Page 64 of The Brightest Fell

“I can’t do this alone.” My voice sounded small in the empty basement. August was gone. I had no doubt of that. I supposed I should be grateful that Amandine hadn’t raised her to be a killer, or there would have been a knife in my neck and I would have been proving all the people who said my tendency to rush headlong into danger was going to get me killed right.

At least Quentin wouldn’t have been here to see. At least I could have spared him that image of me. But I couldn’t have spared Tybalt or Jazz anything by dying here. Amandine wouldn’t let them go just because I’d failed. Hell, she’d probably grab the night-haunt that became me and force them to finish the job, claiming that debts to her didn’t end with death. She might even be right. The Firstborn can be terrifying when they want to be.

There had to be a way out of this. There had to be. I closed my eyes, shutting out my cellphone’s meager light as I tried to think.

This wasn’t the most human I’d ever been. I could tell that from the texture of my blood. I wasn’t sure I could shift myself further toward fae without some sort of crutch—I needed a hope chest in the worst way—but I was still Dóchas Sidhe enough to see the watermarks in my veins, the places where the magic had moved me. Before I’d been mostly fae, I had been your standard changeling scrapper, working my way through an often confusing set of magical rules with swamp water charms and parlor tricks.

Parlor tricks. I opened my eyes and raised my phone, grateful to see that I still had battery power left, and that there was a flicker of a signal in the Borderlands basement. Scrolling through my contact list, I chose the number most likely to get me help in a hurry.

Please pick up, I thought. Please, please, please pick up.

“Borderlands Café,” said a cheery, unfamiliar voice.

Z’ev. It had to be. I took a breath and forced myself to sound as level as possible, like I didn’t have a care in the world. “Hi, it’s Madden’s friend again. Is he still on-shift?”

“I can get him for you, if you’d like.”

“Please.”

“One moment.” There was a soft thunk as he set the receiver down. I looked at Simon, who was resting half in, half out of my lap, and hoped I wasn’t making the wrong call. Not like it made much of a difference if I was. This might be the wrong decision. It was the only one I had left to make.

“Hello?” Madden sounded cautious but still warm. I wasn’t sure the man was capable of staying angry for long.

It was time to test that. “I don’t have much time,” I said. “August was down here. She attacked us, she hurt me, and Simon had to cast a spell to keep Alan from spotting us. I need honey, mint, ginger, hot water, and salt. Can you get them to me?”

“Toby?” Now confusion joined the mix. “I . . . yeah. Are you where you were?”

“I am. Hurry.” I hung up before he could ask me any more questions. Questions were just going to slow us down.

Magic lives in the blood. That’s all well and good for the purebloods. Their bodies can make and handle using as much magic as they need. Changelings, though . . . changelings are more limited. We always have been. So we need to understand magic. We need to find ways to convince it, things that can shore it up when it doesn’t want to hold.

“It’ll be okay,” I told Simon, stroking the hair back from his forehead. He didn’t look like he believed me. I couldn’t blame him, not entirely. He’d found his daughter, only to find that she didn’t know who he was, and then he’d lost her again, all because he was trying to save her. And me. It was no accident that his illusion had extended to cover me.

If he’d just cut it off before it could wrap around me, he could have concealed himself and August, leaving me to face Alan’s wrath, without violating the terms of his geas. It had been the perfect opportunity for him to escape, and he hadn’t taken it. For that alone, I had to do my best to save him. I didn’t have a choice.

The basement door opened and closed again. I shut my eyes, guessing before it happened that Madden was going to turn the light on. There was a click, and the dark behind my eyelids got a little lighter. Cautiously, I cracked them open, and watched Madden descend. He was carrying a small tray. I recognized the teapot, and I had hope. Not much, but still, it was a nice change.

He stopped on the last step, frowning. “Toby?” he said. “I thought you were . . . are you here?”

Crap. Simon’s illusion. I looked around, finding nothing I could throw, and settled on chucking my phone at Madden’s shoulder as hard as I could. My aim was a little off; it hit his upper arm before falling harmlessly to the pavement.

He blinked at it. Then he turned and blinked at me. “There you are,” he said. “What . . . ?”

“Really good don’t-look-here,” I said. “Don’t take your eyes off me, or you’ll lose us again.”

“You look . . .” Madden paused, clearly unsure how to proceed. Finally, he said, “Different.”

“August pulled a lot of the fae blood out of me before she ran, and I’m not strong enough to put it back on my own,” I said. “Arden still has the hope chest in her treasury. I’m sure she’ll let me borrow it for a few minutes.” And if she wanted to charge me some prohibitive price for using it, I’d have no choice but to pay. Swell.

There was a pause while Madden attempted to process this information. There aren’t many Dóchas Sidhe in the world—two is not enough to book a table at Mel’s Diner, much less constitute a healthy population—and hope chests haven’t been in common use for centuries. For most people, the balance of the blood they have when they’re born is the one they’re going to live with. He had already seen my blood shift once before. That didn’t mean it was something easy to understand.

It also didn’t mean that we had time to sit around while he came to terms with the great march of weird that is my life. “Did you bring what I asked for?”

“What? Oh!” Madden shook himself, a great, full-body motion, like he was trying to dry off after an unexpected dip in deep water. “Yeah. Here.” He closed the distance between us in a few long steps, holding his tray out toward me. “What are you going to do?”

“Something stupid. And painful. And unusually lasting, for me.” I took the tray, setting it carefully on the nearest open patch of floor.

Madden frowned. “What do you mean, lasting?”