Page 20 of Be the Serpent

“Forgive me if this question seems indelicate, but how close to a death can you come before it overwhelms you?” I glanced up, blinking at him. He was watching me, a small grimace on his face. “Amy—your mother—always had trouble breaking the connection after a certain point. She said it was as if they wanted to pull her with them into darkness, and she had to find a method of resistance.”

“I’ve never ridden all the way to a real death,” I said, uncomfortably. “I thought I had, once, but it turned out the person I’d been riding with wasn’t dead at all.”

“But how close?”

“Why do you want to know?”

Simon flushed, turning his face slightly away. “I never expected your sister to choose me in the divorce,” he said. “To be honest, I never expected to survive a divorce, even if I were foolish enough to attempt one. Amy . . . Amy doesn’t like to surrender things she feels belong to her.”

“Yeah, I know from that one.”

“When August spoke my name over Amandine’s, I was thrilled, and I was terrified.” Simon shrugged. “I think I have a better sense of how to be a father than Amy has of how to be a mother. I understand that people aren’t pets at the very least, and that puts me above her in terms of both mercy and understanding. But I have no idea how to teach or protect a Dóchas Sidhe.”

Ah. “And you think I do?”

“I think you’re mostly self-taught, but that you have direct access to your own magic, and as the two of you present, at least externally, as the same variety of fae, your experiences should translate.” He shrugged. “She’s a grown woman. She can seek her own tutors if she feels she needs them. But she’s still shaken by what she’s been through, and when she asks questions, I don’t always know the answers.”

“Ah.” I resumed circling the mannikin that had replaced Jessica’s body, studying the position it had fallen into. Everything was consistent with the scene as it had played out in her memories, and with a death brought on by choking and blood loss. The poor girl had never stood a chance.

Simon didn’t know the answers, and I would have given them to him if I had, but I didn’t know them either. August and I legally shared a father, thanks to the weird and occasionally incomprehensible structure of Faerie’s system of inheritance and lineage, but we biologically shared a mother. Amandine the Liar, Last among the Firstborn. She was the youngest known child of any of the original Three, and like all Firstborn, she was what Walther liked to irritably refer to as “biologically unstable.”

Not that Walther actually liked to discuss the Firstborn. As a man of science, they annoyed the hell out of him, because at the end of the day, the Firstborn don’t make any scientific sense. Every one of them is unique, sometimes to the point of displaying dominant traits from things that aren’t fae at all, like Acacia, who is essentially a very talkative tree, or Diamont, who was born looking more like a boulder than a boy, and only uncurled himself to become the Father of the Bridge Trolls after his mother had left him by the banks of the Glomma, believing him to be a statue in earnest. Things like that used to be common enough in Faerie that even the Firstborn themselves don’t know how many siblings they have. Maybe Titania was gardening, or maybe she was planting a new sister. Maybe Maeve was singing a catchy tune, or maybe the eight notes of the refrain were a new brother who hadn’t yet figured out how to have a physical form. Things like that.

Anyway, each of the Firstborn is unique, and it’s not until you get to their kids, people like me, two steps removed from the roots of Faerie, that you’ll start to see consistency. Whenever one of the First has a kid, whatever attribute they were born to bring to Faerie will be amplified in that child, intensified and made more pronounced. Amandine was born when the Queens were newly lost, and when the hope chests were already fading into legend. Faerie seems to know what it needs, and what it had needed in that moment was someone who could bend blood to Faerie’s benefit. Hence the only blood-worker more powerful than Eira Rosynhwyr. And all Amandine’s kids—both of us so far—showed the same abilities, if dialed down from her own, and seemed to have inherited very little from our fathers.

