Page 54 of Be the Serpent

And this whole thing was his fault, so he wasn’t going to get any sympathy from me.

I closed my eyes, did my best not to breathe, and took my first sip of his blood.

It tasted like nothing. Or, no, wait, it tasted like everything, like absolutely everything at the same time, like an entire year exploding on my tongue and blasting back to clear my sinuses and scorch my throat. It was like drinking an entire bottle of menthol syrup mixed with cinnamon oil and ghost pepper extract, and I had never hated anything more, and I had never wanted so badly to take another drink of something. It hurt. It hurt and it burned and I could see, very easily, how addictive it would be to any blood-worker, however weak, because with this stuff in my system, I felt like I could do absolutely anything.

It took a physical effort to lower the bottle without taking another sip. I forced the lid into place, pushing until there was a soft snapping sound to signal that the seal was engaged. Shoving the bottle into my pocket, I turned to Tybalt.

“Now,” I said. “We go now.”

“If you feel the wild recede, drink again,” said Oberon. I glanced back at him and nodded, then stepped into Tybalt’s arms and let him pull me back into the shadows.

Darkness bloomed around us, and I very nearly laughed. The Shadow Roads were warm, the air there thin and stagnant but sweet. The dark was still absolute and all-consuming, and I couldn’t see Tybalt’s expression as we began our run, but I felt his hand tighten on my arm, and knew that he was confused by the ease with which I was moving in what had always been historically hostile territory. Still, we ran, and I realized that if I could breathe, I could actually be useful for a change.

Breathing shallowly in, I filtered through the traces of magic hanging heavy in the motionless air, looking for the scent of roses. It was there, buried under layers upon layers of Cait Sidhe—Tybalt and Raj and Gabriel and Samson, as well as other, less familiar cats. There were so many of them, more than I had ever seen in the Court of Cats or would ever have imagined passing through the area. I shunted them to the side as best I could and kept digging.

And there, under a layer of juniper and thistle, bright and bold and so vast once I caught hold of it that it seemed impossible for me to have been distracted by literally anything else, I found the scent of roses. It was deeper than it had been before, richer, the scent not just of ancient flowers, but of the entire world that must have existed for them to grow. It was clean water and unpolluted air and sunlight and a great garden all around them, and when I breathed it in, light flickered in the shadows, my eyes trying to focus on a landscape that had been gone for millennia.

Or maybe not. These roses had never grown in mortal soil; they were the first flowers of a newly created Faerie, of the deepest realm that carried the collective name of our entire world, and the colors that burst throughout my field of vision were things my mind had never been intended to process or to see. I tried to blink them away, recognizing the threat they represented. Even if I weren’t still partially human, they would hurt me. They were reserved for other eyes than mine.

I pulled on Tybalt’s arm, trying to signal that it was time for us to go back to the sunlit world. When he didn’t change either pace or direction, I cleared my throat and said, “Here. This is where we need to step out of the shadows.”

My voice was a profanity in a place that had never been meant for me. Wow, I was crossing a lot of lines today, and the day wasn’t over yet. Plenty of time for me to piss off a few more underpinning concepts of our world, huh?

Tybalt tensed at the sound of my voice, and for the first time, I caught the whisper of his magic rising as he prepared to pull us out of the dark. It wasn’t a flare, wasn’t a spell being prepared for casting or an illusion being woven. No, this was closer to one of my conversations with the knowes, a negotiation with the world, couched in kindness and in a sort of strange mutual understanding that he probably wasn’t even fully aware of. He’d always been remarkably accepting when I started talking to the buildings, even as he’d expressed that he didn’t fully comprehend my reasons for thinking it was such a good idea. Well, maybe on some level, he actually did. Maybe we were more similar in that regard than either of us knew.

Then we were jumping out of the shadows and into the growing afternoon dimness of a familiar backyard, the grass crunching beneath our feet. Tybalt let me go, taking a few steps away before he turned to look at me.

“October?” he asked, confusion and concern in his voice. “Are you . . . What was that?”

“Guess the Shadow Roads like Oberon enough to let me in without a fight if they think I’m working for him,” I said, feeling almost giddy. There was no ice in my hair, and my lungs didn’t ache at all. I could get used to this. Which was probably a bad thing.

We have a word for substances that make you feel like you can do anything, that make the whole world brighter and better and more filled with potential, and it’s “drug.” Technically all medications are a form of drug, and I know that, but we don’t talk about Tylenol and cocaine in the same breath. I’ve been addicted before. I didn’t want to be again.

And that wasn’t going to stop me from choosing Oberon’s blood over and over, at least until this was all finished and done.

Tybalt studied me carefully before lowering his hands and saying, “If you’re sure you’re all right.”

“I’m fine,” I assured him. “The Shadow Roads just didn’t want to risk kicking out the boss.” I turned to slowly look at the yard around us. Anything other than the worried look that lingered in his eyes.

The smell of Anthony’s blood was still in the air, simultaneously brighter and more faded than it had been before. More faded because it had been sitting out in the open for longer, and nothing holds its scent forever; brighter because with Oberon’s magic boosting my own, I felt like I could follow a single drop of blood in an entire ocean. This was absolutely nothing I should allow myself to get used to.

The smell of roses running rampant dominated it all, almost obscuring even the scent of blood. I breathed in even deeper. “She came back here after we took Mitch to Muir Woods,” I said. “We need to check the house.”

Tybalt nodded, and followed as I walked toward the still-unlocked back door. We could still be wrong—she might not be hiding inside Stacy, and I held that hope as hard as I could as I slid the door carefully open, and heard the sounds coming from the kitchen as soon as I let go.

Music. Something poppy and upbeat. Someone was listening to the radio, which definitely hadn’t been on before. I glanced to Tybalt. He looked back, eyes wide and bewildered. Anyone who would come into a house with a dead child in the living room and turn on the radio probably wasn’t someone we wanted to be dealing with.

Which made it all the more important for us to go inside. I paused, hand on the door, and gave Tybalt a longer, more serious look. “If I need you to get out of there, you’ll go,” I said. “I’m protected. You’re not, and can’t be, and I won’t lose you to her. I can’t lose you to her. So if I tell you to go, you’ll go, and if you can’t listen for whatever reason, I’ll make you go. I need you to agree to that, and promise that if I shove you out a window or something, you won’t come charging right back in.”

He looked horrified. “I would never—”

“Promise me. Please.”

He blinked, slowly, and said, with great solemnity. “You have my word that if you bid me leave you, I will leave you, unless my will is no longer my own.”

“Good enough,” I said. That resolved, I eased the door even further open and stepped inside, Tybalt close behind.

The smell of pancakes and frying bacon greeted us, even stronger than the smell of roses. The smell of blood was entirely gone, stripped from the air of the house like it had never been there at all. Anything short of a Bannick scrubbing the place from top to bottom should have left a trace behind, but there was . . . nothing. Just nothing.