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I call you back from the door to death.
Obey me now, walker of the dreams,
It is not the time for you to leave.
Kaylin jerked under my hands—I’d been continuing the compressions. A moment later, he shook his head and weakly opened his eyes. Rhiannon removed the cloth—the bleeding had stopped.
“Kaylin, can you hear me?” I leaned down, looking into his face. His eyes were dark, flashing with red, and I could feel his demon close to the surface. We’d had words when his demon first awoke in his soul. In fact, we’d had a knock-down, drag-out fight.
“We hear you, woman.”
So it was the demon. “Is Kaylin…is he with you?”
“Yes, but he’s too weak to speak. His body has lost a lot of blood and needs attention. I cannot bring him back further from the veil until he’s attended to. Even then, he will need a great deal of recuperation.” The demon closed his eyes and Kaylin fell into a deep sleep, his breathing shallow.
“We need to take him back to the Barrow.” I looked up at Luna. “What happened? Are you and Peyton all right?” I’d been so focused on keeping Kaylin alive that I’d forgotten to ask how they were.
“We weren’t hurt. Kaylin tried to protect us, but…they were too strong.”
“Shadow Hunters?” But I didn’t think so. If it had been the Vampiric Fae, they wouldn’t have stopped until all three of them were dead.
“No. I think…day-runners.”
Leo. Or Geoffrey. It had to be one of them or both. “Did they say anything?”
“They were threatening to kill us if we didn’t take them to you. Then Kaylin came in and started to fight them. He hurt both of them—bad.”
“He killed both of them, actually.” Check returned from the other room, Chatter behind him. “Two of the yummanii. Dead in the other room. Looks like Kaylin released his demon on them—they’re ravaged worse than he is.”
“They had tied us up by the time Kaylin stumbled in on us. He chased them into the other room and we heard a horrible noise—shouts and screams. Then Kaylin staggered back in, and he was trying to undo the tape when he passed out. Luna and I couldn’t do anything.” Peyton stared darkly at Kaylin. “I haven’t felt so helpless since Myst captured me and had me in her lair.”
Luna ducked her head. “I can do nothing magically without my voice. The duct tape…prevented it.”
“It’s obvious that we can’t do anything until we catch Geoffrey and Leo. Come on; we have to get him back to the Barrow, and you two are coming with us. We should also take the bodies back. Maybe we can figure out some way of getting information out of their spirits.” I stood back as Fearless hoisted Kaylin over his shoulder.
“I’ll head back as fast as I can go. The rest of you follow, and be careful.” He took off, a blur against the snow as we watched him race across the yard from the window.
I pulled out my cell phone and sat down at the desk to check my messages. Kaylin was in good hands, and he should make it. Fearless wouldn’t let anything happen to him on the way there.
As I punched in Lannan’s number, I knew he wouldn’t pick up—he’d be sleeping—but I got his voice mail. “Geoffrey and Leo’s sidekicks just about killed Kaylin, and they were threatening to do the same to Peyton and Luna. We have to find them, and we have to find them soon. I’m going through my coronation tonight, but tomorrow night I want to meet with you and Regina.”
After leaving the message, I checked the news on my phone’s browser. The headlines made me cringe. “Fuck. Another three deaths. Crawl—it has to be Crawl. He’s always hungry, and he’ll be gorging himself. I wonder if he’s staying with Leo and Geoffrey, or if they just turned him loose to his own pursuits.”
My messages showed that Ysandra had called me. I tapped in my voice mail password and listened. The news was just as bleak. The Consortium was demanding our appearance, and she had only been able to put them off for another two days. So day after tomorrow, we had to show up in front of them.
I told Rhiannon this, and she shook her head. “This is bad.”
“Things are chaotic. I’m glad we’re taking the thrones tonight. We’ve been spending so much time focused on this whole mess that we haven’t had time to really pay attention to what’s pushing our buttons.”
Grieve cleared his throat. “The problem isn’t that you’ve had to focus on the coronations. The problem is that there aren’t any aspects to your life right now that aren’t a priority. The Fae Courts, the situation with the rogue vampires, the Consortium, and Myst—they are all major concerns in their own right, and they are all competing for your attention.”
I pushed myself to my feet and texted Ysandra that we’d be there. After I finished, I turned off my phone and asked Check to lock the front door.
Turning to Grieve, I shook my head. “I try to make up to-do lists, but they keep getting blown away by the other stuff coming in. Strict will just have to postpone the tutor for a while until we catch Geoffrey and Leo. You can work on teaching me until then, and you can keep an eye on anything that needs a translator to understand. I think, my sweet, that you and Chatter are going to have to do more than the former Kings had to do. Share-the-wealth kind of thing.”
We headed out the back, Luna and Peyton in tow. The snow kicked in again and was beginning to fall in great, thick flakes. I realized that I wasn’t shivering like the others. As we entered the Golden Wood, the afternoon was beginning to wear away. Even though I was about to become Queen of Winter, the chill mist and ice scared the hell out of me, because I knew Myst was out there, waiting. A lone owl began to hoot softly from a nearby tree, and I glanced up. Not my father, that much I could tell, but it was another Cambyra Fae—another one of the Uwilahsidhe. As we passed by, it flew down, dipping in front of me in an almost aerial bow. I raised my hand in salute as the pale glow of blue and white glimmered through the woods.>Three hours later, I sat back, limp, with pages of notes I’d jotted down.
Strict leaned across the table. “It is much to take in, but that is what I and your other advisors are here for. We’re to help you make this transition, and it will take some time. We all expect that. It was bad enough when I helped Tabera take the throne, and she was born for it. But you…you may have been born with the destiny, but you were not born into Court, so you are still unfamiliar with all of the ways of our people. Your people, too, you know,” he added softly. “You are half Cambyra on your father’s side. You have our blood running through your veins.”
