Page 14 of Be the Serpent

“And?”

“One, in the driveway.”

Meaning either Mitch or Stacy had been home when everything went wrong. Anthony wasn’t quite old enough to get his license yet, and while Karen was, her oneiromancy came with a side order of unpredictable narcolepsy. Sometimes she literally couldn’t wake up. In the interests of not killing herself or anyone else, she had elected not to learn how to drive. She had looked shaken enough when I asked if she was certain that I was pretty sure she’d seen something in her dreams that made her not even want to take the chance.

Asking the color of the car wouldn’t help much. Technically, Mitch and Stacy both had their own vehicle, but in practice, they swapped back and forth, depending on who was picking the kids up that day and needed the bigger back seat.

“Okay, so either Mitch or Stacy is probably inside,” I said. “Remember that if one of us is taking the hit, it needs to be me.”

Tybalt didn’t look happy, but he nodded without complaint. It hurt him to watch me run into knives so that they wouldn’t be free to use on him. He still understood the logic of it, and you don’t survive as long as he has without occasionally letting logic take the wheel.

I have a key to Mitch and Stacy’s front door, but I didn’t want to risk attracting attention by going around the front. Gingerly, I reached out and tested the back door. It shifted when I pulled, scraping in its tracks. The sound wasn’t huge. It was still enough that anyone inside would know we were coming. I paused to consider our options, and decided I didn’t care. I had two hurt kids and the air still smelled like blood.

Mind made up, I yanked the door open with one prolonged scraping noise and stepped into the house, almost reeling as the smell of blood hit me properly for the first time. Oh, there was blood in the backyard, and plenty of it, but that was in the open air. This was blood that had been trapped inside with no way for the smell to dissipate and nowhere for it to go.

Peppermint and milk still underscored the smell, but the scent of cloves was much stronger, almost stronger than the blood itself. I gasped as I caught my breath, glancing over my shoulder to Tybalt. “Jessica,” I mouthed, and he nodded, understanding me at once.

Mitch and Stacy had five kids. That’s all but unheard-of in Faerie, where the purebloods have traded living forever for a birth rate so low that some couples can be together for centuries before they manage to conceive. That’s part of why changelings like me keep happening. Purebloods desperate for the chance to be parents may see a half-human child as a way to practice and prepare themselves for the kid that will actually matter, the one they hope will come along someday. It’s hard not to take that personally. Mitch and Stacy were both changelings, and that gave them the added fertility to keep filling their house with babies.

Stacy had been thinking about trying again, now that Cassandra was living in Muir Woods and Karen was talking about going to live with her sister as soon as she turned eighteen. Since “going to live with her sister” meant moving into Arden’s knowe, no one really had a problem with the idea. It wasn’t like college was an option for someone who seemed increasingly inclined to sleep for eighteen hours a day, and moving into a giant impossible castle isn’t like shoving yourself into your older sister’s cramped one-bedroom apartment.

Three girls, two boys. We knew where the two boys were, and the older girls were both in Arden’s hall, sobbing endlessly. The blood in the air smelled like the youngest of the three girls, Jessica, who was twelve years old and still afraid of the dark after what had happened to her in Blind Michael’s lands. He’d taken Andrew and Karen too, but Karen’s trauma had been at a slight remove, due to his having seized her sleeping self rather than her physical form, and Andrew had been young enough at the time that he’d virtually recovered. Yes, Blind Michael proved that monsters were real, but I had proved that monsters could be destroyed. As long as Andrew knew where I was, he was okay.

And now the air inside his house smelled like his sister’s blood, and another monster was in the mix, and I hated it completely. Nothing was supposed to touch my family. Nothing was supposed to touch my people. Ever.

The smell was coming from the living room. Beckoning Tybalt to follow, I moved slowly deeper into the house, hands on my knives, scanning my surroundings for motion or signs of danger.

The lights were out, casting the house into pleasant dimness despite the sunny day outside, but my surroundings were familiar enough that it didn’t slow me down. The carpet was thick and brown, swallowing the sound of our footsteps. Framed pictures lined the walls, mostly family snapshots, interspersed with a few posed portraits. The most recent was from the previous summer and showed the whole family, Cassandra included, standing on the trail at Muir Woods, bright, sincere smiles on their faces. They looked so happy, so perfect, that it hurt to look at them that way when the smell of blood was hanging in the air, and they weren’t happy anymore.

