“I’m sorry about that.”
“I don’t mean it will hurt me. My brother was never much of a blood-worker, but he has raw power behind him, and the form he used was composed by our First, may she sleep forever and never trouble us again. It will hurt you. Your blood is thin and fraying. The pain . . .”
“Won’t be anything I haven’t felt before. Let me do this. Let me save you.”
“And when I am forever in your debt, and you can never again be free of me, will you be glad you did? This is something I can’t repay.”
“We’ll worry about that later. Please. Don’t leave me to deal with this alone.”
Simon sighed, long and low and weary. I wondered suddenly how long it had been since he’d had a rest. Being elf-shot didn’t count. That sort of sleep didn’t renew the body or the soul, or else purebloods would have done it to themselves every time they needed a break, rather than wandering off into the woods to commune with nature and potentially get eaten by whatever happened to be lurking there.
“All right,” he said. “Give me your hands.”
I walked toward him. He reached out, and I slid my hands into his, letting our fingers knot together. This close to him, the smell of smoke and mulled cider was incredibly strong.
“Why did it change?” I blurted.
He paused. “What?”
“Your magic. It’s not . . . when I smell it in the real world, it’s rotten oranges, not mulled cider. I didn’t know magic could change like that. I thought it was a part of you. Why did it change?”
“Ah.” He looked down, refusing to meet my eyes. It didn’t look like he was preparing to lie. Instead, it looked like he was, well, ashamed. “Magic is a function of the blood. It tells the world who you are, something that can’t be hidden or denied. When I allowed myself to be yoked to someone who did not have my family’s best interests at heart, when I borrowed her magic over and over again—charms and cantrips and blood potions, and be careful, October, be very, very careful, because the things we consume become a part of us, and some transformations run deeper than the skin—when I did those things, I let myself be changed. I became someone else. Someone who had no right to Simon Torquill’s past, or to the love of those who would have saved him, if only they had known how much danger he was in. Magic is a function of the blood. It will change when the blood does.”
“It’s changing back,” I said, and he looked up, startled. “I keep smelling apples on you. Have faith, Simon. Maybe the damage you did wasn’t as bad as you think it is.”
“May Oberon have mercy,” he whispered. Then, more loudly, he asked, “Can you see any sort of flicker around me, any indication of the size or shape of the binding?”
I squinted, willing the delicate web of Sylvester’s magic to come into view. There was a faint, distant whiff of daffodils, but that was all; no magical glimmer appeared. I shook my head. “No. There’s nothing. I think . . . I think I’m too human.”
“The merlins were more human by far than you are now, and they brought a thousand towers down,” said Simon. “There’s no such thing as being too human, and anyone who ever told you that was lying, because they were afraid.”
“Of what?”
He leaned closer, voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper, “Of what you could do if you remembered that your heritage has more than one source. If you can’t see it, feel for it. Right here, right now, we share blood, and this binding was cast on your behalf. Find it. Make it your own.”
I swallowed, hard. Then I closed my eyes.
It’s easier to look for things I can’t see when I can’t see anything at all. Vision just gets in the way. So I held onto Simon’s hands, and I held onto the thin traceries of daffodil flowers in the air, and I strained as hard as I could, stretching a muscle that humans don’t have and purebloods never bothered to find a name for. It was the point of connection between me and the magical world, and while it might be smaller now than it had been, it was still there. As long as a drop of fae blood still ran in my veins, no one could take it entirely away from me.
In the dark, the smell of daffodils was easier to find and follow, as was the scent of cut-grass and copper. I drew it around me like a cloak, and when that wasn’t enough, I bit the inside of my cheek, hard enough to draw blood. It tasted distant and dilute, probably because this wasn’t really happening, not the way I saw it.
Distant and dilute it might be, but blood was blood, and my blood wanted me to succeed. I swallowed, and reached, and filled my questing fingers with the scent of daffodils. I pulled. They pulled back, suddenly rooted.
Simon moaned. The sound was tight and quickly swallowed, like it was something he hadn’t wanted me to hear. I gritted my teeth and pulled harder, chasing the source of the pain, chasing the thing that didn’t want me to catch it. It tried to slither away. I bore down.
And it was there in my hands, the core of someone else’s spell, bright and burning and smelling of dogwood flowers. I needed it to stop. I needed it to go out. I looked for something I could use to extinguish it.
All I had was blood. That was fine. I’d worked with blood before. I’ve been working with blood for most of my life. So I reached deep, tracing back along my own mental fingers until I found the blood I needed and cast it, hard and furious, against the fire. The geas guttered, swamped and overwhelmed. I doused it again.
The flame went out.
I opened my eyes, pleased, smiling. “See?” I said. “I—” Then I stopped, staring at the emptiness in front of me.
Simon was gone. The basement walls had continued to recede; the only way I could tell that I was still in my blood-construct of the Borderlands basement was by looking at the rafters above my head or the cracked stone below my feet, and even those seemed a little too old, a little too medieval to be part of a modern human building in mortal San Francisco.
“Simon?” I called.
My voice echoed off the distant walls, traveling out, bouncing back to me. I bit my lip.
“Hello, little fish,” said a voice from behind me.
I whipped around, so fast that I nearly lost my balance. There, gilded red like everything around him, stood Tybalt. He was wearing the leather pants and open pirate shirt that had been his default wardrobe for so many years of our acquaintance, a smirk on his lips. He looked tired. He looked so very, very tired.
“I can’t leave you alone for a second, can I?” he asked.
“Tybalt?” I took a step closer. “Are you . . . how is this . . . ?”
“I’m not real, no,” he said. “Would that I were. This might all end so much more easily if I were. October, do you understand what you’ve done?”
“I unbound Simon.”
“Yes. You did.” Tybalt took a step back. “He told you it would cost. Didn’t you listen?”
“What?”
“I love you. Take comfort in that. Even in your dreams, you are no longer capable of imagining a world in which I do not love you. Hold fast to that ideal.”