A good don’t-look-here spell makes you seem like part of the landscape, or like someone else’s problem. As long as we didn’t directly interact with any of the bleary-eyed morning customers on the other side of the rope, they would take no notice of us. Carefully, we crept across the bookstore to our destination. Madden was right: the door was unlocked.
The light on the other side was off. Turning it on would definitely be a big enough change in the environment to attract attention. Silently thanking Oberon for fae night vision, I eased my way through the door and onto the steps beyond, descending a few paces before I turned and beckoned Simon to follow.
He hesitated. For one terrible moment, I expected him to slam the door, turn, and run. Instead, he stepped through and closed the door behind himself, casting us both into darkness. It was strange. Being shut in a dark stairwell with Simon Torquill should have given me pause, or maybe a mild panic attack. All I could actually feel was relief. We had both made it this far. With as strong as the traceries of magic were upstairs, we didn’t have all that far to go.
The basement had no windows, and the seal on the door was remarkably good: no light was making its way in. Fae eyes are good, but they’re not that good. “I’m going to turn the lights on,” I whispered, voice barely more than a breath.
Simon didn’t respond, but there was a faint shifting sound, as if he had braced himself. Good. Having sensitive eyes is sometimes as much a curse as it is a blessing. I reached past him and clicked the switch. Light sprang into being, filling the basement with a soft white glow.
I was looking directly at Simon’s face, pale and pinched, his eyes squinted tightly shut. He cracked one of them cautiously open before his face went slack, caution forgotten utterly as he opened both eyes in silent, staring shock.
I started to turn. That was a bad idea. Changing positions meant that the fist caught me square in the nose, sending me reeling backward.
Right.
NINETEEN
SIMON CAUGHT ME before I fell. At least, that was what I thought he was doing: as I struggled to stand upright, I realized he’d closed his hands on my shoulders, effectively pinning me in place. Sylvester had ordered him to raise no hand against me; maybe this didn’t count.
The woman on the steps below us was pale enough to look sickly, like cream that had gone faintly out of true. Her hair was a washed-out silvery red, as if it had been painted with moonlight one day while she wasn’t paying attention, and her eyes were a gold so pale and so clear that they verged on white-gray, like my mother’s, like my own. She was barefoot, wearing tattered secondhand jeans and a shapeless, oversized Borderlands T-shirt, and I would have known who she was even if I hadn’t known that she existed, because the family resemblance between us was terrifyingly strong. She even stood the way I did.
Why shouldn’t she? August and I were both daughters of Amandine who had been partially raised by Torquill men. Everything about my childhood had been a strange parody of hers, and looking at her was like looking at a funhouse mirror, warped and strange and perfect.
Her nose wrinkled. I realized she was tasting the air, rolling it on her tongue the way I did when I was trying to figure out what someone was.
“Let me up,” I hissed, glancing back to make sure Simon knew I was talking to him. “I can’t do this if I can’t stand.”
He didn’t let go. He was still staring at August, a man utterly transfixed, unwilling or unable to unlock his hands long enough to release me. I was probably as strong as he was—I definitely got more exercise—but the position and space we were in didn’t give me a lot of options for freeing myself unless I wanted to hurt him. August probably wouldn’t like that very much, him being her father and all.
I turned my attention back to her. “Uh, hi,” I said. “Mom sent me to find you. She’s been worried.”
August’s eyes narrowed. “I know you,” she said. Her accent was rounded and odd, like something out of an old movie; like something that had been shut away from the mortal world and its linguistic drift for a hundred years. “You were there, in Annwn, when the new people came. You were there when the walls of the world shredded, and I was finally free to step through. You did this to me.”
“I—what?”
That was all I had time to say before she launched herself up the stairs, grabbing me by the hair and yanking me out of Simon’s grasp. She was strong. She’d been living an agrarian existence in deep Faerie for longer than I’d been alive, and she had the sort of grip that comes from ploughing fields and breaking rocks.
What she didn’t have was training. Faced with an opponent who had already punched me once and was now jerking me toward her, I did the only thing that made sense: I brought my knee up and slammed it into the meat of her belly, knocking the air out of her with a loud gasp. She fell backward. She didn’t let go, and so I fell with her, two Dóchas Sidhe tumbling end over end to land in a heap at the bottom of the stairs.
There was a loud crack as we fell, the sort of meaty sound that spoke of broken bones, rather than broken woodwork. There was no accompanying bolt of pain. For once, the broken bone wasn’t mine. August shrieked, the sound still thin and reedy from where I had knocked the wind out of her. What were a few broken bones between newly united siblings?
When the siblings were the pair of us, a few broken bones were virtually nothing. August was a pureblood, maybe the only pureblood of our shared kind, and she healed even faster than I did. By the time I had disentangled myself from the knot of limbs that we had become, she was already bouncing to her feet and lunging for me again, the smell of smoke and roses crackling in the air around her. Did healing raise her magic? Was it that way for both of us, and I had just never noticed, because my own magic was internal to me?
I had so many questions. There were so many things I wanted to ask her, things about our magic and the way it worked, things about our mother, things about her search for Oberon. And none of those questions were going to get answered until she stopped trying to flat-out murder me. August lunged, grabbing for my wrists, like she thought she could subdue me by holding my hands.
Wait. Maybe she could. If I wasn’t fighting back, maybe she’d stop—and it wasn’t like I couldn’t take a little pain. I let her grab my wrists, smothering the instincts that told me to back up, to pull away, to get out of her range before she did something I couldn’t live with. Simon was still on the stairs, neither coming to her aid nor asking her to stop. The geas he was under had to be warring with his parental instincts, and I almost felt bad for him. Almost; not quite. I had other things to worry about at the moment.