Page 42 of Be the Serpent

“You’re a bastard and a monster and everything that’s about to happen is on you, but you’re not the only one who’s going to get hurt,” I snapped, and spun around to face Tybalt again. This time he grabbed my arms and we fell backward into shadows, just the two of us in the black, airless void that loved him so well and tolerated me so grudgingly. He ran, pulling me along with him, and I did my best to keep pace, my hand tight in his.

We didn’t have far to go to get back to the children’s quarters. We stepped into the light and into a scene of intense destruction. Every piece of furniture in the room had been broken, the curtains yanked from the windows, the windows themselves smashed in. The smell of roses hung over absolutely everything, thick enough to be choking, almost too heavy for me to stand.

There was blood on the floor. Not much; a light smear, like you might get from a glancing wound. I stopped to breathe in deeply, picking up the scent of ice and yarrow.

“Walther,” I said, twisting to look at Tybalt. “He and Nolan made it here before things got ugly.”

“What do you think happened?”

I turned to look more slowly around the room, the first hot flush of panic fading to be replaced by grim acceptance of the situation. I didn’t want to be right about this. There was no way I could be wrong. Not after what we’d already seen. Not seeing this room.

“I think,” I said, slowly, “that Oberon hid Titania among their descendants, and he bound her power to make it possible for her to blend. And then he walked away, and left her, with orders not to get caught and not even to know herself most of the time. So she hid, and she did the things that made sense for the people she became, each time. And sometimes, that would have meant those people got married and had kids.”

Tybalt prowled around the room, checking under broken chairs and piles of fabric for signs of where the Browns and others might have gone. I could barely watch. This was all too much, and I was trying to wrap my head around it just as quickly as I could. Lives depended on my understanding.

“But she was still Titania,” I said. “Still the Summer Queen. Any children she had would be Firstborn. New Firstborn, impossible to explain when both Oberon and the Queens were missing. And his spell ordered her to leave no trace behind. So when those kids got old enough to have kids of their own . . . ”

I trailed off, unable to finish the statement. It hurt to even think.

Tybalt lifted his head and looked at me. “If her children had children of their own, they would have established their own descendant lines, and betrayed her placement,” he said. “Five hundred years of families. Five hundred years of slaughterhouses.”

“Five hundred years of killing her own kids to keep herself a secret,” I said bitterly. “Hell of a way to make her a better person, don’t you think?”

“You might be wrong,” said Tybalt.

“Would both of us be wrong?” I asked. “This is a thing that makes no sense whatsoever, but it makes everything make sense if you step back and look at it like it’s the truth. How did Stacy have five kids? Even being part human shouldn’t have made her that fertile. Why did none of them look like anything we knew about their backgrounds? Why are they all Seers? Why did I never know exactly where she came from, or care enough to suss out the balance of her blood?”

Most of all, why had I never offered her the chance to fully join Faerie the way she deserved to? The way I should have? It was like there were thoughts I shied away from having when Stacy was involved, patterns my mind simply wouldn’t complete. It had always been that way, even when we were kids. There just hadn’t been any reason for it up until now.

And now that there was, I wanted to scream.

“She’s gone as well,” said Tybalt. “Would they have taken her with them if she were the source of the trouble? Perhaps they’ve simply attracted the attention of this terrible punishment, and they run now as a family.”

“You have no idea how much I want to believe you,” I said, looking around the room one last time. “If this is Titania, the last time I tried to get too big a whiff of her magic, I completely lost the ability to see Faerie. Can you follow her trail?”

“And why should I not fear the same fate?”

“None of your ancestors were human. The spell she used on the rest of us wasn’t made for you.”

Tybalt used to yell at me for treating him like a bloodhound, back before my own ability to follow the trail of a person’s magic had grown strong enough that I didn’t need the help. Under the circumstances, me being the one to follow the magic wasn’t a great idea. He nodded and shimmered, the smell of musk and pennyroyal rising as he disappeared, replaced by a large tabby cat. Lowering his head toward the floor, he walked straight toward the back wall of the room, stopped, looked back to me, and meowed.

“Okay.” I walked quickly over, knocking on the wall as I checked for hidden doors. It’s not as easy as they make it look in the movies. You don’t get clear hollow spots or easy gusts of air. A really good hidden door will be exactly that—hidden. Otherwise, what’s the point? Still, there will be signs, and a hollow space can never sound exactly the same as a filled one.

When I reached the end of the wall, there was still no sign that anything here was out of the ordinary. I stopped and frowned, then looked back to Tybalt. “You’re sure?”

He meowed again.

Well, damn. “Okay. Time for Quentin’s least favorite habit, talking to the architecture.” I turned back to the wall. “Hey. Toby here. I’m looking for my people. I think one of yours is with them. Are you hiding Nolan? I know he’s your boy. I know you love him.” That was a guess as much as anything else. The knowe had sealed itself off for a century rather than be held by someone outside of the Windermere family, reopening only when it knew they might come home. It made sense that it would love Nolan just as much, given how much it clearly cared for his sister.

Naturally, there was no response. But it felt like the room was listening, if a room can be said to listen. Sometimes the things I believe mean accepting some pretty weird stuff.

“I need to find them,” I said. “I need to keep them safe. If I’m right, if what I’m afraid is happening is actually happening, then they’re in danger, and I need to get to them as soon as possible. Please, can you help me?”

There was a click, and a door opened in the wall where I would have sworn no door had been a moment before. I glanced up at the ceiling.

“I’m so grateful,” I said. “I can’t say enough how important this is. If you need anything, just figure out how to tell me, and I’ll do my best.”

I ducked through the door into the short hallway on the other side, Tybalt on my heels, and the door slammed shut behind him, leaving us alone in the dark.