“It’ll be okay,” I told Simon, stroking the hair back from his forehead. He didn’t look like he believed me. I couldn’t blame him, not entirely. He’d found his daughter, only to find that she didn’t know who he was, and then he’d lost her again, all because he was trying to save her. And me. It was no accident that his illusion had extended to cover me.
If he’d just cut it off before it could wrap around me, he could have concealed himself and August, leaving me to face Alan’s wrath, without violating the terms of his geas. It had been the perfect opportunity for him to escape, and he hadn’t taken it. For that alone, I had to do my best to save him. I didn’t have a choice.
The basement door opened and closed again. I shut my eyes, guessing before it happened that Madden was going to turn the light on. There was a click, and the dark behind my eyelids got a little lighter. Cautiously, I cracked them open, and watched Madden descend. He was carrying a small tray. I recognized the teapot, and I had hope. Not much, but still, it was a nice change.
He stopped on the last step, frowning. “Toby?” he said. “I thought you were . . . are you here?”
Crap. Simon’s illusion. I looked around, finding nothing I could throw, and settled on chucking my phone at Madden’s shoulder as hard as I could. My aim was a little off; it hit his upper arm before falling harmlessly to the pavement.
He blinked at it. Then he turned and blinked at me. “There you are,” he said. “What . . . ?”
“Really good don’t-look-here,” I said. “Don’t take your eyes off me, or you’ll lose us again.”
“You look . . .” Madden paused, clearly unsure how to proceed. Finally, he said, “Different.”
“August pulled a lot of the fae blood out of me before she ran, and I’m not strong enough to put it back on my own,” I said. “Arden still has the hope chest in her treasury. I’m sure she’ll let me borrow it for a few minutes.” And if she wanted to charge me some prohibitive price for using it, I’d have no choice but to pay. Swell.
There was a pause while Madden attempted to process this information. There aren’t many Dóchas Sidhe in the world—two is not enough to book a table at Mel’s Diner, much less constitute a healthy population—and hope chests haven’t been in common use for centuries. For most people, the balance of the blood they have when they’re born is the one they’re going to live with. He had already seen my blood shift once before. That didn’t mean it was something easy to understand.
It also didn’t mean that we had time to sit around while he came to terms with the great march of weird that is my life. “Did you bring what I asked for?”
“What? Oh!” Madden shook himself, a great, full-body motion, like he was trying to dry off after an unexpected dip in deep water. “Yeah. Here.” He closed the distance between us in a few long steps, holding his tray out toward me. “What are you going to do?”
“Something stupid. And painful. And unusually lasting, for me.” I took the tray, setting it carefully on the nearest open patch of floor.
Madden frowned. “What do you mean, lasting?”
“I mean the more human I am, the more slowly I heal.” I’ve bounced back from being stabbed in the heart and dropped from the treetops, but I was more fae than human when those things happened. “I’m about to make a mess.”
“Oh.” Madden took a step back. “I can’t really explain blood on my work pants.”
“It’s okay,” I assured him, and turned to the things I’d asked him to bring me.
The Borderlands Café isn’t the biggest or the fanciest in San Francisco, but the owner makes it a point to buy the best ingredients he can. Belatedly, it occurred to me that I could have asked for a cup of coffee. Being closer to human meant caffeine would work on me again. After I fix this, before the hope chest, I thought, and got to work.
Alchemy is a science, precise and careful and refined over the course of centuries. People like Walther can spend their whole lives practicing their craft, and still feel like they had more to learn. In one of those “Alanis Morissette would call this ironic” twists, changeling charms work along similar principles. A French chef and a home cook can both roast a chicken. It’s just that one of them will do it with technique and precision and a guaranteed result, while the other will be working off of Grandma’s recipe, a handful of herbs, and a basic understanding of heat.
I have always been more of a home cook. I picked up the squeeze bottle of honey and wrung a healthy amount of sticky golden liquid into the bottom of the teacup before adding pinches of powdered ginger and mint leaves.
“He that has a tiny little wit, with hey, ho, the wind and the rain,” I chanted. My magic struggled to rise around me, cut-grass and copper and so very, very strange, and so achingly familiar. This was how it had been for me, for years. This was how I had grown up, struggling to reach the bottom rungs of a ladder that everyone around me seemed to climb so effortlessly.
Maybe using King Lear to focus the charm meant to save my stepfather was a little weird, but I’ve always had a thing for Shakespeare, and somehow I didn’t think Simon would appreciate me going for Hamlet. I added salt to the mixture in the bottom of my teacup and stirred it with my finger before reaching for the pot and adding enough hot water to cover everything. The smell that rose from the mess was sweet and medicinal.
I was going to fix that.
“Must make content with his fortunes fit,” I chanted, and drew the knife from where it rode at my hip, comforting and close. The blade was silver, enchanted to hold a proper edge, and I kept it sharp. Given what my knives were often used for, letting them go blunt was never a good idea.
Simon rolled his eyes, sensing the shape of what I was about to do. He would have told me not to, if he could have; I was sure of that. I paused to smile a little, trying to seem more encouraging than concerned. From the way his eyes rolled again, I didn’t quite manage it.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m a professional.” I ran the knife along the ball of my thumb, opening the skin. The pain was bright and electric, as it always was, but this time, it didn’t fade: this time, it stayed and grew stronger, the skin unable to knit back together the way it so often did.
At least I’d have all the blood I needed. I held my thumb over the teacup, bleeding into the water-and-honey mixture. Then I reached for Simon’s hand, and repeated the cut along his thumb, adding his blood to the “tea.”
“Simon Torquill,” I said. “You have been bound for my sake, and for my sake, I release you. You have been bound by the blood of your brother: I undo those ties with the blood of my mother. Be fit. Be fine. Be free.” I raised the cup to his lips, holding it there until I saw him swallow. Good.
Now came the hard part. “The rain it raineth every day,” I murmured, finishing the phrase from Lear, and brought the cup to my own lips. The bloody red of his memories crashed down on me like a wave, and the basement—and my body—went away.
TWENTY