August and I would breed true from here. Any kids we had would be Dóchas Sidhe, and so would their kids, and so on, and so on, until our descendants were as common in Faerie as any other type of fae. Thanks to our specific magic, we wouldn’t even need hope chests to keep from functionally breeding the bloodline out of existence after two or three generations of marrying humans or other types of fae in order to avoid marrying immediate siblings. Odds were good that if Amandine had a third kid, they’d be Dóchas Sidhe like us, if slightly different, since no two children of a Firstborn are exactly the same.

Odds were also good that she could create a whole new descendant line if she went out and found herself someone other than a Daoine Sidhe or a human to get knocked up by.

Does it make perfect sense? No. Does Faerie ever make perfect sense? This much, at least, is consistent: every Firstborn exists to fulfill a function in Faerie, and they fulfill it through their children. Someone like Amandine, who managed to stop at two—that we knew of—is an oddity. Most Firstborn count their children by the dozen. August and I both being her daughters, born within a short period, meant that our magic was probably almost identical.

“There’s pancake batter all over the floor in here,” said Quentin, sticking his head out of the kitchen. “It looks like someone dropped a whole bowl of the stuff.”

“Any footprints?”

“Not that I’ve seen so far.”

A mess in the kitchen was probably a clue to where Stacy had gone. There was no way she would have stood idly by while someone was attacking her kids, or hidden while Jessica threw herself into danger. A scenario was beginning to put itself together in my head. Something had happened outside the house, close enough to catch Stacy’s attention while she was in the kitchen, but either quiet enough or far enough away that it hadn’t been noticeable from Jessica’s room. Maybe a neighbor yelling, or someone knocking on the front door and startling her. She’d dropped the pancake batter and—

And nothing. That didn’t make any sense. Stacy would have needed to be in real and immediate danger to make that kind of mess and just leave, especially with one of the kids in the house. If I hadn’t known where all five of them were, I would have been afraid something had happened to one of the children. As it was, I knew something had happened to one of the children. I just didn’t know what.

Carefully, I walked around the bloodstain on the carpet, leaving Simon to study the body as I joined Quentin in the kitchen. He hadn’t overstated the mess. Pancake batter covered most of the floor, drying in long, sticky streaks along the nearby cupboards. What he hadn’t mentioned was that the stovetop was still on, scorching the bottom of Stacy’s grilling pan, probably badly enough that she’d have to buy a new one. After today, that was the least of her problems.

I reached over and snapped the stove off, taking note of the little bowls of chocolate chips, blueberries, and strawberry slices on the counter. “She wasn’t expecting to go anywhere,” I said.

Quentin looked at me, swallowing hard. His eyes were very bright. He had been in Blind Michael’s lands with Jessica and Andrew. While he’d never seemed particularly close to the younger Brown kids after that awful experience, it wasn’t the sort of thing somebody could just forget about because it was over. He and Raj were basically brothers because of what they’d been through together. For him, this had to be like finding out the horror movie you’d survived when you were a kid was suddenly getting a sequel.

“Hey,” I said, more gently. “Do you need a hug?”

He nodded wordlessly, all but throwing himself across the puddle of pancake batter to lock his arms around my shoulders and squeeze me close. He was taller than I was. That was still jarring sometimes. I was so used to thinking of him as my teenage sidekick, had been so comfortable looking at him through that lens, that it was weird to look at him any other way.

But he was going to be twenty-one before Samhain. He was only nine years away from being expected to return to Toronto, declare his majority, and take up his position as his father’s heir. He was an adult.

Time isn’t fair. Never has been, never will be. It’s a lot like Faerie that way.

I put my arms around Quentin and hugged him back, taking a moment to ignore the horrific situation still unfolding all around us. The smell of roses had even reached into the kitchen. It wasn’t as strong here as it was in the living room, but it explained why I hadn’t picked up on the smell of charring metal before Quentin found the stove. It was hard for me to smell anything above the roses.

A car pulled into the driveway. I let go of Quentin and stepped quickly out of the kitchen, heading for the front door. I made it there before I heard Mitch’s key slide into the lock and the knob began to turn.