This was what Tybalt’s magic felt like from the inside, all wild pennyroyal and feline musk. This was the shape of it. I looked at him again, small and trembling in the depths of the ferns, and I saw the thin traceries of his transformation snarled in the stripes of his fur, worked into the lines of his limbs. It was so simple. It was part of him, and it was locked in its current position, twisted by my mother and then frozen by his own fear, confusion, and power.
“I love you,” I said gravely, and reached out, hooking my fingers in the air, hooking my magic into his, and pulled.
Tybalt did not transform so much as collapse, a cat one moment, a man the next. Not entirely a man: there were stripes across his bare back and shoulders, extending all the way down his butt and across the tops of his thighs. That didn’t matter. That had never mattered to me. I scrambled to my hands and knees and dove into the bushes, gathering him close, ignoring the scent of crushed flowers as I pulled him against me and held him as tightly as I dared.
I was crying. Finally, I was crying. I pressed my face against his hair and just sobbed, breathing in the scent of him, his skin and sweat and magic, mingling with the scent of blood and roses and green, growing things.
It was hard to say how long I was crying into his hair before he raised his head, blinking bemusedly up at me. I sniffled. He lifted his hand, fingers trembling, and touched my cheek.
“October,” he whispered.
“We’re home,” I said, and we were. We finally, finally were.
TWENTY-EIGHT
IT HAD BEEN THREE days, and I was finally able to let Tybalt out of my sight without finding it difficult to breathe.
May and Jazz were in a similar situation. Jazz had insisted on going back to her antique store after two days in bed, and May had gone with her, despite this plan necessitating her being out of bed before one in the afternoon. Unspoken but ever-present was the fear that we were enjoying a brief respite from our separation, and that if we lowered our guard, even for a second, it would all come crashing down.
The Luidaeg still had Officer Thornton in her guest room, and was slowly working on removing the traces of Annwn from his system. She didn’t know how long it would be before she could wake him up, much less start figuring out how much damage his time in deep Faerie had done. He might be lost forever, one more Rip van Winkle to lay at Faerie’s doorstep.
I hoped not. I hoped he was going to be all right. We’d lost too many people already.
There had been no sign of Simon since his disappearance from the Luidaeg’s apartment. I had reinforced the wards around the house, and for the first time, I was allowing May and Quentin to help me with them, turning our protections into a deeper, more complicated shell. Simon could still get through if he wanted to, but with three of us pitching in, we would almost certainly feel him coming.
What we had here wasn’t safety. It was just the illusion of safety. It was still the only thing we had and, by Oberon, I was going to cling to it.
Something rattled in the hall. I tensed, ready to yell for Tybalt, only to relax when Tybalt himself came around the corner, stepping into the kitchen. He smiled wanly at the look on my face.
“I am not as breakable as all that, little fish,” he said.
“That’s what you say now,” I said, trying to keep my voice light. It wasn’t easy. “Let’s skip the life-threatening adventures for a while, okay?”
“To echo a wise woman I know, that’s what you say now, but when I object to your being covered in blood, how much credence do you grant to my objections?” He stalked across the room and slid his arms around my waist, joining his hands at the small of my back. “Fair’s fair.”
“I’ll have you know that I didn’t get covered in blood once while Mom had you,” I said.
He nuzzled my neck. “I would say I should be kidnapped more often, but—”
I pulled away, just enough to press a finger against his lips. “Don’t.”
Tybalt nodded. There were shadows in his eyes. I wasn’t the only one who’d been traumatized. He’d gone to the Court of Cats as soon as he was ready, relieving Raj of the throne. He was still going back and forth, and both of us were nervous wrecks every time he had to leave. It wasn’t a healthy situation. We would have to get past this. Given how recently everything had gone wrong, I wasn’t going to push the issue.
Someone knocked on the back door.
We both went still. I glanced at the clock. It was barely eight o’clock at night, early enough that virtually anyone could have been at the door, human, fae, or somewhere in between. I looked at Tybalt. We both nodded before stepping away from one another, grabbing handfuls of shadows from the air and spinning them around ourselves, draping our true faces in the thin veneer of our human disguises.
The illusions also covered the knife at my belt. I’d put the iron away again, but the silver went everywhere with me now, and would for a while. Resting my hand on the hilt in what I hoped would look casual and ordinary to whoever was outside, I walked to the door, unlocked it, and swung it open.
August was on the back porch. She looked at me. I looked at her.
“Hi,” she said.
“Good-bye,” I said, and started to swing the door shut.
“Wait!” She flung out her hand like she was going to prevent me from locking her out. I paused, and she grimaced and said, “I don’t need to come in. I just came . . . I just came to say I was sorry, and to make sure your people were okay. Are your people okay?”
“October?” Tybalt was suddenly at my shoulder, a warm, reassuring presence. “Who’s this?”
“My sister,” I said, and that was true, and it wasn’t true, all at the same time. We shared blood. That was all, and that was what she’d tried to take from me. “Tybalt, meet August.”
“Ah.” His voice turned wary. “Come looking for more things to steal?”
“That wasn’t me,” she said. “That was our mother. October, I—”
“I know,” I said wearily. “You were lost. You were lost, and you were scared, and you didn’t know, and I want to be the bigger person here. I want to forgive you for hurting me. I want to be able to step back and not blame you for what Amandine did. But I can’t. Not right now. Maybe someday. Right now, I just want to put my family back together, and breathe. Can you understand that?”
She bit her lip before asking, “Are you going to find my father?”
I didn’t even have to think. “Yes,” I said. “Not right now, but someday . . . yes. Finding lost people is what I do. Even if I didn’t want to find him, I probably would.”