The Winter Long

“October?” asked Tybalt from behind me.

“Here!” I dropped to my knees on the carpet. The squelching noise my landing made had nothing to do with seawater. There was blood everywhere in this terrible little corner of the room, soaking into everything it touched. Grabbing the Luidaeg’s head, I turned it until she was facing me. “Luidaeg? Can you hear me?”

My eyes had adjusted enough to the dark that I had no trouble seeing the long streak of half-dried blood running down the side of her face, dipping inward at the corner of her mouth before tracing the line of her neck and vanishing under the collar of her blood-soaked sweatshirt. A bruise had blossomed under her left eye like some sort of terrible flower, all bitter yellows and deep purples. More blood was matted into her hair, turning her normally wavy curls into a jagged mass of spikes and snarls.

“Oh, root and branch . . .” I whispered, feeling under her jaw for a pulse. She looked so much smaller than I had always believed her to be, her natural illusions withering and fading away. The Luidaeg had seen legacies born, seen empires rise and kingdoms fall. She was older than anyone else I had ever met, even Blind Michael. Along with her sisters, she had once been the terror of bog and fen, a mother of nightmares and a sister to screams.

But that was so long ago. Her brothers and sisters had been hunted and killed by Titania’s jealous children, or by descendants of Oberon looking for an easy path to becoming heroes. Her fens had dwindled until she was nothing but a dockside squatter, and still she’d been remembered. She’d become a monster to her parents’ surviving children, and she’d made the role her own. She was too old and too much a part of our heritage to die.

She couldn’t do that to me.

“Is there a pulse?”

Tybalt’s voice snapped me out of my brief reverie. I searched her throat again, pressing my shivering fingers into the soft skin of her neck, and shook my head. “There’s no pulse.”

If she wasn’t gone, then she was going, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.

No. The thought crossed my mind, followed instantly by a chilling resolve that wound through me like the Shadow Roads, freezing everything it touched. Maybe it was true that most people couldn’t do anything about it, but I was Amandine’s daughter. I was among the first of the Dóchas Sidhe. And this was not going to happen on my watch.

“Help me move her,” I said, shoving my knife back into my belt and sliding my hands under her arms before I started to stand. Every shift of my position brought another of her wounds into view. There was so much blood.

Tybalt moved immediately around to lift her feet, asking, “Where are we going?”

“Her room. Even if it’s trashed, the bed’s big enough that we should be able to find a flat space to lay her out on, and I’m going to need room to maneuver.”

“October . . .” He frowned at me, expression speculative, even as he began backing across the living room toward the hall. He knew me and my limitations better than almost anyone else, and he wasn’t going to make me walk backward across a dark, cluttered room. “Are you preparing to do something utterly foolish, or simply stupid?”

“Remember that time I raised the dead?” In the basement at Tamed Lightning, just me and my knife and the body of Alex Olsen, who’d had information that I needed. I hadn’t even known what I was back then; I’d thought I was just another Daoine Sidhe, one with an unusually high tendency to wind up bleeding all over the damn place.

Tybalt’s eyes narrowed. “I recall something that might fit that description,” he said. “I recall, for example, that I did not speak to you for quite some time afterward, since you had done something that should have been impossible.”

“We know it’s not impossible. Not for me.”