Ashes of Honor: An October Daye Novel

“Yeah,” I said, biting back the urge to start swearing. “I got that.”


There was no trace of Chelsea’s magic, but I didn’t need her magic to tell me that this was where the door had opened. A large section of wall was burnt black. In some places, it was gone, revealing the empty, echoing room that surrounded us. The silver window frames above the hole had been melted by the heat; some of them were splattered on the floor in oracular swirls, while others had maintained their cohesiveness but lost their form, twisting and curving into something that looked like modern art, assuming your definition of “modern art” involved a preschooler and a blowtorch.

The air smelled like fire, molten metal…and blood. Once I started paying attention to it, it became impossible to ignore. I stepped away from Tybalt, moving to a blackened patch on the green marble floor. I knelt there, laying my fingertips against the stone, hearing the blood sing to me through the layers of ash that separated us.

“You died here,” I said, very quietly.

“October—”

“I wasn’t here, and the girl I’m supposed to be finding was, and you died.” I looked up at him, glaring through the tears in my eyes. I left my fingers balanced on the floor, letting his blood sing its song of pain and longing. Longing to live; refusal to let go of the world. Maybe that’s what differentiates the Kings and Queens of Cats from the rest of Faerie. They have a cat’s stubbornness and the power to back it up. So when death says, “Go,” they just refuse.

My heart hurt. My heart hurt so badly, and I was still trying to recover from Connor, and oh, Titania, I couldn’t do this again. The thought startled me. I froze where I was, still glaring.

Tybalt sighed. “I know.” He hesitated before adding, “This is not the time, and this is not the place, and my nephew needs us. But I ask you to consider this. I got better. I will always get better.” He hesitated again—possibly the first time I’d ever seen him pause more than once after he’d decided he was going to say something.

Finally, he said, “Some of us, October, will not leave you.”

I stared at him. Then I pushed myself to my feet, shaking the chill of his words from my skin, and dipped a hand into my pocket to pull out the Luidaeg’s charm. As I half-expected, it was glowing a brilliant foxfire green, like a Candela’s Merry Dancer, boiled down and concentrated. I held it toward the darkest part of the char. The glow dimmed.

“She didn’t open this door,” I said, and turned, relieved when the motion put Tybalt out of my sight. He was right; this wasn’t the time for that conversation. And he was also right that it was a conversation we needed to have sooner rather than later. Just not now.

The glow didn’t brighten again until I was facing an undamaged patch of wall. Even the cobwebs and ancient, tattered curtains were intact, marking this as one of the few places not touched by fire. I moved in that direction, careful to step around the spots on the floor where blood sang to me of injuries and anger. I didn’t want to get overwhelmed.

The curtains eddied in a half-felt wind as I approached, and I smelled a faint trace of calla lilies under the veneer of smoke. The rest of her magic was buried, blending into the background smell of the fire. That didn’t matter. I had what I needed.

I held the sphere out toward the source of the lily scent. There was a soft sound, somewhere between a sigh and the chiming of a bell, and the sphere changed from foxfire green to lambent white, dimming at the same time, until it seemed as if I had a hand filled with frozen starlight. Emphasis on the “frozen”: as soon as the light changed colors, a chill raced up my arm, wrapping itself around my heart. It squeezed once, long enough to make me gasp, and then it was gone…but the memory remained. Chelsea and I were tied now. No matter what else happened, I had to find her.