Page 78 of Be the Serpent

Without Simon, Arden and Lowri would have been in genuine trouble. Thanks to her long campaign against the children of Maeve and Oberon’s own slowness to claim descendant lines under his own banner, the descendants of Titania outnumber the claimed descendants of Oberon and Maeve by a factor of about two to one. Far more of Arden’s staffers were fighting on Titania’s side. I couldn’t see Quentin. I just hoped that he was still safely inside the orangery, protected from the chaos outside.

As for the Browns, it was obvious where they were. Titania’s forces wouldn’t have been trying so hard to get inside for the sake of anything else.

I was still trying to make a decision when a hand grasped my shoulder and Tybalt’s familiar voice purred, “There you are, my sweetling. Did you miss me?” next to my ear.

That was all the warning I got before he jerked me backward, into the shadow. It was enough time for me to catch my breath, and not much more than that.

Without Oberon’s blood in my system, the Shadow Roads were as frigid and airless as they had ever been, and the lines of glowing light were gone. That was understandable, although I felt a brief pang of loss as I registered their disappearance. It had been nice not to feel like I was completely helpless in the dark.

Then I squinted my eyes shut to keep them from freezing. Having limits means knowing how to account for them.

My hands were full, and I didn’t trust myself not to drop something if I tried to juggle my knives and the bottle when I couldn’t see and my fingers were going numb. That meant I couldn’t reach for Tybalt as he let me go and stepped away.

“I could leave you here,” he said, voice low and pleasant. “I could walk away and leave you in the dark, and no one would ever find your body, and my mistress would be well pleased. But first, she would be angry, as she asked me to fetch you to her, and so I suppose this is to be a brief reunion.”

Lips closer to my ear, he added, “Darling,” and shoved me in the back, hard. I stumbled forward—

—out into the moonlight. Stacy, who was standing only a few feet away from where I had emerged, turned and smiled at me, sweetly.

“Hello, October,” she said, and her voice was hers and not hers at the same time, the echoing, terrible voice of a goddess, and oh, I was so completely screwed.

NINETEEN

I swallowed hard, even as the smell of pennyroyal and musk from behind me announced Tybalt’s return. I would have noticed his magic when I was on the hill with Sylvester, but I’d been too distracted by the smell of blood. Blood tends to overwhelm everything else where I’m concerned.

He strolled past me to join Titania, who smiled winsomely at him, the expression smug and sour and so unlike anything I had ever seen on Stacy’s face that I had no trouble telling the two of them apart. She reached up with one hand, caressing his cheek, and he leaned into the gesture, eyes half-closed and content.

“Get your hands away from him,” I snapped.

“Why should I?” she asked, glancing slyly in my direction. “He’s of Malvic’s line. No blood of mine. But as I told you before, Malvic was in my keeping in his cradle, when my darling husband proved unsuited to the challenges of a boy who was sometimes a wild beast and sometimes impossible to confine. That was what he did, you know, when we were all of us together. He created problems or he took them from my flighty sister and he dropped them in my lap, as if my only purpose were the resolution of trouble he had brought to my doorstep. Is it any wonder I grew bitter? Better to be bitter than to be taken for granted. So much of what he considers his own belongs to me, if only because he refused to take ownership when those things were fresh, and new, and pliable. I shall have them. All of them.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Balance this and balance that. There is no balance. There is only us, the Three of us, born to power and destined to take it as we desire. We made you. All of you, every flawed, mewling one of you, and there’s no crime in us using you as we see fit. You are our property, after all.”

“You are absolutely the Rose of Winter’s mother,” I said. Even under these circumstances, I wasn’t going to say Evening’s name out loud. She claimed to be more powerful when she was asleep, and I didn’t know whether being near her mother would make that more or less true.

Titania smiled. “Yes, I am. She may be my finest creation.”

And maybe if Titania had ever once said that to her face, she wouldn’t have been such a murderous disaster. And the rest of us might have a lot less to worry about.

“You came here to kill me,” she said, gaze flicking briefly to the knives in my left hand. I glanced down at them like I’d forgotten they were even there.

“What, those? Nah. I’m always armed,” I said easily. “Ask whatever’s left of Stacy. Ask my husband, aka your new pet. I’d like him back, by the way. I’m pretty attached to him, and it took us, like, years to sort our shit out well enough to actually get somewhere. Stacy knows. She was responsible for making me look presentable for the wedding.”

Titania’s eye twitched. “What your little friend knew or didn’t know is irrelevant, because she’s not coming back.”

“Would you be so firm about that if you really believed it?” I asked, almost idly. “I think you’re a little bit like May at this point. All the people you’ve been, still buried inside you. Hundreds of years of memories that you didn’t ask for, that were foisted upon you by someone else, that aren’t your own but feel like they should be.”

She finally pulled her hand away from Tybalt’s face, eyes narrowed. “Stop talking,” she said.

“Nope. Not until you give my husband back to me.”

“Husbands don’t have as much value as you seem to think they should,” she said, sharply. “They come, they go, they tarry with your sister for a time, and they turn their back on you as soon as you’re more complicated than they want you to be. You’re better off without him.”

“You really do remember them all, don’t you?” Was taunting the Queen of All Faerie really the best idea I’d ever had? Nope. Did I see another option? Not so much, and I already knew she couldn’t harm me directly. I was stalling until Oberon showed himself, trying to keep her from remembering that she could order any one of her captives to kill me on her behalf.

Or could she? Tybalt had pulled me into the shadows twice, but he hadn’t even tried to slaughter me. How much of that was Tybalt himself resisting her, and how much of it was a matter of the geas refusing to let her give that order?