The Winter Long

“Raj seemed pretty tired after just bringing me from Goldengreen . . .” I said.

“He was running alone,” said Tybalt. “It will be different when he runs the roads at the same time as I do. My presence holds the shadows open as his does not, as yet. I can help him.”

That made me feel a little better about allowing Raj and Quentin to run separately—and after our encounter with the wards at Goldengreen, I wasn’t sure that running in a line was any safer. “I’ll trust you on that,” I said, moving away from Quentin and stopping next to Tybalt. He held out his hand. I took it, holding on as tightly as I could without hurting either one of us.

“I’ll never tire of hearing you say that you trust me, little fish,” he said, and glanced to Raj. “This will be a fair journey. Do you know the way?”

Raj nodded. “Run for Albany, come up for air. Do the same in Orinda. Then dive down into the Summerlands, so that we come up on the grounds in Shadowed Hills, instead of in the mortal world.”

“Good,” said Tybalt approvingly. “We shall take a similar route. When you arrive, if you somehow manage to beat us there, wait among the trees. Do not approach anyone, even if you know them.”

“And if you need to take more breaks than that, do it,” I said. “I don’t want anyone else getting hurt today.”

Tybalt smiled at me. For just a moment, nothing else mattered, not Evening, not Simon, not the confusing snarl of overlapping threads that my life had become. Tybalt and Quentin were alive, and we were all together, and we were going to find a way to get through this, because that was what we did. We were unstoppable, as long as we were together.

“Take a deep breath,” he said.

I did as I was told, and he stepped into the shadows, pulling me with him into the dark.

We ran in silence and in cold, as we always did, but this time, the trip was broken with flicker-flash impressions of the mortal world, cities flickering into view around us as Tybalt pulled me out of the shadows long enough to catch my breath and lose some of the thin coat of ice that was trying to form on both of us. I recognized the first city we ran through—Alameda, whose ports backed on the San Francisco Bay, making it the perfect target for a short hop. The second could have been any one of the genteel suburbs that thrived in the East Bay, where bedroom communities had become a way of life. It hadn’t been that way when I was younger; Lafayette, Walnut Creek, and San Ramon had all started out as farming towns, filled with livestock and with hunger. Now they had housing developments named after the orchards that used to thrive there, and I couldn’t tell them apart.

The third city we ran through wasn’t technically a city at all. One second we were in the dark, cold reaches of the Shadow Roads, and the next we were running across the interstate, with cars zooming all around us. Horns blared as motorists reacted to our sudden appearance. I gasped, seeing headlights bearing down on me, and Tybalt yanked on my arm—

—and we were back among the shadows, racing toward a destination that I couldn’t see, but which hopefully wouldn’t come with semis trying to turn me into changeling paste.

We didn’t run long after that, thankfully. I was tired, and I didn’t imagine Tybalt was that much better, since he was the one providing most of the motive force behind our journey. We tumbled out of the darkness and into the light, landing in a snowbank with me sprawled half on top of him. I sat up with a gasp as snow managed to infiltrate the few parts of me that hadn’t felt like they were half-frozen.

Beneath me, Tybalt groaned. I rolled away from him, and he pushed himself upright, glowering through ice-crusted lashes. The look didn’t seem to be directed at me, and so I raised an eyebrow, beginning to scrape ice sheets off the outside of my leather jacket.