I couldn’t exactly see the threads of Faerie, but I could feel them. They were too thin, too sparse. They couldn’t sustain a changeling. Where else could I find the magic of Faerie? Enough to create Faerie where it wasn’t?
Fred’s words came back to me. “Look to yourself. What you seek is never far.” Her advice may have sounded like it belonged in a fortune cookie, but . . . I was a true-blooded fae, which meant the magic of Faerie ran through my blood. And through Desmond’s and Falin’s.
“Desmond, I need your blood,” I said, kneeling to dip my hands in the dark puddle around his head.
He didn’t growl, so I took that as consent since I didn’t have time to secure anything better. The blood from his wound had stopped flowing some time ago, and the puddle surrounding him was already cooling, congealing. I swiped it across the cement floor, drawing a circle around Rianna. The cooling blood didn’t go far, so it was a small circle.
“Al, what are you doing?” she asked, her voice shaking. Even if she’d accepted death as inevitable, she was terrified of it.
I didn’t answer but sliced a gash across my palm with my dagger as I yelled, “Falin, I need you.”
Falin had Saunders on his stomach, his hands cuffed behind his back. The man was no longer on fire, which was more than he deserved. Falin dropped him as soon as I called and rushed over.
“What—?”
“Add your blood to the circle,” I said as I let my own blood dribble over the circle I’d drawn with Desmond’s.
Blood magic was dangerous. Illegal. But Falin didn’t question me. I’d asked for his help, and he offered it, cutting his palm in the same way I had.
I’d done true blood magic only once before, and it had been only my blood then. Now, with blood from all three of us in the circle I’d drawn, I could feel the three different, potent magics we each possessed. And I could feel the common thread that tied us all together. The thread that was Faerie.
I still couldn’t see it. I was used to magic being visual to me, but this wasn’t. I could feel it, though, so I closed my eyes. I reached down, lifting the dainty threads of Faerie magic from the blood with my fingers. Then I reached out, gathering everything around me that felt like Faerie, and began knotting them together, piece by piece, strand by strand, like a fishing net. I worked by feel, looping, threading, knotting. As I worked, the strands grew thinner, Faerie magic drawing out of the world, but it caught between my knots, held.
“Duck,” I commanded Rianna. I heard the sound of her clothes moving and felt the air shift slightly, but I didn’t dare open my eyes and see the emptiness I’d been working with—I didn’t want to disbelieve my net of Faerie away.
I tossed the net over her head, pulling it down.
“Get as low as you can,” I said, and she must have listened, because I was able to pull the net down to meet the circle of blood and tie the points down.
Then all that was left to do was wait.
We didn’t have to wait long. I finished only moments before sunset. Usually I wasn’t very aware of sunset. I might feel slightly tired, but it wasn’t devastating. This time it hit like a punch to the gut.
The breath rushed out of me and my head spun. I could feel the draw of energy and magic being pulled from my blood to maintain the net of Faerie. The others must have been feeling the same. I heard Falin collapse to his knees beside me, and Desmond whined. I bowed my head, tucking it between my knees as vertigo made the world lurch despite the fact that I was perfectly still. But I didn’t open my eyes.
I tried to count heartbeats but couldn’t seem to get over three. I wasn’t sure how many times I counted to three and then stopped, feeling ill and wondering what number I’d left off on.
Finally the world calmed. I could breathe again. I waited for the vertigo to return, but it was gone. Sunset had come and passed. Faerie magic was reentering the world now that night had arrived. I lifted my head and cautiously opened my eyes, afraid I’d see one of my best friends aged several hundred years inside a bloody circle.
Silent tears ran down Rianna’s still young, still-living face. She jumped free of the circle and threw her one good arm around my shoulders, nearly dragging both of us to the ground.
“You did it,” she whispered. “You actually did it.”
Despite my exhaustion, a smile I couldn’t have contained if I’d wanted to claimed my face, and I hugged her back fiercely.
When she finally pulled away, I swayed and pressed a hand against my head. “I don’t think I want to do that particular trick again anytime soon, so let’s make sure you make it back to Faerie from now on?”
She beamed, studying my face. “But you did more than just save me. Al, you wove reality. Normally you just shove it around. You actually wove it together.”
I hadn’t thought of it that way.
On the other side of the circle Desmond gave out another whine, and Rianna’s eyes widened before she whirled around to run to her four-legged companion. I turned to Falin. He’d picked himself off the ground, but he looked shaken. His glamour had snapped, letting the natural glow of his skin show, but it wasn’t as strong as it should have been. His soul inside his exhausted body still glowed strong and healthy, though, so I hoped I hadn’t done any of us permanent harm.
“You don’t look so hot,” I told him when he offered me a hand up.
He gave me a pointed look. “You should talk.”
Yeah, I bet I was frightful in my half-decayed clothes, grave wind still blowing my hair every which way, not to mention the power drain of what I’d done.
“I should say th—” I started, but Falin pressed his fingers to my lips, stopping me.
“Do not offer me any boon she could use against you.” He didn’t have to say who she was. At the end of the day, he was always the queen’s tool.
“You didn’t have to do what you did.”
“I know.” He lifted my hand to his mouth and pressed a quick kiss to my knuckles. “One day I’ll ask you for a boon with no debt. Grant it to me.”
He said the words like a requested oath, but they held no binding power. I nodded anyway. He turned my hand over and winced.
“We’ll need to rebind this.”
I frowned at my hand. I thought at first that the blood was from where I’d cut my palm, or perhaps Desmond, but no, it was actively flowing from the shredded skin of my fingers. Touching reality had cost me some flesh.
“Well, I guess that wraps this up,” Briar said, climbing to her feet from where she’d been tending to Gauhter’s wounds.
He was alive, and apparently would stay that way.
“And I guess I know why Derrick gave me my charm,” she said, making a face at the viscera splattered over her jacket and pants. Yeah, without a charm preventing the smell of decay from sinking in, that would never come out.