I shot him a sharp, wary look. “What did you tell her?”
“Tell her?” He laughed unsteadily. “That you were working on a private project. Maeve’s teeth, April, did you think I was going to say ‘oh, your adopted daughter is trying to blackmail the night-haunts into helping you resurrect your wife, who we all thought was lost forever, and if they won’t, she’s going to leave everyone else dead to punish them’? I’m pretty sure she would have gone looking for you.”
“And she would have found me. Li Qin has always been lucky that way.” Lucky, and more than lucky. She can bend probability with an artist’s skill, and while fortune always snaps back on her—always balances itself out—she knows how to make it dance to her desires. Without her, Mother would never have been able to make my integration with the hardware work. Even if Li Qin didn’t know it at the time, she powered my salvation.
I owed her so much. I owed them both so much. It was past time I started to repay them for everything they had done for me.
A quick inward glance at the network told me it was almost eleven. Time must have twisted inward on itself while I was in the ritual circle, an unfortunate side effect of using my actual magic, which still believed me to be something green and growing. Dryads thrive on slow magic. It sustains us, allows us to keep our trees—which are more mortal than the flesh of our cousins, who do not age, or grow, or die in the same ways that we do—alive and thriving for far longer than the seasons should deem possible. Dryads are not truly immortal like the Daoine Sidhe or the Tylwyth Teg, because trees must shed their leaves and put forth new fruit to remember what it is to be a part of the forest. But they can live a long, long time.
I will live far longer, now that I am no longer a part of that slow and subtle process. I wish I could regret that.
“Are they here?” I pulled my attention out of the network, returning it to Elliot. “October, has she arrived?”
He nodded. “She and Li Qin are in the basement, along with Toby’s squire.”
“You should have told me!”
“You were busy.”
He was correct—of course he was correct; the night-haunts were not the sort to sit patiently and wait while I took a meeting elsewhere—but I glared at him all the same.
“What did you tell them?” I demanded.
“That they couldn’t begin until you got there, and I couldn’t watch,” he said. “It wasn’t a lie. I know if it works, they’ll call me, and if it doesn’t, I don’t want to know until I have to.”
“I said October was to be locked out until the night-haunts agreed!” My voice was turning shrill, hurting my own ears.
Elliot looked at me flatly. “I told Li Qin,” he said. “She opened the doors anyway. You’ve got a problem, take it up with your mother. She agreed that nothing would happen until you were there. Honestly, under the circumstances, I feel like that’s all you were going to get. October’s a hero. You were never going to keep her waiting on the stoop.”
The rules of Faerie are elastic things, capable of bending themselves into incredible configurations before they actually break. Heroes have always been, and will always be, a strain on those rules. They go where they like. They do what they will. They save us, but the damage they do in the process is sometimes the thing we truly crave salvation from.
“Watch the security feed from the cafeteria,” I commanded. “When the night-haunts return, call me. No matter what I seem to be doing, call me. You have permission to use my security override.”
I didn’t wait for his reply before vanishing, hurling myself into the code and racing along it to the access port in the basement, half-hidden behind a filing cabinet. I reached for it, crackling like an electrical short in my hurry to make myself manifest.
Li Qin was standing between two of the covered cots, her hands resting beside the heads of two of the victims—Yui and Barbara, our first and most innocent dead. She was looking at a tall, underfed woman in a leather jacket, whose brown hair was streaked with incongruous gold. As for October . . .
She looked wearier than she had been the last time I had seen her, something I wouldn’t have believed possible if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. Faerie is not easy on heroes. The bones in her face had shifted since then, becoming sharper, less human. She was burning out one side of her blood, becoming something new. I could sympathize with the pain of the process. I, too, had once become something new.
A tall boy on the verge of becoming a tall man stood behind her. His hair had darkened from the careless dandelion gold of our first meeting, becoming a deeper, stranger shade of bronze, but his eyes were still exceedingly blue, and he still looked comfortable in his own skin. He offered a wan smile when he saw me. I inclined my head in reciprocal acknowledgment.
Li Qin glanced over her shoulder. Her smile was warmer, if underscored with understandable anxiety. “Hello, sweetheart. Elliot told me you were indisposed.”
“Elliot also informed you that I did not want this ritual to begin until I was present,” I said sternly. “Why did you refuse to heed him?”
“Nothing has begun,” she said.
“The ritual will work best if it starts at midnight,” said October. “Blood magic likes the stupid dramatics.”
I looked at her. “The ritual may not begin at all,” I said.
October blinked. Then she scowled, anger rolling across her face like malware. “What do you mean?” she asked. “Li Qin said—”
“This is not Li Qin’s County,” I said. “This is mine. I have one additional component to add to the process. If it is not completed in time, I am afraid we will not be able to continue.”
“April?” asked Li Qin. “Did you find something in my notes that I had overlooked?”
“Not in your notes,” I said, keeping my attention on October. “The trouble with notes—the trouble with anything in the material world—is that they are only as honest as the people who compose them. You recorded the truth as you knew and understood it. I do not accuse you of lying to me, Mother. But other people have told lies. Other people have obfuscated their data.”
October opened her mouth to speak. Then she paused. “April,” she said, in a careful tone, “why is there blood on your hands?”