of Honor: An October Daye Novel

Tybalt threw me onto the Shadow Roads once, to save my life. I nearly died of hypothermia and lack of oxygen. I couldn’t help remembering that as snarls and the sounds of flesh hitting flesh filled the darkness. I tried reaching toward the sound, hoping to find something I could grab onto, but my hands found only emptiness and cold.

Then the claws found my arm, and there was sudden heat as my blood ran down my skin, filling the air with the smell of copper. Maybe that’s how Tybalt found me. He grabbed my outstretched arm, hissing, “Run,” with an urgency raw enough to be almost as frightening as the idea of being stranded on the Shadow Roads. He jerked me forward. I felt something pop inside my wrist, a single white-hot flare of pain. Then we were falling, so fast and far that I wasn’t sure we’d ever hit the bottom. The sound of roaring grew distant behind us.

“Hold on,” whispered Tybalt. The roaring faded into silence—we were too far away to hear them. That seemed to be what he’d been waiting for. He wrapped an arm around my waist, pulling me close, and leaped out of the darkness, into the light.

We punched back into the human world on a suburban street lined with pastel-colored houses and broad-leafed mulberry trees. The air smelled like roses and jasmine and was almost warm enough to break through the cold trying to work its way all through me. My arm was still bleeding, but sluggishly, already starting to heal. Tybalt staggered and collapsed as his feet hit the sidewalk. I managed to catch him, sliding an arm under his, and looked around.

There was no one in sight, and the curve of the street meant that we had a moment of privacy. California road planners sometimes seem to have a phobia about straight lines. We were lucky; it was early enough in the afternoon that most adults were at work and most kids were still at school. We might not have long before that changed, but for the moment, we were alone. “Hey—hey! Stay with me here, big guy. What the hell was that?”

“That, my dear October, was an assassination attempt,” he wheezed. He was shivering more than I was, and ice was caked in his hair and eyelashes. How hard had it been to fight on the Shadow Roads without losing track of me? He was a King of Cats, but not even a King of Cats has access to infinite resources. “Someone, I fear, has decided to depose me.”

“What the—” We were too exposed. If anyone passed us, the blood would catch their attention, and we’d wind up with a lot of explaining that we weren’t equipped to do. “Come on.” I shifted my arm to balance most of Tybalt’s weight against me as we staggered down the long driveway of the nearest house.

“This happens,” he said, without real authority; he was trying to convince himself as much as he was trying to convince me. “It will be fine. I just need to catch my breath, and I will crush this insurrection. I will be fine.”

“Liar,” I said, with as much warmth as I could muster. “No one who’s bleeding as much as you are gets to say that to me.”

“They’re all flesh wounds.”

“Isn’t every wound a flesh wound?” I kept us moving until we were in the shadow of the garage. The climbing ivy that was doing its best to strangle the surrounding structures hid us from the street. I eased him to the pavement. “There’s no car in the driveway, and the shades are drawn. We should be safe for now.”

“Not for long,” said Tybalt, closing his eyes again. “Whoever has decided to challenge for my throne will follow. We cannot stay here.”

“And we can’t go anywhere else, either. So just breathe.”

Something rustled in the bushes. I whipped around, grabbing the knife from my belt. If the Cait Sidhe who attacked us on the Shadow Roads had already found us, we were toast, but I’d be damned if I wouldn’t take as many of them with me as I could. Tybalt couldn’t fight yet. That just meant I needed to do the fighting for him.