Page 69 of Be the Serpent

“Cassandra is going to call Stacy’s phone, and get her to come here to collect the children. When she shows up, I’m going to break the binding Oberon put on her.”

His gaze sharpened, and he focused on my face for the first time. “You can do that?”

“The Luidaeg seems to think I can, so yeah, I can probably do that. If I can’t, I guess we’re going to find out in the biggest, most dramatically stupid way possible. But the way I take down a spell is apparently well suited to dismantling a geas, and Oberon doesn’t seem to have put as much thought into the one he cast on his wife as she put into the one she cast on the Luidaeg.” If the Luidaeg had been allowed to tell me I could dismantle a geas lain by one of the Three, she would have told me long since. Her own geas was a burden that dragged her down every single day.

Yeah, freeing her might have meant she returned to the sea to be with the Roane, but that would have been worth it to see my friend allowed to be happy. As it was, she had to serve the people of the land, bound and forbidden to live the way she wanted to, and all thanks to Titania.

“I see,” said Tybalt, still focusing on me. I took a step backward, swallowing the final bite of my sandwich.

“Tybalt? Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Like what?”

“The way Quentin looked at Chelsea when she picked them all up lunch from that Mean Poutine place in Vancouver.” He was happy with Dean, but when Chelsea had popped into our living room laden with square brown fast-food containers, Quentin had looked at her like he was suddenly considering whether Dean’s parents had the right idea.

Which was their business, if they decided that was the way they wanted to do things. As long as I didn’t have to be the one to explain it to anyone’s parents, I really didn’t care.

“I’m just astonished all over again by what a creative and talented wife I have,” he said, and took a step toward me.

The alarm bells that had been chiming before were getting louder inside my head, approaching storm-klaxon volume. “Yeah, well, I’m pretty innovative,” I said, and dipped a hand into my pocket, pulling out the little bottle I’d received from Oberon. It was still well over two-thirds full. I wanted to conserve as much of it as possible for the actual fight against Titania, but I could have a sip now, if I needed it.

And I was direly afraid I needed it.

Tybalt scowled when he saw what was in my hand, but he didn’t move to stop me. “Is this really the time to be indulging in your quest for more power?” he asked.

I paused in the motion of raising the bottle, blinking at him. “What?”

“You and I both know you accepted that only because it could make you more powerful, even if only in the short term,” he said. “You’ve never been content with your limitations, even when you ought to be.”

“Right,” I said mildly, trying to ignore the sting of his words. “That verifies it. I won’t say you’re not Tybalt, because you probably are, but you’re not speaking for yourself right now.” I raised the bottle, quickly swallowing two sips of its contents, and was immediately assaulted with the smell of roses, strong and cloying and radiating, as expected, almost entirely from Tybalt. I lowered the bottle, eyes on him. “So what, the Court of Cats was already compromised when you got there?”

“The Court of Cats contains only what it means to,” he said. If I focused, I could see the lines of prismatic pink in his eyes and wrapping around him like a hand. Titania had her claws in him.

“Then it needs to do some serious introspection,” I said, re-capping the bottle and returning it to my pocket before spreading my arms. “Guessing she sent you here to stop any plan we might be putting in place to stop her, and she knows me well enough to know I’d be right in the center of it, although not well enough to know that keeping you away would have been a bigger distraction than whatever it is you’re about to do to me. So come on, kitty. Let’s go.”

Tybalt snarled, the sound equal parts fury and frustration, like he was fighting as hard as he could against the compulsion forcing him to do this, and launched himself across the short distance between us, slamming into me like a freight train. I let the impact drive me back, not offering any resistance or attempting to get away, and was unsurprised when he shoved me again, even harder, and I tumbled into shadow.

So we were going to be fighting in the dark, were we? It made sense as an instruction from Titania: Stacy knew how much of a toll the Shadow Roads took on me, and that meant Titania did too. It was also a bad choice under the circumstances, since the mouthful of Oberon’s blood I’d just swallowed was protecting me from the worst of the road’s effects.

Tybalt snarled, circling me. The cold wasn’t bothering me, and I could breathe, but I still couldn’t see, and that was going to be a problem if he didn’t make contact soon.

“How did she get into the Court of Cats, Tybalt?” I asked the darkness around me, turning to stay oriented on the sound of his voice. It wasn’t as good as being able to see him, but it was better than staying completely still. “Did someone lead her in, or did she just follow the Shadow Roads and guess where she wanted to go? Stacy had never been there. Titania has probably been to the Courts before, but not this one. How much damage did she do?”

He made a strangled sound, then resumed his snarling.

“That bad, huh?” I tensed. As long as I could keep him growling, I could tell where he was.

Maybe that wasn’t the only way. The smell of roses still hung around him. I closed my eyes, taking away the distraction of the dark, and reached for the spell that was binding his thoughts, the one I had seen reflected in his eyes. At the same time, I bit the inside of my cheek, hard enough to draw blood, and as it washed across my tongue, adding the taste of cut grass and copper to the loam I had taken from Oberon, I saw.

The space around me lit up in an array of fine threads. The Shadow Roads themselves were a magical construct. I saw the prismatic pink I now recognized as Titania, wrapped tight and tangled through the darker green of Oberon. A third line of threads was woven with the two, deep blue and pearl white at the same time, and I gasped, almost losing hold of the spell I was trying to conjure.

Maeve’s magic. That was what her workings looked like. Meaning if she was still out there in the world, I knew what I would need to look for. I didn’t dare reach for those threads—not only would collapsing the Shadow Roads potentially kill the two of us, but it would strand uncounted Cait Sidhe in their Courts, with no way out—but now that I knew they existed, I could try to find Maeve’s magic again, to get a sense for the scent of it.

Another patch of pink moved around me, flickering prismatically, much fresher and more potent. That was the source of the roses that flavored the air, recently woven and wrapped tight around my husband’s heart and head. My poor love. He wasn’t going to be happy when he realized someone had tried to use him as a weapon against me. Again.

It was harder to get a grasp on the threads when they were attached to someone who kept moving. There was a solution to that, but neither of us was going to like it. I waited until he finished another loop, then launched myself at him, driving my shoulder into his chest. Tybalt hissed as we both went down in a heap on whatever served the Shadow Roads for ground. They were a dark, infinite space, but at least they had gravity: when we fell, we hit, and we stopped falling. I appreciated that.

Tybalt scrabbled to get out from underneath me, and I grabbed him by the hair, holding him where he was. The fact that I wasn’t bleeding yet was a testament to how hard he was struggling against Titania’s compulsions: I’ve seen the man fight, on several occasions, and there should have been entrails flying everywhere. Instead, he was fighting me like we were a pair of high school wrestlers and the last thing he wanted to do was hurt me.