The Winter Long

The seawater soaking my clothes was freezing into sheets of ice that cracked and fell away as we ran. My strength was fading, and Raj couldn’t be much better off. It was hard for Tybalt to take me on the Shadow Roads, and he was an adult Cait Sidhe, secure in his powers. Raj was just a kid. Carrying me through the shadows had killed Tybalt once; what was it doing to Raj?

I was dwelling on that thought when Raj yanked me out of the darkness and into the dimly-lit hall of the Court of Cats. I threw my free arm over my eyes, squinting through the ice on my eyelashes as I tried to speak. It came out in a squeak. Raj pulled his hand away and dropped to his knees, retching. I stayed upright for a moment longer before I collapsed beside him, gasping for air.

“Let’s not do that again for a long, long time,” I wheezed.

“Okay,” Raj shakily agreed.

The feeling was rapidly returning to my fingers and cheeks, accompanied by the pins and needles sensation of healing frostbite. It was intense enough to keep me where I was for a few more seconds, and to make me very grateful that Raj and I hadn’t tried that particular run before I could recover quite so quickly from injuries. It definitely made me miss running with Tybalt.

Tybalt. The thought stiffened my spine. I pushed myself to my feet, demanding, “Where do I need to go, Raj?”

“Wow.” He managed a wan smile and raised his hand, pointing off down the hallway. “You stayed still longer than I expected. Just go that way. He wants you to find him, you won’t get lost.”

“Okay.” I hesitated. Every nerve I had was screaming for me to run until I found Tybalt and Quentin, but Raj looked so small lying there on the hallway floor . . . “Can you shift? I can carry you if you’re in cat form.”

Raj’s smile was bright enough to make me feel bad about even those few seconds of hesitation. “Yeah,” he said. The air around him blurred, the smell of pepper and burning paper lancing through the air, and he was gone, replaced by a young Abyssinian cat—but not, I realized as I stooped to gather him into my arms, by a kitten. He had grown into the length of his limbs and the size of his ears, making him a handsome creature even in this form. My boys were growing up.

“So you know, I’m putting you down as soon as I see Tybalt,” I said, and started walking, slowly at first, and then breaking into a jog.

Raj purred.

The Court of Cats is a patchwork kingdom, made from the lost pieces of the world around it. Mortal buildings and pieces of disused knowes, they’re all the same to whatever strange magic assembles and maintains the Court. The hallway where we’d landed was all aged, oiled wood, like something out of a medieval castle. As I ran, I passed through a white-tiled hospital and an empty, disused library, where the shelves were empty and the ceiling was so high above me that I couldn’t even hear the echoes end. There were windows, but after the first two we passed, I stopped looking their way—the things they showed were too skewed, and they didn’t help me get where I was going.

Raj curled loosely in my arms, showing admirable restraint for a cat; even when I tripped over a raised doorjamb or a bit of uneven brickwork, he didn’t dig his claws into my flesh. Much. The few times he did, the smell of blood put strength back into my wobbling legs, allowing me to keep up my pace.

“Did you intentionally drop us on the other side of the Court or what?” I asked. Raj, who didn’t currently have a mouth capable of forming human words, didn’t answer me. That was probably for the best.