Another smell overwhelmed the blood and cloves when we were about halfway down the hall, strong enough and startling enough to stop me dead in my tracks. My feet suddenly felt like they were rooted to the floor. I didn’t want to keep going. I didn’t want to be here anymore. Every scrap of sense I had was screaming for me to flee, to get out of here and run as fast as I could for the hills, and to never, never look back.

“October?” Tybalt’s voice was close to my ear, pitched low to keep from carrying, but still virtually a shout in the still, quiet air of the hall. “What’s wrong?”

“Can’t you smell it?” I didn’t do nearly as good a job as he did of keeping my voice down. If he sounded like he was shouting, I sounded like I was screaming, and any hopes that we hadn’t been heard were pretty well eliminated. I still couldn’t hear anyone else moving. Maybe that was a good sign. It didn’t feel like one.

“I smell the blood.”

“No. Not the blood.” Magic has a scent, and every person’s magic is unique. Even two magical traces that are superficially identical—say two people whose magic smells like apples, which isn’t uncommon among close family members—are actually entirely different if you have the nose for it. Which most people don’t. But me, lucky me, being able to pick out and identify the individual strands of someone’s magical signature seems to be part and parcel of the standard Dóchas Sidhe starter pack, whatever that means. There have only been two of us that I know of, and it’s not like August and I have had a lot of heart-to-heart conversations.

Tybalt probably wasn’t picking up on the scent of cloves in Jessica’s blood, meaning he didn’t know for sure who’d been hurt. I almost envied him that ignorance. I could only muster up the focus for “almost,” because the majority of me was screaming inside my head, demanding to know why the fact that it clearly had the votes wasn’t causing me to turn and run for the door. I didn’t want to be here. We shouldn’t be here.

Because over everything, drowning out the scent of blood, hung the scent of roses. Not modern, cultivated roses, and not wild roses, either: this was the smell of an old rose, the kind of strong rosewater perfume that people have been dabbing on their wrists and pouring into their bathwater for centuries, the overwhelming, cloying scent of closed rooms and stuffy manners. It smelled ancient in here, unspeakably old, and I choked on it, unable to keep moving forward.

Tybalt’s hand at the small of my back urged me on. “I don’t know what’s stopping you, but whatever it is, I can’t smell it,” he said, very softly. “I only smell blood, and the distress of your family, and know we need to continue on if we want to know that your people are safe.”

“Right. Right.” With him preventing me from turning and running, I was able to finally unroot my feet from the floor and continue down the hall, passing rooms with closed doors that smelled of neither blood nor roses, and offered me no answers.

Then I reached the end of the hall, where it emptied into the living room, and I was running after all, but not out of the house. No: I was running as fast as I could for a heap in the corner, a discarded pile of limbs and destruction that was barely recognizable as the broken shape of a twelve-year-old girl.

There was blood everywhere. The carpet squelched under my feet as I ran. Still, I hoped, despite the smell of blood and roses hanging over everything, despite the utter, condemning silence of the room, I hoped, because letting go of hope means letting go of everything.

When I reached Jessica, I dropped to my knees beside her and rolled her onto her back as gently as I could. You shouldn’t move someone who’s that badly hurt, but part of me was hoping that if I jarred something, she would move or at least moan, proving she was still alive. She didn’t. Her skin was cold to the touch, and her open eyes stared blankly at the ceiling, not seeing anything. She was never going to see anything ever again.

I was the one who moaned, soft and low and almost stunned, too shaken by what I was seeing to do anything else. This little girl, who had called me Aunt Birdie like all her siblings did, who had run and danced and seen so much of her brief childhood’s joy extinguished in Blind Michael’s lands, who had been struggling ever since to find her way back into the brightness that was hers by right . . . this child, this baby, had stopped her dancing.

“If we’d been much slower, the night-haunts would already have come and gone,” I said dully, dragging my fingers across the blood-soaked carpet.

“Are we going to wait for them?”