One Salt Sea: An October Daye Novel

The air tingled around me as I walked, crackling with excited static. The hall marked the dividing line between the Summerlands side of the knowe and the mortal world cave that served as one of the primary anchor points. That made it a liminal space, belonging simultaneously to both worlds, and to neither.

A recessed doorway was hewn out of the wall at the spot where the static was the most severe—still in the knowe, but close enough to the mortal world to be overlooked, almost hidden. A person could walk down the hall a dozen times and never find the opening. I put my hand on the flat groove worn into the door itself, pushed it open, and stepped through. It was time to do something I’d intended never to do again. It was time to call the night-haunts.





TWENTY-THREE


THE SOLARIUM WALLS WERE GRAY stone shot through with veins of quartz and studded with fossils. Careful study would show extra legs on the lizards and vestigial wings on the prehistoric mice. This was a Summerlands mountain, and the secrets it held had no real connection to mortal evolution. The smooth gray floor was patterned with the lacy ghosts of fossil ferns.

Moonlight streamed into the room through the crystal panels set into a silver cobweb grid high overhead. I took a hook from the wall and walked carefully around the room, using the specially-designed tool to open the windows one by one. The night-haunts could have found a way inside without that small courtesy, but it never hurts to be polite, especially when asking for a favor.

Once all the windows were open, I returned the hook to its place on the wall. Then I walked to the center of the room, drawing the knife from my belt. Moonlight cast sharp, secretive glints off the silver. I didn’t pause before dragging the blade across the inside of my left elbow. Bright blood welled immediately to the surface. I tilted my arm down to let the blood run down my fingers and began to turn, drawing a bloody circle on the floor around me.

“I need your help,” I said, quietly. “I need your attention. I need you to come to me. Please, if anything remains between us, please, come to me now. I’ve never needed you more.” The smell of cut grass and copper rose around me, heavy and cloying. I licked my lips, and added plaintively, “Please.”

Silence fell. I returned my knife to its holster, clapping my right hand over the cut I’d made and pressing down to stop the bleeding. It was already slowing down. Just one more advantage of supernaturally efficient healing, I suppose.

Seconds ticked past, stretching into minutes. The smell of my magic didn’t fade, and the night-haunts didn’t come. I was on the verge of giving up when the spell surged and burst around me, leaving my head aching and the smell of copper hanging in the air.

And then I heard the sound of wings.

A thin stream of night-haunts flowed in through the windows above me, moving with an economy that made sense, considering that half of them were little more than shadows. The more solid members of the flock—the ones that had eaten the most recently—clustered around the outside, keeping their frailer companions from being scattered by the wind. They were all about the size of Barbie dolls, with tattered dry-leaf wings that looked too frail to lift them off the ground.

As they drew closer, I started to see individuals among the flock. Too many of them were familiar. The night-haunts have no faces of their own, so they borrow the faces of fallen fae, taking on their minds and memories . . . for a while. Seeing them always hurts, but it’s a good kind of pain, like having the chance to see something you thought was lost forever just one more perfect time.

The night-haunts surrounded me, their expressions giving no clue as to whether they were pleased or aggravated by my summons. Most of them stopped about six feet above the floor, hovering in place while one of the ones I recognized—the one with the face of Devin, my teacher, lover, and betrayer—barked instructions in a guttural language I didn’t know.