One Salt Sea: An October Daye Novel

“All right, honey. If that’s what you want, you can go home.” I let go of her hands, gathering her into a hug. It felt good, and right, and like it was everything I’d been missing since I came back from the pond. “This is going to hurt, okay? But it has to hurt if you want to go back to your dad.”


“Okay,” she said, sniffling, and buried her face against my shoulder.

I closed my eyes, the smell of grass getting stronger, the smell of copper overwhelming the primroses. Even with my eyes closed, I could see everything she was, every trace of her heritage. And I reached out, still holding her close to me, and grabbed hold of everything that wasn’t human—including the poison that was struggling to kill her. Wipe away one, wipe away the other.

Set her free.

Her screaming was the worst thing I’d ever heard—but if I stopped, she’d die, so I kept going, changing and twisting and wiping away, until the screaming stopped, giving way to silence. And I opened my eyes.





THIRTY-TWO


GILLIAN WAS STILL UNCONSCIOUS on the floor, but the wound in her shoulder had closed. That seemed to be the only immediate change. Her fae blood was thin enough that removing it hadn’t visibly altered the shape of her face; she still looked like my little girl. And she still wasn’t breathing.

“Move,” said the Luidaeg, pushing me roughly to the side as she moved to put her hands on my daughter’s chest. She looked up, pupils expanding until her eyes were consumed by blackness. “Go to your Selkie,” she said. “You don’t need to watch this.”

I nodded numbly, climbing to my feet. I swayed there for a moment, and then I turned and ran to Connor.

He was lying where he’d fallen, motionless, save for the shallow, strained rise and fall of his chest. The arrow was still in place, sticking out of his body like an accusation. See? it seemed to say; see what happened because you let him love you?

“Oh, Connor.” I knelt, letting my fingers brush against his cheek. “You idiot. You wonderful, stupid, beautiful idiot.”

Gillian whimpered. I didn’t let myself turn around.

“I love you,” I whispered, and leaned down to kiss Connor’s cheek. My lips left a bloody print behind. “Sleep well.”

Something was wrong. The blood in the room was trying to tell me what it was, but I was tired, and everything was so jumbled that I couldn’t tell what was happening anymore. I stood, wiping the tears from my eyes and the blood off my lips and chin. “Come on,” I said, to no one and to everyone who was listening. “Let’s go bring those damn kids home.”

The room only had two doors. We entered through the first, and so I walked toward the second, not looking to see who followed me. I was exhausted. My head ached from the strain of what I’d just done to my little girl—a thing I would have said was impossible a year ago. “Impossible” no longer seemed to have much place in my life. Connor was . . . Connor was asleep. I refused to admit to anything more than that. As for me, I was somewhere past “done” and accelerating toward “completely finished.”

“Toby?” asked Quentin. He ducked ahead of me as I opened the door into the next section of the shallowing, revealing a long, dark hallway. The pixies flew ahead of us, lighting it. “Are you okay?”

“No,” I said, stepping past him. A blue-winged pixie landed on my shoulder, providing a dim but steady local light. “We’re looking for two teenage boys. They’re probably scared, so try not to startle them.”

“Are we quite sure Rayseline had no other little helpers?” asked Tybalt. I glanced back to see him making his way through the doorway.

“No,” I said. “But if she did, they were probably more hired thugs, and they’ll run when they realize they’re not going to get paid. There’s no way she paid them enough to stay—Dugan could never have stolen that much from the Queen’s coffers without getting caught, and Raysel didn’t exactly have resources of her own.”

“You have such a generous view of fae nature,” said Tybalt mildly.