Page 85 of Be the Serpent

“I made them a good place where they could be safe and asleep together,” she said. “I have to stay awake so it doesn’t fall apart, but Walther and Quentin said they’d stand watch and let everybody else rest, so that’s what they’re doing.”

“Okay,” I said. “Can you wake them up?”

“I could, but it might be hard, and they need the rest,” she said, a little dubiously. “They’ll remember everything they dreamt when they wake up, though, so if you want to go in with them, that might be better.”

“Okay,” I said dubiously, glancing at Tybalt. He was watching me impassively, looking neither pleased nor displeased about this new development. I guess when I was asleep, he didn’t need to worry about me going off and getting myself into more trouble. At least not the usual kind. I turned my attention back to Karen. “What do you need me to do?”

“Sit down and get comfortable,” she said.

It would have been silly to worry about the state of my jeans when I’d already been bleeding all over everything. I sat down in the loam, leaning back on my hands. Leaves crackled beneath my palms, surprisingly sharp for being bits of fallen foliage.

“Close your eyes,” said Karen.

I closed my eyes. I was definitely awake; I could smell the pomegranate trees around us, the lingering traces of blood, and musk and pennyroyal of Tybalt’s magic, and the simmering cut grass and copper of my own. Sleep didn’t feel like it was coming for me any time soon.

A phantom hand brushed my brow, accompanied by the cottonwood and quince scent of Karen’s magic, distant, wispy, and absolutely unmistakable.

“Time for sleep,” she said, softly. “You’re safe now. You can relax.”

I breathed in, breathed out, and tried to relax. The smell of her magic got stronger and stronger, washing everything else away, until it was just me, the darkness inside my eyes, and Karen’s voice, alone in the nothingness.

“All right,” she said. And then: “I’ll see you when you wake up.”

I opened my eyes.

I was sitting in the grass in the Browns’ backyard, next to the play structure where we’d found Anthony bleeding at the start of all this. The sun was shining bright as anything, midsummer-warm and surprisingly pleasant. I stood up.

“Hello?”

There was no reply . . . but the back door of the house was slightly ajar. I walked closer, pausing at the sound of voices coming from inside. Someone laughed. Dishes rattled. I pushed the door the rest of the way open and slipped into the house.

Like the backyard, this was the house as it would be in a completely perfect world, rather than the house as we knew it from day to day. Everything was clean and bright, and oddly soft-focused, like it was being shot by a cinematographer who had a very specific mood in mind. I walked down the hall, trying not to focus on the places where the house was strange to me, trying to focus instead on the places where it was more perfectly itself than it had ever been.

And then I reached the dining room, and there were the Browns—four of them, anyway. Anthony, Andrew, Cassandra, and Mitch sat around the table, which was ironically laden with breakfast-for-dinner, just like it had been when “Stacy” tried to convince me and Tybalt to give her the children in exchange for her own freedom. They were chattering animatedly among themselves, dishing pancakes and bacon and scrambled eggs onto their plates.

Cassandra was the first to notice me. She looked up, and smiled, gesturing toward one of the open chairs. “Hey, Aunt Birdie! I was wondering when you were going to show up. Sit down, have some pancakes. I know you must still be hungry.”

I sat. “Do dream pancakes really fill you up?”

“Not in the same way, but they taste exactly like the ones Mom always makes, and that’s good enough for me.” A flicker of sorrow crossed Cassandra’s face. That was good. I didn’t want her to be unhappy, but I very much wanted not to be bursting into some bucolic fantasy and ruining everything by insisting on telling them the truth.

Anthony and Andrew had ignored me thus far, too focused on shoveling mountains of eggs into their mouths with the sort of single-minded determination that most teens grew out of by seventeen or so. I’d only enjoyed a few years of the “eating everything in sight” phase with Quentin, and I’d been surprised to realize that I missed it. Nothing like having someone around who’ll always stop for a snack to make you remember that sometimes food is important.

Mitch, on the other hand, looked at me levelly from the other side of the table, his hands resting to either side of his plate. When I met his eyes, he asked, quietly, “Is it over?”

Everyone stilled. The boys stopped fighting over the platter of eggs, and turned to face me.

I took a deep breath. One of the few mercies of Faerie is that the purebloods like ritual and tradition so much that they have predetermined ways of saying almost everything from “Bob’s dead” to “Bob’s pregnant” to “Bob’s overthrown the rightful ruler and if you don’t recognize him as King right now, you’re going to regret it.” It’s sort of like having a society run by greeting cards. But what we didn’t have was “So you just found out the love of your life never actually existed, and when the person she really was managed to break through the mask, she killed your youngest daughter before she ran away.”

I had never expected to need a scripted way of saying “Sorry your wife turned out to be Titania,” but here we were, and I didn’t want to be here, and the fact that it was happening in a dream that smelled like maple syrup and bacon wasn’t making it any easier. This wasn’t the sort of setting that should be disrupted like this. This was a moment that should be perfect and protected forever, the sort of thing that only gets to exist in dreams.

But Mitch was a changeling, just like I was. He’d grown up at least partially in the human world. If anyone in Faerie was going to be okay with the absence of poetry, it was him. I looked him square in the eye as I nodded and said, “It’s over.”

He sucked in a sharp, anxious breath, glancing to Cassandra, and then back to me. “How did it end?”

“Tybalt carried me to her.” He’d done it under her orders, but it had been for the best in the end; by getting me up close, he’d put me into a position to break her hold on the situation. “She was flickering. Stacy was still there, the way a dream hangs on for a while after you wake up, and she asked me to end it before . . . before the other one could take over and destroy everything. She was fighting, Mitch. She was fighting right up until the end.”

Andrew made a pained noise and hid his face against his brother’s arm. Anthony stroked his hair with one hand, watching me closely.