“I know.”
“Bring him home.” He darted forward, flinging his arms around my waist for one heart-rending moment. Then he tore himself away and ran for the door, shifting into feline form as he went. He was faster on four legs. He would reach the edge of the wards and disappear, heading back into the shadows, back to the Court of Cats.
I let out a shuddering breath. “All right,” I said. “All right. We should—”
“If I may,” interjected Simon. “As this seems to be the time when you set the members of our party, I recommend your fair Fetch remain here.” He nodded toward May.
She recoiled. “What?” she demanded. “No! Why? No!”
“There are spells that can be woven—spells I can weave, and you can trust, so long as my brother’s binding limits the damage I can do—to let blood call to blood.”
May and I blinked in unison. I was the first to speak. “Okay, first, I’m not sure what that means, and second, if blood can call to blood, why can’t you use that to find August? We could all go home and actually get some sleep.”
“I’ve been sleeping for some time,” said Simon.
“Not long enough,” muttered Sylvester. Louder, he said, “We tried blood charms to bring August home. Wherever she is, she’s outside their reach, or something is blocking them. My brother is proposing using your Fetch as an anchor. Your blood calls to hers, no matter how far apart you are, and if we make that calling . . . louder . . . she will be able to know more of where you are. She would know immediately if you were in danger, and we could send aid.”
“Why not just, I don’t know, take aid with her in the first place?” asked May.
“There are many reasons, but the simplest is that a smaller force moves faster,” said Simon. “Send a hundred knights and all you’ll do is slow us down. But that doesn’t mean I’m refusing to be sensible. Anchoring her to you, and leaving you here with my brother to serve as an early warning system, only makes sense.”
May looked at me, silently pleading for me to disagree. And I wanted to—sweet Maeve, I wanted to. May had as much right to bring her lover home as I had to go racing after mine.
At the same time, May’s combat experience was all borrowed from my memories, and while she had knowledge, she lacked muscle memory. She couldn’t drive—not well, anyway—couldn’t sharpen a knife, couldn’t do anything that required her to have actually done the things she remembered doing. All my sword training had come after her creation. She didn’t have any of it. She was indestructible, but she healed as slowly as I had before my blood was shifted.
“I need you here,” I said, and my words were a betrayal: I could see it in her eyes.
“Okay,” she whispered. “But you bring them home. You bring them both home. If I find out you saved Tybalt over Jazz—”
“I won’t,” I said. “You know I won’t.”
“But I won’t be there,” she said, and burst into tears.
I put my arms around her. She buried her head against my shoulder, weeping loudly. Looking over her head to Simon, I asked, “Is this really necessary? Can’t she come?”
“We are going to travel to places that are not safe,” he said. “There’s no one else to serve as anchor to your blood.”
“Sylvester can serve as anchor to yours, can’t he?” I felt May stiffen in my arms, waiting for his response. This could be the solution: a way for May to come with us while still having an early warning system on the ground at Shadowed Hills.
“Yes, and you could slit my throat in a fit of pique,” said Simon. “It’s safer if we’re both anchored.”
“I don’t care. She needs to be there.” May was a liability in every sense imaginable, except for the one that counted: she loved Jazz more than she loved anyone else in the world. If I had been left behind while someone else went to rescue Tybalt, it would have devastated me.
May pulled away, sniffling. “No,” she said, voice thick with tears. “He’s right. I can’t help. I can’t fight, I can’t pick locks, all I can do is get between you and anyone who wants to stab you, and you don’t really care if you get stabbed.”
“I’m getting used to it,” I said dryly.
She laughed, voice unsteady. “See? You’ll be all right. Let me be the anchor, so we can find you if things get bad. Can I do that?”
“You can.” I leaned in and kissed her forehead, murmuring, “I will find them,” before turning back to Simon. “All right. Do what you need to do.”
“Fortunately, I do not need to enchant you directly; my brother’s binding recoils at the very thought,” said Simon. He took a step forward, holding out his hands. “If my brother and the Lady Fetch would be so kind?”
Sylvester narrowed his eyes before sliding his hand into Simon’s. After a pause for breath, May did the same with Simon’s other hand. Simon smiled. It was not a kind smile. It wasn’t a cruel one, either. He looked sad, almost, like he understood the enormity of what they were both doing, and regretted that they couldn’t trust him more.
“We begin,” he said, and started chanting in a language I vaguely recognized as Irish Gaelic. The smell of candle smoke and rotten oranges swirled through the room, underscored by Sylvester’s daffodils and dogwood and May’s cotton candy and ashes. Simon kept chanting. The air thickened, growing heavy—and then the spell burst, sending the unmingled perfumes skittering into the corners.
Simon stopped chanting and dropped their hands.
“It’s done,” he said. “If harm comes to either one of us, you’ll know it. You’ll know where we are. It’s down to you to find a way to reach us, if we are beyond this realm.”
“I’ll find a way,” said Sylvester.
Simon looked at his brother, and this time there was no disguising the sorrow in his expression. He looked like a man who had never been able to count on the ground beneath his feet, but who had set his own anchors against that instability, only to have them all crumble in the first stiff wind.
“I wish you had been able to say the same when it came to saving me,” he said softly. He turned away before Sylvester could reply, focusing on me. “Well, Sir Daye? Are you ready to save my daughter?”
“I’m ready to save Tybalt and Jazz,” I said. “Everything else is secondary.”
Simon grimaced. “I can understand why you would feel that way, but I’ll need you to rein in your tongue, at least until we’ve finished with our first stop.”
“Why?” I asked warily. I already had some idea of what he was likely to say. I was hoping to be wrong.
“We’ll be starting at your mother’s tower.”
“Oh, right,” I said. “Of course.” Well. Crap.
EIGHT