Page 41 of Night and Silence

The smell of blood permeated the room, somehow enhancing the faded magical scents that were already there rather than overwhelming them. The cold and rowan remained: I wasn’t wrong. No matter what Walther said, I wasn’t wrong. The smell of mold and char also remained, and I realized through the growing dizziness that it was the scent of the Baobhan Sith’s magic. She was an ambush predator, and this trap had been set specifically for me, putting her in a place where her magic would blend into the environment, making her impossible to detect unless I was actively looking.

My arm was going numb. I twisted and slammed my head into hers as hard as I could, hearing the distinctive sound of bone cracking. She howled as she ripped herself away, leaving blood to cascade freely across my skin. My knife was still embedded in her shoulder. I grabbed for it, and she jerked away, taking the knife with her.

The skin was already beginning to knit itself closed at the edges of the ragged, terrible wound she had made in my arm. That was good. It was happening more slowly than I expected, and I was losing a lot of blood in the meantime. That . . . wasn’t good. Something crunched underfoot as I lunged for my knife again, and I knew without looking down that I had just stepped on my phone.

There would be time to worry about that later, when I wasn’t covered in blood and fighting for my life. The Baobhan Sith lunged again, her hands outstretched in front of her like talons. The smell of her magic was getting stronger the more she flew, almost as strong as the smell of my own blood, which seemed to be enraging her.

She was no longer as emaciated as she had been. She was slim, not skeletal, as if something had melted away the worst of her hard edges, smoothing increasingly healthy-looking skin over increasingly well-padded bones. Her hair was growing lusher, less like dead, rotting flowers gone to brown in the winter and more like the first delicate flowers of spring. She was rebuilding herself by devouring me.

I can recover from almost anything, given time. According to some people, I’ve risen from the dead at least once. But magic is in the blood, mine even more so than most. What would happen if, when I collapsed, I had no blood left to raise me?

I wasn’t in the mood to find out. As the Baobhan Sith lunged, I grabbed her by the hair and swung her, hard, for the wall. She shrieked as she slammed into it, and shrieked louder as she ploughed right through it, taking out chunks of waterlogged plaster and fire-damaged beams on her unplanned journey to the hall.

This was it: my one opportunity to run. But run where? There was a window. Getting it open and getting myself out it would take too long, and my throw had put her between me and the front door.

And she still had my knife.

I’m not all that hung up on material possessions, but I need my leather jacket, and I need my knife. They were gifts. They matter. I shook the sleeve of my jacket back into its normal position, hissing as it touched the slowly-sealing wound. The leather was thick enough that if she bit down again, she’d have to chew hard to get to my skin. That was good. She was probably going to have the opportunity. That was bad.

Howling, she came at me again. Her hands latched onto the collar of my jacket, jerking me toward her, and I realized what she was about to do too late to get my elbow up, too late to do anything but shriek as she clamped her surprisingly strong mouth down on the side of my throat, biting through the skin and burying her teeth deep in the flesh. I tried to scream. I couldn’t find the air. Everything was pain, pain, pain, and for some reason, it wasn’t fading at all. It was like my body wasn’t even trying to heal while she was biting me. That was . . .

That was not good. I had been stabbed in the heart and kept healing. Now some flying fairy leech was trying to drain me dry, and I couldn’t even breathe.

I tried to push her away, hands slapping futilely against her shoulders. My fingers brushed the pommel of my knife. I groaned and focused on grasping it, trying once again to pull it free. The activity seemed to have jarred it loose, at least a little, because I yanked, and it shifted. I yanked again. It came free in my hand.

Hesitation was only going to weaken me, and Arden wouldn’t prosecute me for violating Oberon’s Law when it was so clearly self-defense—I hoped. Without stopping to ask myself whether this was the right move, I brought the knife around and stabbed the Baobhan Sith in the neck, feeling the blade sink home.

