Page 44 of Be the Serpent

“Followed the blood trail,” I said. I looked to Jin, who had bled the least but was the most visibly injured person in the room. “How’s Anthony?”

“I got the knife out, stopped the bleeding, cleaned and packed the wound and was preparing to regrow the skin, and then the Prince and the alchemist showed up, and everything went to shit,” she said. She sounded exhausted. That wasn’t really a surprise, all things considered. She had apparently run some distance with a horrific gut wound, and was now jammed into a too-small room with a bunch of kids who weren’t hers and a few adults on high alert. Not what she’d signed up for when she’d agreed to accompany the boss to Muir Woods.

“He’ll live,” she continued. “In case you were worried about that. We need to get him better medical care at some point in the not-too-distant future, but right now, he’s stable, and he’ll stay that way as long as we don’t ask him to move again any time soon. Were you followed?”

“No,” said Tybalt, with absolute certainty. “Why has the Prince not removed you all to safety?”

“Because I can’t,” said Nolan, sounding more frustrated than anything else. “I delivered the alchemist to his lady—”

“Please, can we not call her that?” asked Mitch.

Nolan ignored him. “—and was about to take my leave when there was a very bright light. Terribly so, as if we had looked into the center and soul of a dying star. When the light cleared, the screaming began, and I found my magic quite beyond my reach.” He sounded almost embarrassed by that, as if he were admitting to some unspeakable failing on his part.

“We grabbed the kids and ran,” said Mitch. “Everyone was screaming. Stacy—did you see her? Was she in the hall?” His voice broke, in desperation and denial.

But was it really denial? Could he honestly be expected to look at the situation and go “Oh, my wife, who I’ve known since we were both kids, has secretly been Titania this whole time, and has decided to kill our children before turning into someone new and forgetting about me?” It was a stretch even for me, and I’d been standing there while Oberon basically drew me a road map to that inevitable conclusion.

Everything about this was terrible, and none of us was going to walk away untraumatized. But right now, we had something bigger to worry about. I looked around at the others. “Can any of the rest of you reach your magic?”

They shook their heads in ragged unison, with Jin laughing dryly at the end.

“If I could get to my magic, do you think I’d be standing here with my guts in my hands?” she asked. “I’d have myself patched all the way back together and be working on the kid. But right now, it’s not happening.”

I gave her a closer look. Her skin, which had already been pale when the day began, looked like so much wax packed over the structure of her face and arms. Her wings hung limp behind her, and her flesh was starting to hang off. “Are you molting?”

“I want to be. I was already standing right on the edge, and a sharp-enough shock to the system when you’re almost there should kick off the process. Everything inside me is getting loose and ready to drop away. But it can’t quite let go. It’s like something’s holding it on, even though it shouldn’t be able to stay.”

Ellyllon biology is odd even by fae standards. Maeve claims them, but they work closely enough with blood that Oberon was probably also involved. Even so, this wasn’t good. “This doesn’t sound like what happened to us,” I began.

No, but it was close, wasn’t it? An absence of action instead of awareness; a reaching inward rather than a looking outward. I could see how perceiving magic and actually reaching for it might be connected. It was all in which part of the circuit got interrupted. “Okay,” I said, slowly. “That’s not great.”

“You think?” asked Jin, and laughed again, this time with an edge of hysteria.

“Tybalt, can you touch the shadows?”

“I can,” he confirmed. Then he sighed, heavily, fixing me with an unhappy look. “You’re about to ask that I leave you once again, when the danger is both unknown and unknowable, aren’t you?”

“We need to get these people out of here, and walking back isn’t an option,” I said. “Maybe the Luidaeg still has some of those eggs. I promise not to go hunting for her while you’re not here.”

“We’ve made it this far into the latest nightmare without you being ripped open and bleeding out on the floor. If we could continue that state of affairs, I would be immensely grateful,” he said, and kissed me quick before stepping into the shadows and disappearing, leaving only the faint scent of musk and pennyroyal behind.

I turned back to Mitch. We were in a room with the Crown Prince in the Mists, and both Jin and Walther were older than he was, but he was the father of the four children currently in here with us—three children and Cassandra, anyway, who was legally an adult in the human world, even if she was a few years away from being able to say the same in Faerie—and for the moment, I was willing to let him feel like he was in charge. That would change in a hurry if we entered a situation where we needed heroing. Once the heroism starts, I’m pretty much the boss of things.

“Tybalt will either be back with a way to put you all in contact with your magic, or with the sea witch,” I said.

Mitch flinched. Not an uncommon reaction from adults in the Bay Area. Quentin and the rest of his gang were growing up weird because they thought of the Luidaeg as a friend rather than a sort of predictable environmental hazard. When I was his age, I thought of the sea witch as Faerie’s greatest monster, a constant, lurking threat who could—and would—sweep me away if she was given half a chance.

Some of that was my mother, who never had a nice thing to say about her sister, even before I’d known the Luidaeg was her sister. But Sylvester had been the same way. Most of it was just natural fear of the Firstborn, created by the gulf between their power and our own and emphasized endlessly by the stories about them we chose to remember and retell.

Faerie is a world made up of incredibly long-lived people with equally short memories. It would be annoying if it wasn’t so damn horrifying.

“I know she’s been kind to Karen,” he said, hesitantly, “but she’s still . . . well. She’s still her. Is it really safe to bring her here when we’re all defenseless?”

Mitch was scared and traumatized and had just lost one of his children. Cassandra might understand if I got snappy, and Karen was currently unconscious; Anthony and Andrew, on the other hand, didn’t need to watch me picking a fight with their dad just because I was stressed.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to. Jin barked bitter laughter, hand still clamped over her middle, and said, “Don’t be stupid, Brown. We’re all defenseless in front of the sea witch. If she wants us broken, we break. If she wants us bent, we bend. She’s a nightmare walking, and the only reason we’re still here is because she hasn’t seen the value of getting rid of us. You flatter yourself by behaving as if she’d be a threat to you without good reason.”

“Threaten to take Karen away from me, and you’ll give me a good reason,” said the Luidaeg mildly. I didn’t need to turn to know that she and Tybalt were standing behind me. I turned anyway.