Page 86 of Be the Serpent

Too late to stop now. “I unbound her—the other one. I let her out of the cage she’d been locked in for so long, and doing that meant Stacy got to rest. She didn’t have to fight to keep control of her own body, and she didn’t have to exist alongside the woman that killed her daughter. There was no way to save her, Mitch. I’m so sorry.” Tears rolled down my cheeks, warm and wet and surprisingly real, for all that this was a dream.

“I know you would have saved her if you could,” said Mitch. “I’m probably going to be angry with you for a while once we wake up and get out of here, but right now, I’m just glad you could let her rest.”

“It shouldn’t have ended like this,” I said.

“I knew something about her was . . . I knew she wasn’t what she said she was. Too many things didn’t add up, and then the kids never looked like either of us, didn’t match any of the descendant lines we knew how to trace, and they could do impossible things. Changeling children aren’t supposed to be able to see the future. They aren’t supposed to be so powerful that the sea witch offers to take them on as her apprentices.” Mitch looked away. “Time always worked a little differently when Stacy needed it to. Karen’s school did a bake sale once, when she was doing human school. She forgot to say anything until the night before. Stacy started baking right after dinner. She came to bed on time. But in the morning, there were eight dozen perfect, frosted cupcakes on the counter. And she didn’t call Kerry. It wasn’t hearthcraft. She just . . . needed time, and so she took it.”

I didn’t say anything. I felt like a fool for not having noticed the things he was talking about before. I’d always been proud of the fact that I was more attentive than your average pureblood. And now my best friend’s husband was telling me she’d been bending time for years, and I’d somehow never noticed? It made me wonder how many other things I’d never noticed.

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

“Hey, don’t be.” He forced a smile. “It wasn’t your fault. If . . . that other one . . . was inside Stacy, then she was inside Stacy from the beginning, before we ever met her, and that didn’t have anything to do with you. All you ever did was try to be the best friend to her that you could possibly be. You got two of our kids back from a monster, and you let her do your makeup for your wedding. She’d been so afraid you’d try to do it yourself—or worse, let May do it—and wind up looking like you just escaped from a Hot Topic. You were a good friend to her, October Daye, and she loved you very much, and she was never sorry to know you. Not even when you were a nightmare given flesh and breaking all our shit.”

Anthony was crying, still stroking his brother’s hair with one hand, and Cassandra was staring off into space the way she always did when she was looking toward the future.

“We have to wake up now,” she said. “Tybalt’s getting a little antsy. Apparently, he needs to talk to Toby about something important.” She smiled at me, just a little smugly.

I eyed her. “You already knew.”

“Why do you think I told you to eat a sandwich already?” She shrugged. “This has probably been the worst day of my life, and as soon as I stop trying to stay upbeat, I’m going to collapse and scream for a few hours, so that’s going to be fun, for me and Walther both. I hope this hasn’t scared him off.”

“Don’t you know?”

“I told you I can’t see the future where the Three are concerned. Well, I won’t see the future where the people I love are concerned, not unless it’s something so urgent that it doesn’t give me a choice. It’s better this way. I don’t want to know everything that’s coming. It’s bad for the heart to stop having surprises.”

“That’s very mature of you.”

She looked at me and shrugged again. “I’m a lot older than you think I am, Aunt Birdie. I grew up while you weren’t looking.”

“I was indisposed!”

“You were a fish,” she said, in a withering tone, and laughed. To my surprise, Andrew and Mitch joined in, and for a moment the dining room was filled with merriment to go with the light that had already been there.

There was always the light.

TWENTY-ONE

The smell of pomegranates invaded my nose. I groaned, eyelashes fluttering, before I opened my eyes and pushed myself into a sitting position. All four remaining Brown children were awake now, and all four of them were hugging their father while they cried. Mitch was crying in turn, his arms wrapped tight around his family, shielding them from the world and all its dangers with his body.

If only the dangers of Faerie were so easy to stave off. Tybalt stepped into view above me, offering me his hand. I smiled a little, grasping it, and let him pull me to my feet.

“October,” he began. “I’m so sorry—”

“Okay, I love you, but if you’re about to apologize for being less powerful than Titania, we’re going to have a talk about your superiority complex,” I said. “I get that you’re a cat. I knew that long before I married you. But when you weigh ‘cat’ against ‘Queen of Faerie,’ I’m pretty sure we all know who’s logically going to win.”

“And when we weigh ‘changeling street rat’ against ‘Queen of Faerie’?”

I leaned closer, smiling at him. “Didn’t you hear? I’m a hero.”

If not for the sobbing family ten feet away and the fact that it would have been entirely inappropriate, I would probably have kissed him. Under the circumstances, I could just touch his cheek, delicately, and say:

“You didn’t do any permanent damage. You didn’t have a choice. As far as I’m concerned, either one of those things would mean you got forgiven. Both of them together means you don’t have to be, because there’s nothing to forgive.” I stepped back. “Quentin? Fight’s over. Did May get Raysel out of here before it all went to shit?”

“Danny picked them up, and then the fighting started,” said Quentin.

“Uh-huh. You want to tell me why you didn’t go with them? Given that you’re my squire and I gave a direct order?”

“Yes, but you didn’t give it to me directly,” he said. “Everything was chaos. This big weird bell started ringing, and it was like it rang through the walls, you couldn’t not hear it. And then Cass called her mom, and she was crying, and she said her mother wasn’t coming, but someone else would be, and May said I had to go with her and Raysel, but you’d be coming back here to fight, and I know where my place is. My place is with my knight.”