She stiffened, hissing hard around the seal her mouth had made against my skin, but didn’t pull away. I worked the knife free, drawing back to stab her again—

—only to swing wildly as hands grasped my shoulders and yanked me away from her. She didn’t let go without a fight, biting down harder as I was pulled from her embrace, so that her teeth shredded what felt like half my neck. Then I was flying, flung away from her so hard that my back slammed into the far wall before I could fully register what was happening. My skull hit the wall a bare second later, and the world became a dancing blur of light and shadows, undercut by the sound of a tiger roaring in full-throated rage.

No. Not a tiger. There couldn’t be a tiger in here, there wasn’t any room. I tried to get my eyes to focus, to see what was going on as the tiger roared and the Baobhan Sith shrieked. Blood was still oozing down my neck, hot and sticky. I put my hand over the wound, trying to keep at least some of the blood inside. That seemed like the sort of thing I should be worrying about, since I needed blood to live. Applying pressure seemed to help, somewhat, even as it made the pain worse.

Oddly, that pain made focusing easier. It was like my mind was so desperate for a distraction that it was willing to seize on whatever it could get. I blinked, and there was a man in the room with me, lean and fast and dark-haired, leaping to avoid a blow from the Baobhan Sith. She was bleeding now, too, from vast claw slashes that ran across her chest, leaving holes in the tattered gown she was wearing.

The man—I squinted, trying to see his face. The Baobhan Sith lunged for him, teeth gnashing, and he danced back with another roar. The motion turned him so that his face was half in profile, turned toward me just enough to let me see the familiar slope of his cheekbones, the curve of his lips. I gasped.

Tybalt glanced toward me for barely a beat, only long enough to be sure I wasn’t in danger. Then he was slashing at the Baobhan Sith again, the battle continuing as he tried to drive her back, away from him, away from me and the so-tempting smell of my blood.

The wound at my throat felt like it was starting to heal. I risked pulling my hand away, wincing as another gout of blood oozed free. I was going to need to eat a hamburger after this. Maybe two. Or twelve. I staggered to my feet, knife gripped firmly in my hand, blood running down my arm inside my leather jacket, so that I felt like I had been utterly doused in the stuff.

“Hey!” I snarled. “Get the fuck away from my fiancé!”

The Baobhan Sith turned, hissed, and launched herself in my direction. Tybalt let her get past him, stepping aside to let her gain momentum before he grabbed her by the feet and used that same momentum to slam her, hard, into the bedroom floor. She howled. He stomped on the small of her back, scowling at me.

“Can’t you seize an opportunity for escape when it’s offered to you?” he demanded.

“Excuse me for not wanting to leave you to get eaten!” I snapped and kicked her in the head as she tried to raise it. “What are you even doing here?”

“Entertaining as it would be to repeat your own words—” he began, then faltered when he saw the way I was looking at him. “Quentin called me.”

There was a lot in that sentence to unpack. I settled for kicking the Baobhan Sith in the head again. She tried to bite my foot. “I had things under control.”

“You’ll forgive me if I doubt you.”

I stopped looking at the Baobhan Sith to look at Tybalt instead—normally one of my favorite activities, and now, suddenly, something I wanted to avoid for as long as possible. He looked back at me, and I didn’t know whether it was trust or exhaustion that allowed me to see the shadows in his malachite-banded green eyes. He looked haunted. His hair, always dark brown, was streaked with darker stripes as his natural tabby patterning carried over into his human form. That wasn’t normal. His stripes only showed when he was comfortable, or when he was under too much strain to properly design his human form, which was a far more voluntary thing than most people realized.

Young or weak Cait Sidhe sometimes carried aspects of their animal shapes over into their human ones, tails or actual cat ears, markings more blatant than the usual cat-slit pupils and retractable claws. Tybalt wasn’t that far gone, but he looked more animal than I had seen him in a very long time, with an aura of wary skittishness around him that made me think of stray cats glimpsed at the mouth of alleyways, there one moment and gone the next.