Page 43 of Be the Serpent

So pretty normal, really.

ELEVEN

The air inside the hall smelled of blood, and not at all of roses. I decided to take that as a good sign, breathing deeply and closing my eyes as I followed the blood trail through the dark. I hadn’t gone very far before I heard footsteps behind me and felt Tybalt’s hand on my lower back, steadying me without urging me on.

“Do you truly think this is Titania?” he asked, voice low.

“Don’t you?” After everything else, it was the only thing that made sense, and more, it pulled so many other things together into a coherent whole. Now that it was in front of me, it seemed inevitable, like we had always been intended to end up here.

The smell of blood was getting stronger. I could smell other blood traces beneath it, not as strong, but still present. Anthony, mostly. He’d been injured, and without my unnecessarily rapid healing, he still would be.

Sometimes I forget other people stay injured for more than a few minutes. I don’t like that I forget it; it feels like the supernatural healing equivalent of those people who grow up poor, get access to a lot of money, and forget how much a gallon of milk costs. I have to be careful to treat other people like they’re breakable without trending over into acting like they’re already broken.

But my feelings don’t matter when it’s someone else’s injury. Walther was actively bleeding. Anthony was hurt. I didn’t have time to stand around being surprised by their fragility. I breathed in as deeply as I dared, focusing on blood rather than magic, and found a third trace, even fainter, that managed to smell effervescent and tingly. Jin was still with them. She’d been hurt at some point, but she was close enough to molt that the amount of blood didn’t really tell me how bad her injuries were. Ellyllon who are preparing to shed their skins don’t experience pain, or injury, the way normal people do—and for once, I was including myself in the “normal people” column. She could have been holding her guts in with one hand and still barely bleeding.

Faerie doesn’t go out of its way to make anatomy easy, which is why we mostly don’t have physicians. We have healers who use magic to do their jobs, midwives who use their hands and years of training, and alchemists who just sort of argue with the innate properties of the world around them until they get something that can act as a painkiller or a counteragent to a poison. Really, it’s a miracle we’ve lasted this long.

Tybalt stayed close behind me as I prowled through the dark, his presence more reassuring than anything else could possibly have been. He was a defense and an exit if I needed one, and we had plenty of shadows to flee through. I kept walking.

The blood traces ended at another wall. I pressed one hand flat against it and leaned forward until my forehead touched the wood. It had been polished but never stained or treated beyond that; it still smelled of sap, as strongly as if it had just been hewn from a fallen tree.

“Hey,” I said, voice low. “We already did this part. Can we just skip to where you let me in so I can help them? Please?”

There was a click. Nothing moved. I straightened and stepped back, giving the door room to swing open a few inches into the hall.

“I appreciate this,” I said. “You’re helping a lot.”

On the other side of the door was another low hall, this one lit by a soft ambient glow from the ceiling, coming from spalted streaks in the wood itself. Spalting is caused by fungus getting into wood either when it’s alive or after it’s dead. Faerie has more than its fair share of bioluminescent fungus, and that gives our architects ways to arrange for at least faint light without actually expending magic. Plus it can look really cool, which was probably most of the logic behind this hall. I smiled a little as we walked, passing darkened doorways that smelled of nothing but dust and sap, following the scent of my injured friends.

This hall, at least, ended in an actual door. I hesitated to consider the best way to do this, then reached out and knocked, very lightly.

Something moved on the other side, quick as a whisper, away from the door.

“Hey,” I called. “It’s Toby. I’m here with Tybalt. We’re coming in.”

For the first time, I paused to consider the fact that no one else was likely to be able to find us. Quentin is more polite to the knowes than most members of the Divided Courts, but he’s a little mortified when I make nice with them, and he was unlikely to think to try it—and even if he did, he didn’t have the history to make the knowe do him a favor if it was even slightly unsure. Arden couldn’t portal to us if she didn’t know where we were. Madden could probably track us by scent, but he’d have the same issue Quentin did when it came to getting through the hidden doors.

Oh, well. Good thing I was used to working with minimal backup.

“Okay? You know we’re coming in,” I called, more loudly, and opened the door.

The room on the other side was small, square, and plain, with the only furnishings being a single bed and an old-fashioned wooden wardrobe. It was also intensely crowded, as it currently contained five Browns, Walther, Jin, and Nolan, plus now Tybalt and myself. This was the sort of room that would have felt cramped with five people. Ten was way too many.

Walther was gripping the broken-off leg of a chair like a club, and Anthony was stretched out on the bed, blood seeping through the bandage on his side and into the thin mattress. It would need to be replaced, and probably burned, since at this point I was pretty damn sure that all four surviving Brown kids were Firstborn. Their blood would be intensely valuable to blood-workers like Simon or alchemists like Walther, and did we really need prophecy in convenient lozenge form? We did not.

Everyone else was clustered in the corner of the room, as far from the door as they could possibly get, except for Karen, who was asleep on the floor at the foot of the bed, one arm tucked under her head as a makeshift pillow, and Jin, who was slumped against the wardrobe and—yes—holding one arm clasped across her midsection like she was struggling to keep something tucked away inside. I hate it when my guts want to be on the ground.

As one, the people in the room, sans Karen, turned to stare at me. I stepped fully inside to let Tybalt enter, then closed the door, before I turned and waved at them.

“Hey,” I said.

“Aunt Birdie!” shouted Andrew, pulling away from his father and throwing himself across the room to wrap his arms around my waist and bury his face against my side. I lowered my hand to rest atop his head, feeling the blood that was drying sticky in his hair. Poor kid. Nothing about this day had been easy on him, and it wasn’t going to get any better.

“Toby,” said Walther, lowering his chair leg and straightening, swallowing hard as he tried to relax into a less confrontational position. “Are you—Is everything—What’s going on?”

“I came here to ask you the same thing,” I said. “Are you hurt?”

“You know I am, or you wouldn’t be asking,” he said, and held up his right arm, showing me the shallow cut that ran along the side from just above his elbow almost to his wrist. “How did you find us?”