THE VINES DIDN’T DISAPPEAR when Amandine did: they remained as tight as ever, and the stasis lingered with them, holding me and May in place. Then, bit by bit, they seemed to loosen. I could blink. I could breathe. I hadn’t even realized I wasn’t until I started again. That was alarming.
The vines loosened more. I strained against them, feeling the thorns bite deeper into my arms—and now there was pain, sensation beneath the numbness. May still wasn’t moving. I didn’t know whether Mom’s magic had less of a hold over me because I was Dóchas Sidhe and May wasn’t, or whether I was just more willing to hurt myself, but it didn’t matter. All that mattered was getting loose.
Amandine had frozen us right after Tybalt handed me my knife. I had a knife. Carefully, I began working it back and forth, sawing it against the vines. The position of my pinned hand meant I was only sawing it against the vines, and not against my own leg, but that wouldn’t have made any difference to me. Not now. I needed to get free. I needed to save them.
The smell of Amandine’s magic hung in the air, blood and roses, getting fainter all the time. For the first time, my own magic was strong enough to sketch out the subtleties of those two elements, the crisp brightness of the blood, the woody wildness of the roses. They had a strong perfume, but they were wild things, the sort of roses that grew rampant in wooded places, never tended by a gardener, nor planted by a human hand. I filed the details away in the part of my mind that was always documenting the magic of others. It might matter someday, and if it didn’t, at least it was a small distraction from what she had done. I needed the distraction. I needed to keep sawing, and I needed not to drop the knife. If I lost that, we could be trapped here until the boys came to cut us loose.
The boys. Amandine had come here with the intent of taking hostages—the presence of the seeds in her skirt had proven that. They’d been enchanted before she came to the house, requiring only a small amount of magical effort to trigger them. Why? It wasn’t like anyone who lived here could stand against her.
But the Luidaeg could. And the Luidaeg had been at my bachelorette party. Ridiculous as her presence had seemed at the time, it was probably the only thing that had stopped Amandine from making her visit in the middle of a mortal karaoke bar. Everyone in Faerie is supposed to help maintain the secrecy of the whole. For someone like Amandine, that could mean transforming every human in the place into rabbits and leaving them to be eaten by urban predators. A few missing persons cases have never been a big deal for the purebloods. There are always more mortals to abuse.
Which brought me back to the boys. They’d been in the house when the doorbell rang, or at least they should have been. Had Amandine taken them as leverage before coming to offer me the chance to work for her? Or had they somehow missed the sound of everything going terribly wrong in the kitchen? There was no way they were sitting idly by while this went down. It wasn’t possible.
My knife finally sliced through the vines pinning my arm. I began cutting the rest of them away, faster now, the numbness receding more and more as the vines fell. When I pulled my legs free, the numbness dispersed entirely, leaving me physically fine. Mentally . . .
May rolled her eyes, silently pleading with me to hurry.
“Sorry,” I gasped, running across the room to her. I was halfway there when I tripped, stumbling into the nest of thorny vines. They barely punctured my skin. They’d been sharper before, hadn’t they? They had felt so much sharper, so much more dangerous.
More of Amandine’s magic. We couldn’t trust a thing she did—or said. For all I knew, she was already hurting Tybalt and Jazz. I hadn’t included her in my offer of hospitality. Faerie would offer no consequences for what she’d done. If she killed them . . .
If she killed them, I was going to show her what I’d shown Blind Michael. Firstborn are hard to kill, harder than purebloods, maybe even harder than me. That doesn’t mean they can’t die. It just means I have to work a little harder.
May started sobbing as soon as I sliced through the first layer of vines and freed her from enough of the stasis to let the tears come. My own eyes were dry. Shock and fear had chased my tears away. I kept thinking of the look in Jazz’s eyes when Amandine had forced her to transform, of the way Tybalt had yowled. Tears would have been a luxury. I could cry when they were safe. When they were home.
The vines fell away. May collapsed into my arms, hanging bonelessly against me for several seconds before she pushed herself back to her feet, grabbed my shoulders, and exclaimed, “We have to save them!”
“I know. I know we do.” I felt a surge of shameful gratitude. Jazz had been taken along with Tybalt. Much as I wanted to fall to pieces with worry, I couldn’t do that. She needed me. May needed me. I could stay strong, because someone else’s heart was at risk.
I’ve always been better at being strong for other people than I am at being strong for myself. Maybe it’s the way I was raised—or maybe it’s the way I was made. Either way, I guiltily shoved the gratitude to the back of my mind, pledging that May would never know about it. Ever.
May’s fingers dug into my shoulders until it hurt. I didn’t welcome the pain, exactly, but I was grateful for the distraction it offered. “Well?” she demanded. “Go! Get them back!”
“I can’t.”
She stared at me like I’d just confessed to summoning Amandine to the house myself. “What?”
“I mean, not yet. The boys—”
Her eyes widened. “Oh, oak and ash, where are they?” She looked around the kitchen like she expected them to appear. “They should have heard . . .”
“Maybe they did. Hang on.” I pulled my cellphone out of the pocket of my jeans and swiped my thumb across the screen. Quentin’s name was at the top of my “frequently called” list, which made sense. Tybalt doesn’t have a phone, and the Luidaeg’s number is the very definition of unlisted.
She was going to be my next call. Just as soon as I knew the boys were safe.
The phone rang twice before Quentin answered, sounding breathless and hesitant. “Hello?” he said, cautiously.
“It’s me,” I said. “Where are you?”
“Prove it.”
“Last week you tried to convince me to help you make a sushi pizza for your boyfriend, and I laughed until orange juice came out of my nose. Not my most dignified moment.”
“You don’t have dignified moments,” said Quentin, sounding profoundly relieved. “Is it safe? Can we come home?”
That confirmed my impression that if he had been in the house, he would have at least tried to come to my rescue. “Where are you?”
Silence answered me. I pulled the phone from my ear, and saw the call had dropped, just as the smell of pepper and burning paper filled the air, mercifully washing away the last of the blood and roses. I turned. Quentin and Raj were in the corner next to the fridge, Raj with his body positioned to block Quentin from the rest of the room. It was a protective gesture. It was also a sensible one. If anything tried to touch them, Raj could shove Quentin backward, onto the Shadow Roads, before either of them was hurt.