Page 64 of Be the Serpent

Arden looked at Cassandra, unimpressed. “You know, when I was a kid, the household staff was much more willing to listen to the nobility.”

“When you were a kid, the bra had yet to be invented,” countered Cassandra. She took the platter from Nolan and walked over to me, thrusting it into my hands. “You have to eat. It’s important.”

“Why?”

“I can’t tell you.” Her mouth twisted unhappily. “If I tell you, you’ll change what you do, and if you change what you do, things will go much, much worse for you. So I can’t tell you, but you’re going to eat as many of these sandwiches as you can stomach, and then you’re going to eat two more, because you’re going to bleed a lot before you get to eat again, and you need something to use when you’re building back all that blood.”

I took the tray, blinking at her. “You’re not normally this specific about what’s going to happen, even in your nonspecific way,” I said.

“Yeah, well, I’m not normally in the middle of a massive crisis involving my whole fucking family, and my sister’s not normally dead,” she snapped. “I can’t See that woman directly—even the air shies away from her, it’s like she’s the original evil enchanted mirror or something—but I can See the wreckage she leaves in her wake, and there’s a lot of it. Something really, really bad is going to happen if you don’t stop her soon, and it’s going to hit all of us. That makes it enough my business for me to See.”

“Aren’t oracles useful?” asked Arden, almost abstractly. “Can’t pick lottery numbers, can’t tell you not to wear the white dress on a night when the chefs are serving cioppino, can make dire proclamations with absolutely no guidance to go with them. What happened, Sir Daye?”

Meaning she wanted the formal report rather than the colloquial one. Too bad for her that the two are effectively one and the same where I’m concerned. “Went to Oberon for help stopping his wife,” I said, blandly. Everyone here knew he was back, even if I had never seen Nolan directly interact with him. “He gave me a very temporary form of protection, but didn’t want to otherwise help me. Where is he?”

“Wandering around the grounds, while steadfastly refusing to go and look for her himself,” said Arden. “To be honest, it feels like he wants to pretend none of this is happening.”

“A position I can sadly understand,” said Cassandra.

So could I, and that was really the problem. “After speaking to Oberon, I went back to the Brown house, hoping I could find a trail there to follow. I found Titania, playing at being Stacy Brown, preparing pancakes for dinner.”

Cassandra winced. “Jessica’s favorite.”

“Yeah.” It seemed best to be blunt at this point. It wasn’t like I could make things better by doing literally anything else. “I was hoping . . . I don’t know what I was hoping.” Charging wildly off into danger had worked for almost everything else in my life, and I guess what I’d really been hoping was that it would work again here. That somehow being willing to risk myself would be enough to transform this into the sort of situation that could be handled by risking myself. More quietly, I finished, “I just don’t know.”

“But we know where she is now?” asked Arden.

“Not really. She said she wasn’t free yet, wasn’t back yet, because she hasn’t fulfilled the terms of her geas. So she has to do what Oberon commanded her to do, and then disappear again, to become somebody new. She said—and I’m sorry, but I believe her, about this at least—she said there is no Stacy without her, and so we can’t save Stacy. It’s impossible.”

Cassandra made a choked sound and turned her face away. I took the first sandwich and shoved as much of it into my mouth as I could manage, chewing fast and swallowing too quickly. “Stacy’s still there, though, and still fighting, I think because she hasn’t been able to arrange a perfect disappearance for Titania.”

“You mean because she hasn’t killed us yet,” said Cassandra, voice cold.

“Yes, I do,” I said. “In order to fulfill the conditions of her binding, Titania has to pass without a trace. She has to disappear into someone new, and not leave any evidence that there was ever anything odd about Stacy Brown.”

“Four unexplained Firstborn from a nondescript changeling woman is certainly odd,” said Arden.

“It would have been five if any of us had known how to read what the signs were trying to say,” said Cassandra. “Jessica and Andrew had been having nightmares for weeks. Even if they didn’t remember them when they woke up, Karen did, and she made sure I knew what was going on. We all knew we needed to be worried about something, but none of us expected it to be our own mother.”

“Because it wasn’t your mother,” I said, more fiercely than I intended. “Stacy would never have hurt Jessica. Stacy’s still there. She’s fighting Titania. She’s fighting so much harder than I would ever have thought it was possible for a person to fight against the queen of us all.”

“What does Titania want?” asked Arden.

“The Browns. She wants to kill the rest of Stacy’s children, so she can vanish like none of this ever happened. She can’t be Titania without constraints until she’s become a better person, and being the kind of person who wakes up from a long dream of being someone else and promptly starts trying to murder kids isn’t what I’d call ‘better.’ But she can’t stop being Stacy and turn into somebody new until she’s erased all signs of her presence, which means not leaving four Firstborn behind.” I paused, taking a slow, shaky breath.

“And she says if I don’t help her finish out this stage of the geas, she’s going to kill everyone I love,” I said. “Well. Almost everyone. Oberon apparently bound her against harming direct members of Janet’s descent. So I’m safe, August’s safe, and May’s probably safe, depending on how the magic wants to interpret the existence of a Fetch.”

“Gillian?” asked Tybalt, in a tone of mild horror.

I shrugged. “I don’t know. She was born a changeling, but I pulled my contribution to her heritage out after she’d been elf-shot. She still had my jawline after that, so clearly I’m still her biological mother, but when I removed the magic, I could easily have removed the protection. And it wasn’t like I was going to ask Titania, ‘Please, ma’am, but as you’re making wild threats, can you tell me how many of my loved ones are in danger?’ If she doesn’t remember Gilly exists, I’m not going to remind her.”

Tybalt nodded. “She can reach the Court of Cats,” he said. “Her daughter, Erda, was the one who opened the Shadow Roads for our use, and while the stories of Erda paint her as the kindest of women, she was well known to be devoted to her mother, and to have objected when Oberon said the Cait Sidhe would stand alone, claimed by none among the Three, in recognition of our independence.”

“So your people . . . ”

“My people are not safe.” He started to step away, then stopped, indecision painted on his face. “I am your husband,” he said. “I am your mate. I stood before the sea witch and I promised to stand beside you. I should be here as you consider throwing yourself into danger.”

“And you’re also still a King of Cats, and you know about a danger to your Court,” I said. “Go. Warn them to close the doors and keep their heads tucked down until we know what’s happening. Lock the doors on the Court of Cats until Titania is no longer the wolf on the stairs outside.”