Page 12 of Be the Serpent

“Yeah,” I agreed. No burritos today. But maybe burritos tomorrow?

And then Karen, who had been standing quietly to the side, her eyes focused on nothing specific, screamed.

The amplification spell was gone, but the acoustics of the room were still made to help people communicate with large groups: they grabbed the sound, bouncing it from wall to wall until it seemed like the loudest thing that had ever existed. The Luidaeg recoiled, visibly startled.

“Karen?” she asked.

Karen didn’t seem to hear her. She was clutching at the sides of her face, bending almost double as she screamed.

The smell of redwood sap filled the air, sharp and resinous, as Arden appeared in front of the wailing teen, eyes wide with alarm. “What’s wrong?” she demanded. “What’s going on?”

Under any other circumstances, it would have been nice to see her becoming comfortable enough with Faerie to open a portal in order to travel less than twenty feet, instead of walking like a normal human person. With Karen still screaming and the rest of us absolutely unsure of why, “nice” wasn’t exactly on the table. Even the Luidaeg looked alarmed, which was alarming in and of itself.

Then the door slammed open and Cassandra came staggering into the room, tears streaming down her face and one hand pressed hard against the side of her head, like she thought she could do something to stop some terrible sound the rest of us couldn’t hear. She shot me one sharp, panicked look as she stumbled to her sister’s side and dropped to her knees, the two girls clinging to each other.

Karen’s screams dwindled into sobs. She buried her face in Cassandra’s hair, crying like her heart was broken, like she thought the world was ending—like the world had already come crashing to an end.

We had two Seers in the Court in the Mists, and both of them were terrified and all but incapacitated in each other’s arms. Slow dread spread through me like blood soaking into silk. I raised my head, meeting the Luidaeg’s eyes, which had gone glass-green in her shock, shifting colors to mirror her mood.

“Queenie can drive, and I know where the house is,” she said, voice rougher than it normally was. She put her hand on Karen’s shoulder, keeping herself anchored to the two girls. The Luidaeg was a Seer too, I remembered—and she didn’t seem to have Seen anything. Only the Brown girls, still crying and clinging to each other, had.

Oh, this was bad.

“Right,” I said, catching her meaning. I dug my keys out of my pocket and threw them to Simon before I spun on my heel, raising my arms toward Tybalt. “Carry me through the Shadows? We need to get to the Brown house, now.”

“Of course,” said Tybalt, and swept me off my feet into his arms, a gesture that could have been romantic under other circumstances but was currently nothing but practical. This was the best and fastest way for us to move. Arden would bring the car, but she couldn’t be our means of transit, not when we might be charging into danger. Protect the Queen. Slay the monsters. Isn’t that the hero’s job?

“Raj and I will follow you,” yelled Quentin, as Tybalt ran across the room toward the nearest patch of shadow. I flashed my squire a thumbs-up over Tybalt’s shoulder and took a deep breath at the same time.

We plunged into darkness and cold.

My fondness for driving when it’s an option isn’t just about being able to go through a drive-through if the urge takes me: it’s a desire to avoid the Shadow Roads whenever I can. They may seem kinder to the Cait Sidhe, but to me they’re airless and cold, a freezing void where I could easily be lost forever. Just before our wedding, Tybalt had been elf-shot in the process of pulling me into the shadows, and had dropped me when he lost consciousness.

I still had nightmares about that moment. I hadn’t been particularly comfortable traveling via Shadow before I was stranded there, however briefly, and now . . . let’s just say it wasn’t in my top ten favorite ways to get around the Bay Area. But it was faster than taking the mortal roads, and there was no traffic, and it meant we weren’t risking one of the only monarchs I actually liked. Tybalt ran while I huddled against him, feeling my lungs begin to burn as the air ran out, ice crystals forming in my hair. Going into the shadows when I’ve already been bleeding is an experience—one that I’ve had too many times to be comfortable with it, and one that I was distantly relieved not to be having now.

I was resolutely thinking about everything except for what we might find when we broke back into the light. For something to impact Karen and Cassandra, and only Karen and Cassandra, so violently, it had to be focused on the Brown household. If it had been something that impacted a larger percentage of Faerie, I had to assume other Seers would have picked up on it—or at least the Luidaeg, since she’d been standing right there.

Good. Focus on that. Focus on the idea that this would be a small crisis, something I could deal with that had upset the girls but wasn’t going to be catastrophic. It wasn’t going to be the end of the world.

Tybalt tensed before taking a final leap, out of the shadows, back into the light. He put me down as I sucked in a large, desperate gulp of air, coughing to clear the ice crystals from my lips and nose. It always took a few seconds for my eyelashes to thaw enough for me to open my eyes, and when they did, I saw that we were standing in a suburban backyard, green grass and a tall wooden fence surrounding a surprisingly elaborate play structure made entirely of treated wood. No metal at all, not even in the swing set—the swings were on ropes, old-fashioned and safe for fae children.

I turned to face the house. The sliding-glass back door was closed, and the curtains were undisturbed. Everything looked perfectly normal. Appearances are deceiving more often than I would prefer. I took a step forward and stopped dead.

I smelled blood.

“Tybalt,” I said, voice gone low. He snapped to attention, instantly focused on me. “I need you to go to the front of the house and see whether you can see anything. Check whether the cars are here. Then come back.”

A cat prowling around the front yard would be less suspicious than a strange woman, and he wouldn’t need to spin any illusions—a Cait Sidhe in cat form is indistinguishable from an ordinary cat. The same couldn’t be said of either of us as bipeds. He still narrowed his eyes, hands flexing.

“I promise not to go in the house until you come back, unless I have no other choice.”

Some of the tension left his shoulders, and he nodded curtly before turning and stalking toward the fence. His form flowed smoothly downward as he moved, until, with no clear point of transition or in-between forms, a tabby tomcat stalked in his place, tail lashing.

I watched him go, waiting until he had squeezed under the fence before I approached the house. I’d been telling the truth when I said I wouldn’t go in unless I felt I didn’t have the option of waiting, but that didn’t mean I was going to stand idly by.

I was stepping onto the concrete patio outside the door when I caught another whiff of blood. It was fresh and sharp, with an underlying trace of peppermint. I stopped where I was, closing my eyes as I turned to follow the scent. When I was sure I knew where it was coming from, I stopped turning and opened my eyes again.

The house was behind me. I was facing the small redwood “castle” Mitch and I had spent an entire weekend building, back when Cassandra was still young enough to fit inside, and we had believed Gillian was going to grow up alongside the Browns, one big screaming mass of children. The blood I smelled was inside the castle. I swallowed, hard.