I lowered my phone. “Hey,” I said.
“Where is my uncle?” demanded Raj. He raked his eyes across the chaos in the kitchen, glaring at the wilting vines littering the floor and the bloody pinpricks on May’s arms. His gaze finally settled on me. Only the faint tremor in his lower lip betrayed how frightened he was. “Where is he?”
“Amandine has him,” said May, stepping forward before I could speak. “She took Tybalt and Jazz. As collateral.”
“Collateral against what? Wait—Amandine? She was here?” Quentin shoved his way in front of Raj, starting toward me. “Toby, I’m sorry, we were coming out of my room when Tybalt appeared in the hall upstairs and told Raj to get out of the house, I didn’t want to go with him, I wanted to stay and fight for you like a squire is supposed to, but once we were in the Court of Cats, I didn’t know how to get back—”
“Stop apologizing,” I said. To my great relief, he did, and stood there looking at me mutely, waiting for me to tell him how I was going to fix this. Waiting for me to tell them all.
I couldn’t, because I didn’t know. Instead, I rubbed my eyes with one hand and said, “I didn’t ask Tybalt to give that order, but I would have if I’d been thinking. Raj did the right thing getting you out of there.”
I couldn’t see Raj through my hand. I could picture his expression. He would be sagging slightly with relief. Relief that I wasn’t angry at him for grabbing Quentin and running; relief that I hadn’t expected them to stand and fight. Quentin is officially my squire, but Raj frequently falls into a similar role. Somewhere between our first meeting in Blind Michael’s lands and my slow courtship with his uncle, I had come to matter very much to the kid, and he had come to matter very much to me. That doesn’t mean it’s his job to risk his life for mine.
“I should have stayed,” said Quentin. “I should have fought.”
I lowered my hand. “You’re my squire. You’re also the Crown Prince of the Westlands,” I said. “We were up against one of the Firstborn. None of us knew what she was capable of. Tybalt gave the best order possible, under the circumstances. I’m just glad Raj was able to follow it.”
“Amandine was really here?” Quentin shook his head. “I thought . . . I don’t know what I thought. I didn’t think she knew where we lived. Why did she come here?”
“Because she wants me to find my sister.” I closed my eyes, taking a deep breath. I could do this. I could find August; I could save Tybalt and Jazz. I could.
I just needed to figure out how.
“Why did she take them? They’re not going to help you find anyone when they’re not here.” Raj sounded very small. With my eyes closed, it was easy to remember the skinny, terrified boy he had been when we met, the one who had been convinced that he was never going to make it out of Blind Michael’s lands. I had been the one to tell him to be brave, then. I had been the one to promise him that he was going to make it home.
I opened my eyes. “Because she wanted leverage against me,” I said. “I told her I wouldn’t work for her. She got mad.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” said May.
“Maybe it was!” snapped Raj. “One of the Firstborn came here and asked you to do something, and you said no? October. Why? Why would you do that?”
“She’s not ‘one of the Firstborn,’” I said. “She’s my mother. She’s the reason I am . . . well, she’s the reason I am just about everything I am. She knows how to push all my buttons, because she was there when they were installed. I said ‘no’ because I didn’t think she’d hurt me.” But that wasn’t true, was it? She had confessed to doing exactly that. Try as I might, I couldn’t think of turning someone human against their will as anything but hurting them.
“And it wasn’t her fault,” said May again. Her voice shifted, taking on traces of the strange, nameless accent she had when she was touching her night-haunt roots. She was a part of their flock for centuries untold before she became my Fetch. It was easy to forget that sometimes. “Amandine may be your mother—I may remember her as my mother—but she was planning to take collateral as soon as she stepped through that door. I know enough about her to have no question about that. She came here intending to take something to guarantee your good behavior.”
“Why?” Quentin asked.
“Because that’s how Amandine is. That’s how she’s always been.” May shook her head. “I can’t remember much more than that. The memories aren’t mine—I got them from the dead—and those get fuzzy after a while.”
“I know someone who will remember,” I said. I wanted to run out the door and start looking for Amandine. I had a pretty good idea of where to start: she was likely to have taken Tybalt and Jazz back to her tower. But I couldn’t best her magically, and she might hurt them if I showed up without having even started looking for August. I needed help.
There was only one person who could give me that.
Raising my phone again, I called up the keyboard and tapped the numbers in a decreasing spiral, moving from one to eight. As I dialed, I chanted, “Cinderella, dressed in yellow, went upstairs to kiss a fellow; made a mistake, kissed a snake, now they’re happily married with a dental practice outside Marin.” The smell of cut-grass and copper rose in the air around me, my magic gathering for the attack.
The copper smelled bloody, arterial. The more of my humanity I lose, the more my magic smells like my mother’s. I have never hated that fact more than I did in that moment.
The spell coalesced, drew tight, and finally burst, drifting down around me. I lifted the phone to my ear, waiting as patiently as I could.
The death of the dial tone has not been kind to me. I can have trouble telling whether a call has been successfully completed when I’m calling someone like Quentin, whose phone actually exists. The Luidaeg’s phone isn’t connected to the exchange. She doesn’t have a cell, and her landline doesn’t have any wires; the jack is stripped, the cords cut off close to the body of the phone to keep her from tripping over them when she gets out of bed for a midday snack. The fact that I can call her at all is pure magic, and the spell doesn’t always work.
There was a long pause—long enough that I started to think I was going to need to cast again—when there was a click and a sound like a bottle smashing to the ground before the Luidaeg asked wearily, “What the hell do you want? Isn’t it enough that I came out in public for you? You know, in my day, people were grateful when I blessed their events with my presence. They didn’t go expecting me to answer the fucking phone to boot.”