FIRST PROBLEM: AUGUST DIDN’T want to come. By which I mean “August had no interest in going on a road trip with her half sister, especially since I’d already hit her with a baseball bat.” She folded her arms and glared at me, and if there’d been any question of whether we were actually related, it would have been answered then and there.
“I’m not going anywhere with you,” she snapped. “You’re changeling filth and I don’t have to do as you say.”
“Does she heal like you normally do?” asked Quentin. “Because we could break her arms to distract her, and I bet I could carry her.”
August’s attention flicked to him. “You’re a bloodthirsty boy.”
“I learned from the best,” said Quentin coldly. “You hurt my knight. I think I’m owed a little nonfatal payback.”
“We could stand here arguing about this for hours,” I said. “It’s not going to change anything. You’re coming with us.”
“I will rip the last of the immortality from your veins and leave you human and weeping on the floor,” said August.
“You can try,” I said.
The Luidaeg looked between us. Then she turned to Quentin, lowered her voice, and said, “We’re approaching the part where I remind them that I’ve only been bound against harming the children of Titania, and neither of them is covered by that label. Which means if they don’t stop squabbling and move, I can gut them both like trout.”
“Can you gut someone who isn’t a fish like a fish?” asked Quentin.
“We could find out.” It would have taken a fool to miss the warning in the Luidaeg’s tone. Her patience—never her greatest attribute—was rapidly coming to an end.
The last thing I wanted was to add an angry sea witch to my list of problems. I focused on August. “Do you want to see our mother or not?”
Her eyes widened. “You know where Mama is?”
Aw, hell. “I should probably have led with that,” I said. “Yes, I know where Amandine’s tower is, and I need to take you there. She has hostages. I want them back. Will you come willingly?”
“You should absolutely have led with that,” said August. She waved a hand airily, dismissing the idea of my people being a factor. “Take me to my mother. She’ll want to see me, and to hear what’s become of Papa.”
“You might want to reconsider how much she’s going to care about that, but sure,” I said. “Luidaeg, can we use the back door now?”
“I should have hidden that thing better,” said the Luidaeg. She couldn’t lie, so I knew she meant what she was saying, but there was no rancor in her tone: only a bone-deep weariness that I sympathized with all too well. “Simon should be well clear by now. But, October, you should be aware that my back door is very rarely used by anyone but me. You know what that means, don’t you?”
It meant the walls between worlds hadn’t been worn thin and forgiving: it meant that in my current, nearly human state, the crossing would be disorienting, if not actively painful. I grimaced and nodded.
“I do, but I really don’t want to drive across the Bay Area wondering whether she’s about to grab the wheel, and I doubt she’s letting me put her back in the trunk.”
“I am not going back in the ‘trunk,’” said August firmly.
“Okay,” said the Luidaeg. “You can use the back door. It’s your funeral.”
“Maybe someday,” I said. “Not today.”
The Luidaeg looked unconvinced, but she led us through her apartment to a door that I had somehow never noticed before. It wasn’t the one Quentin and I had come through with Simon, or maybe it was, because when she opened it, it revealed the swamp.
Looking at the spreading marsh reminded me of something. I turned to her and asked, “Where’s Poppy?”
“Watching your policeman,” said the Luidaeg. “She’ll let me know if he wakes up.”
“Is he . . .”
“I don’t know.” She looked at me, suddenly weary. “Humans weren’t meant to spend time in Annwn. He may recover completely, and I may be able to edit his memory enough to let him go home. Or he may be broken forever, stranded on the wrong side of the knife until his mortal life is done. Only time is going to tell us. Now go. Make your mother give your people back.”
“That’s the plan,” I said, and stepped outside.
The world didn’t spin so much as it whipped into a maddened circle, moving so fast and so erratically that I dropped to my knees and vomited on the path, barely catching myself before I wound up facedown in my own sick. Throwing up didn’t make the whirling stop. If anything, it made it worse, because I hadn’t been able to breathe while I was barfing, and now that I was done, I couldn’t catch my breath. Everything was wrong. Everything was so wrong. I wasn’t supposed to be here. I knew it, and the air knew it, and my body and the world were perfectly willing to go to war if that was what had to happen.
“Toby?”
The voice, though distant, was recognizably Quentin’s. He sounded worried. I hated being the reason he would sound that worried, I hated it, but I couldn’t fix it if I couldn’t breathe. Everything hurt. Everything was wrong. Everything was spinning—
“Let me.”
This voice wasn’t Quentin’s. I muddled through the pain and the nausea and the oxygen deprivation and identified it as August’s. That was . . . not a good thing. I was incapacitated. Quentin wasn’t unarmed—he was my squire, he was never unarmed—but his knives wouldn’t be enough to stop her if she really wanted to fight him. Daoine Sidhe are specialized in blood and illusions. He didn’t have the combat training to use blood against her, if that was even possible, and disappearing only helped if you could move afterward, getting out of range.
“If you hurt her . . .”
“I need her to take me to Mama, remember?” Now August sounded annoyed. “I’m just going to nudge her a little bit, so she gets her balance back.”
“I’ll slit your throat if you do more than that.”
August laughed. It wasn’t a cheerful sound. “I’d live.”
A hand touched my wrist, delicate and almost gentle for the first second, before it clamped down and everything else in the world—the spinning, the nausea, the inability to breathe—was replaced with an electric jolt of pain so extreme that it felt like it rattled my teeth in their sockets. I was stunned enough to start breathing again, sucking in a great lungful of air.
“There.” August jerked her hand away from me like I was something too disgusting to handle for long. “She’ll be able to function now.”