Page 28 of Once Broken Faith

What I found was vague amusement, and a shrug so expansive that her hand hit the side of my arm. “You’re the hero of the realm here, Toby. I’m just the sea witch. You’re supposed to leave me slumbering in my watery cavern until you need a handy deus ex machina.”

Karen was looking back and forth between us, increasingly agitated. It had only ever been a matter of time before the dam broke. “What’s wrong with you?” she demanded. “There’s a man . . . he’s dead, Aunt Birdie! He’s right there, and he’s dead, and you’re making jokes! How can you do that? It’s mean, and it’s petty, and it’s . . . it’s not fair.” She sounded petulant as only the young ever could.

I missed being that upset by the cruelty of the world. I just couldn’t seem to work up the anger anymore. “You’re right, pumpkin: it’s not fair,” I said, walking over to put an arm around her shoulder. I kept my still blood-sticky hand behind my back. She knew it was there, but that didn’t mean she should be forced to look at it. “Nothing about the world is ever fair. You know that. We joke because we’re not happy either. King Robinson was a jerk, but he didn’t deserve to die, and we can’t bring him back. So we try to make ourselves feel better when we can, because we know the world isn’t going to suddenly turn kind. That sort of thing would take more magic than there is in the whole world.”

“He was a pureblood,” said Karen. The quiet puzzlement in her voice broke my heart to hear. She was so young. The Luidaeg was right that I never asked myself whether children should be protected: I knew the answer. They should be protected for as long as they could be, for as long as our shoulders could bear the weight of the world, because innocence was so fragile, and so easily destroyed. Karen had lost most of hers when Blind Michael had taken her captive. As for what remained . . .

There was so much more of it than I’d ever suspected. And it was so very, very fragile.

“I know,” I said. “Purebloods aren’t supposed to die. When they do, all we can do is try to make sure that justice is done. We’re going to figure out who killed him. I promise.”

It was a foolish promise to make. I’d made worse, and I could hear, distantly, the beating of paper-thin wings against the wind. The night-haunts were coming.

Quentin heard it, too. “Do you want us to go wait somewhere else?” he asked.

Karen was an oneiromancer. She could see the night-haunts any time she wanted to, just by visiting my dreams, or May’s. It might be better for her to see them in the flesh, not colored by whatever nightmare they were flying through.

“No,” I said. “Stay.” I turned toward the open balcony door. So did the others.

We waited as the air grew hazy with fragile, half-seen wings, and the night-haunts streamed into the room. The flock moved like smoke, buffeted by an unseen wind. The frailer, more faded night-haunts stuck to the middle, where they could be protected by the bodies of their more solid kindred. The night-haunts around the edges of the flock were doll-sized replicas of Faerie’s dead, wearing heartbreakingly familiar faces and forms, turned alien and strange by the tattered wings that grew from their backs, by the emotions hanging frozen in their eyes.

The flock circled the room twice, wings buzzing, searching for danger. None of us said anything. We simply waited to see what the night-haunts would do. Karen shivered against me but didn’t pull away. Finally, the night-haunts landed on one of the long banquet tables, the shadowy central figures clustering together while the others shielded them with wing and body. One night-haunt—slightly taller than some of the others, with eyes as purple as wildflowers, and the face of a decadent, black-hearted Peter Pan—stepped forward, eyes fixed on the Luidaeg.

“Auntie,” said the night-haunt, and his voice was the voice of Devin, my old mentor and first lover, and hearing it was like sandpaper on my soul. I had seen this night-haunt every time I’d faced the flock since Devin’s death, and it never stopped hurting. “Why do you come between us and our prey? The flock must feed. We’ve lost two to the wind in the last year.”

“Father did you no favors when he bound you,” said the Luidaeg. “Hello, Egil.”

He bowed, only half mockingly. “It’s been a long time.”

“Indeed, it has.”

I still said nothing. It was easy to forget that the night-haunts had lives aside from the ones they stole from Faerie’s dead. Sometimes they seemed to forget, too. But they were purebloods, even when they wore changeling faces: their mother had been one of the Luidaeg’s sisters, and they had been born predators, intended to devour fae flesh, which would never rot under normal circumstances. Without the night-haunts, we would never have been able to hide our existence from the human world. It was just that at first, they’d preferred the taste of the living. They’d been a scourge upon our kind, eternally hungry, fast and fierce and unstoppable . . . until Oberon changed them, binding them to eat only the dead. Without the lives they took from the blood we left behind, they had nothing. They would fade, and fade, until they became the only purebloods in Faerie who could die of natural causes.

Fae died rarely. The night-haunts were always there.

The night-haunt with Devin’s face—Egil—was joined by another, this one shorter, stockier, and wearing the face of my dead Selkie lover, Connor O’Dell. I didn’t know this night-haunt’s true name. I wasn’t sure it would have helped if I had. He turned to face me, sadness and longing in his eyes. The night-haunts got more than just form from the blood. They got memory, emotion, even personality, to a certain degree. Connor had died to save my daughter. He’d died loving me. And now he was a night-haunt, and I was in love with another man.

“Hi, Toby,” he said.

“Hi,” I replied, keeping my arm around Karen. That didn’t feel like enough, and so I continued, “I kept my promise. I stopped the goblin fruit.”

Egil laughed. He sounded so much like Devin that I shivered. “You did, and you knocked down a monarchy to do it. Oh, October, I wish I’d understood what a glorious disaster you were when I was alive. I would have used you to undermine the world, and laughed while it was burning.”

“I can’t tell whether that was meant to be a compliment or not,” I said. “Either way, I did what I promised, and now I need a favor.”

Both night-haunts blinked at me. So did several others, some of whom had faces I recognized. Others were foreign to me. Death was rare in Faerie, but not so rare that I was present every time it happened. Thank Maeve for that. If I’d been the sole cause of death in Faerie, High King Sollys would have locked me up and thrown away the key.

“We told you once that we would eat you if you kept summoning us,” said Egil. “What makes you think that’s changed?”

“Well, first, I didn’t summon you. The body under the table did. Second, I did you a favor. You don’t want there to be any chance I could claim you were in my debt, do you?”

Egil narrowed his eyes. “I take back what I said. You’re too destructive to be trusted. What do you want from us?”

“I want something that should be pretty easy to give, all things considered. I want you to feed on the dead king, and then let me talk to whoever gets his memories. I need to know if there’s anything he saw that I wouldn’t know how to interpret when I saw it in his blood.”

There was a momentary silence, broken only by the endless dead-leaf rustle of the night-haunts opening and closing their wings. Finally, almost cautiously, the night-haunt with Connor’s face said, “If you leave this room, we won’t be here when you come back. We won’t wait for you.”

“I know.”