Then she snarled, “I don’t start things. I finish them,” and lunged, hands outstretched to grab the sides of my face and yank the last of the fae blood from my body.
I forced myself to stay where I was until she was so close and moving so fast that she couldn’t possibly change her trajectory. Then I stepped to the side, sticking out my foot and hooking it around her ankle. She went down hard, sliding several feet across the floor.
It didn’t buy me much time. It bought me enough to grab the baseball bat out of the umbrella stand, where it had been sitting unused for long enough to have gathered a thin patina of dust, and bring it down across the back of her skull. Something cracked. It wasn’t the bat.
August lay still.
TWENTY-TWO
THE BASEBALL BAT HIT the floor with a clatter, rolling until it came to a stop against the wall. I bent forward, resting my hands against my knees and panting hard. The scratches on my cheek stung like fire. It had been so long since I’d had to deal with the long-term effects of my injuries that I wasn’t used to them anymore.
“Mortality sucks,” I said finally, and pushed myself upright. Simon was standing next to the door, eyes wide and face pale. I guess seeing his stepdaughter bludgeon his long-missing biological daughter with a baseball bat had been a little much for his delicate sensibilities. “Help me with her. We need to get her into the kitchen before she wakes up.”
“Before she—October, you hit her in the head with a club!”
“Baseball bat, and yeah, I did, so I figure we have maybe five minutes before her skull puts itself back together and she wakes up. Probably pissed, because I did just hit her with a baseball bat. Come on.” I bent again, this time reaching for August’s arm. I paused at the last moment, before my fingers would have touched her skin.
Could she hurt me while she was unconscious? My magic sometimes did things when I was asleep, when it thought I needed it to act on my behalf. I pushed my shoulders forward and bent my elbows, until the sleeves of my jacket covered my hands, like I was a five-year-old playing dress-up with Mommy’s clothes. Thus protected by a layer of leather, I wrapped my effectively mittened hands around August’s right wrist.
Simon still hadn’t moved. I looked up and frowned at him.
“You can help me move her, or you can stand there while I wrench her arm out of its socket dragging her,” I said. “The choice is yours.”
“This seems wrong,” he said, and moved to grab August’s left wrist. Unlike me, he didn’t cover his skin first. He didn’t need to. As a pureblood, there was nothing in him that she could use as a lever.
“Everything about this is wrong,” I agreed, as we dragged August down the hall toward the kitchen. “I’m not supposed to be this mortal. This isn’t how I wanted to meet my sister, if I ever did. You’re not supposed to be the last man standing on my list of allies. I’m not supposed to be asking myself where my squire is and fighting not to panic before I have my sister who, again, I just hit in the head with a baseball bat, safely tied to a chair. So, yeah, it’s wrong. It’s also the only right we have.”
Simon said nothing, but he kept dragging, and under the circumstances, I was willing to accept that.
The kitchen was empty, save for Spike, who was sitting on the counter taking in the afternoon sun. It sat up and rattled when it saw us, like an animate maraca. I smiled.
“Hey, buddy,” I said.
Spike crooned, and rattled some more.
Before coming to live with me, Spike had lived with the rest of the rose goblins in Shadowed Hills, where it had originally sprouted from a seed planted by Luna. Like so many things in Faerie, it had been comfortably wild until someone gave it a name—that someone being me. I hadn’t been thinking. Sometimes my time in the human world shows itself in odd ways, one of those being a tendency to want to call things by their name. So I had named it, and it had followed me home, and I hadn’t been sorry, not once I adjusted to the idea of having a rose goblin now.
Simon smiled wanly at the sight of it, before helping me to boost August into one of my kitchen chairs. Her head lolled limply forward. That was a good sign. I really didn’t want her waking up before she was safely restrained.
“Hold her here,” I commanded. “I’m going to get the duct tape.”
“Hurry,” said Simon. “I can hear her breathing. I think she’ll be awake soon.”
“Hurrying,” I said.
The kitchen junk drawer was a welter of strange herbs in jars, odd sticks, bones, dried flowers pressed between sheets of wax paper, dead batteries, and other semi-useful things that we had, for whatever reason, not been able to bring ourselves to throw away. I dug through it until my fingers closed on a roll of duct tape. Yanking it free, I rushed across the room to where Simon was holding a motionless August upright, keeping her from falling out of the chair.
Quickly, I ripped off strips of tape and secured her hands to the chair’s arms, swaddling them with tape until she began to resemble a uniquely sticky mummy. Simon lifted an eyebrow but said nothing about this apparent overkill. I silently thanked him and kept taping, running loops of tape up her arms before I started taping her torso to the chair.
I was securing her shoulders when she began to squirm. Not much; just enough to tell me she was waking up. Quickly, I ripped off the last strip of tape and took a step backward, out of the range where she could accidentally brush up against me.
August shifted. August squirmed. August lifted her head, opened her eyes, and tried to stand, only to be held in place by most of a roll of duct tape.
There was a pause during which it seemed like everyone in the kitchen, even Spike, was holding their breath. August turned to Simon as the closest person. There was still no recognition in her eyes. She might as well have been looking at a total stranger, and my heart broke for him, to be so close to everything he’d sold his soul to get, and yet unable to touch it.
“You, untie me,” she said. “Right now.”
“You have no idea how much it pains me to say these words, my dear, but no.” Simon straightened up and took a step backward, away from August—away from the temptation she represented. It was taking everything he had not to reach for her.
“Hello.” I stepped into her field of vision, jerking her attention away from Simon. She glared at me, eyes narrowed, and said nothing. “Nice to meet you, sis. Sorry about the tape. You clearly never learned not to hit.”
“Untie me, mortal,” she spat.
“Not mortal,” I replied. “Thin-blooded right now, but I’ll fix that soon enough. You might be stronger than me, and you might be better-trained than me, but that doesn’t make you capable of turning me human. Our mother learned that.”