Page 55 of Be the Serpent

Someone was moving around in the kitchen. I walked gingerly along the hall toward it, one hand resting on the hilt of Oberon’s antler-handled knife, half-sure of what I was going to find, and entirely sure that I didn’t want to find it.

Then I was in the kitchen doorway, and there was Stacy, sweet, beloved Stacy, exactly as she had always been, her hair bundled into a messy knot on the top of her head, a streak of flour down one cheek. The smell of cinnamon was bright in the air, all but drowning out the richness of the pancake batter. She had no shoes, but stood barefoot in the kitchen—exactly the cliché we used to joke about not wanting to become—wearing one of Mitch’s sweatshirts. The bowl of pancake batter was tucked up under one arm, and a platter of finished pancakes sat on the counter.

She beamed bright as a beacon when she saw me. “Toby!” she exclaimed. “I didn’t know we were expecting you today!”

“Um, hi, Stace,” I said, trying to stay outwardly relaxed as Tybalt moved away from me, heading into the living room. I understood why—it was important we know exactly what was going on—but that didn’t mean I had to like it. “I was here earlier, remember?”

“No,” she said, blinking guilelessly at me. She had always been good at guileless. Better than any of the rest of us, that was for sure. “I was at the store, but I came home to make pancakes for dinner. That’s still Jessie’s favorite.” Her voice dropped, becoming conspiratorial. “I lost my temper with her earlier, when she was telling fibs about her brother sneaking around with some girl. He’s much too young to be getting up to anything like that!”

“Sweetie, he’s fifteen,” I said. “You and Mitch were getting frisky behind the woodpile at Shadowed Hills when you were fifteen, remember?”

Of the four of us, me, Kerry, Stacy, and Julie, I’d been the late bloomer. Paradoxically, I’d also been the first one to wind up unexpectedly pregnant. I guess that’s what we call reaping the rewards of restraint. Not a proverb that’s going to catch on any time soon.

Stacy blinked, looking momentarily puzzled. Then she waved it away, all smiles. “Oh, no,” she said. “No, no, that can’t be right. We were much older than any of my children before we got up to anything . . . before we did anything naughty like that. Much older.” She turned her attention back to the griddle on the stove, flipping the pancake expertly over before transferring it to the waiting plate. “Did you and Tybalt want to stay for dinner? You know you’re always welcome here.”

A soft footstep alerted me to Tybalt’s return, and told me how hard he was working to be considerate—a Cait Sidhe who doesn’t want to be heard can walk through a field covered in fallen leaves and not make a sound. If he was stepping hard enough for me to hear it, it was because he wanted me to know where he was. I turned.

He was right behind me, all smiles and insincerity. “Forgive me, Stacy, but I need to borrow my lady wife for a moment,” he said.

It had been a long time since I’d seen Tybalt smiling like that, engaging his whole face without it coming anywhere close to his eyes. I realized with a start that it used to be the only way he ever smiled, back when I’d been seeing him mostly in the Court of the false Queen, when we’d been lying to each other and to the world over and over again.

I didn’t like it. I didn’t have to. “I’ll be right back,” I said to Stacy, then offered Tybalt my hand and let him tug me into the living room. He moved smoothly, still smiling as he watched me move, and if I hadn’t known him as well as I did, I could have taken it for flirtation.

Stacy clearly did. She laughed as he pulled me away, pouring another pancake onto the griddle. And then we were in the living room, and I had better things to worry about.

Better things, like the fact that there was no sign of Jessica. No manikin on the floor where her body had been, no bloodstains on the carpet or signs of the struggle that had happened here. I still couldn’t smell blood. I breathed in, so deeply that the smell of roses made my head spin, and there was nothing at all.

Tybalt let go of my hand. “How is this possible?” he asked, voice low.

“She’s the Lady of Flowers,” I said. “Night-haunts make their replacements almost entirely out of flowers. April said that when they made a new body for January, they started with the blood she had found in the company freezers, and from there they used everything they had to hand. Which was mostly dried flowers from the ritual April had used to summon them.”

Tybalt frowned. “That’s a making.”

“So if she was trying to clean up, if she was trying to stay calm for the sake of her own peace of mind, she might have resorted to an unmaking,” I said. “Pull the spell away from the raw materials, let them crumble back into so much potpourri.”

“That is . . . ”

“Horrific? Efficient? Very much in line with what we know so far?” I shook my head, watching him gravely. “I don’t put anything past her at this point. Her, not Stacy.” If I thought of them as two separate entities, maybe I could survive this.

Or maybe not, because there was no way we were going to be able to force Titania back into quiescence. She was awake now. Even if we could shunt her aside for short periods, Stacy was trapped inside a body with her, and she was going to lose.

Jessica was dead. This was basically already over.

“Toby!” Stacy’s voice was bright and guileless, the voice of a woman who expected her family to walk in at any moment. “Are you and Tybalt staying for dinner? Would you like eggs? I was just going to scramble them in the bacon grease, but I can do them another way if you’d prefer.”

“Um,” I said, brilliantly. I swallowed, both my panic and the sudden urge to take another sip of Oberon’s blood, and said, “Yeah, Stace. Yeah, we’re staying. It would be great if you could scramble us both some eggs. I really appreciate the offer.”

“You’re my girl, Toby,” she said, voice still bright. “You always will be. You know that.” She looked past me to Tybalt. “I hope she’s relaxing about letting you love her. She never wants to trust it when it’s coming from the rest of us.”

“She has learned to take my affections seriously,” he said, tone grave.

Stacy laughed as she stepped into the kitchen doorway. “Why are you weirdoes both being so serious today? It’s like you think somebody died!” She sobered almost immediately, shooting me an anxious look. “Toby, nobody died, right?”

I wanted to tell her. I wanted to remind her. Because it would hurt to hear, but I wouldn’t be hurting Stacy, would I? Not at this point. Stacy was just a mask she was wearing, a hollowed-out echo of my friend, and hurting Titania to make her pay for what she’d done to us seemed only and absolutely fair.

I shook my head. “No, Stace,” I said. “No one died. We’ve just had a really long day. It was Raysel’s trial.”

“Oh, that poor girl.” She stepped back into the kitchen, and I heard eggshells cracking as she began fixing the promised eggs. “Did they agree to wake her up? She deserves to be awake at this point.”