Page 40 of Sleep No More

The smell of redwood bark and blackberry flower drifted through the room, undercut by a faint whiff of apple cider, completely out of keeping with my surroundings. I turned my face toward the wall. It wasn’t a magical signature I recognized; if the Queen’s men were coming to drag me to judgement, I wasn’t going to fight them, but I wasn’t going to make this any easier on them than it had to be. If they wanted me begging for clemency or running to them looking for saviors, they were going to be direly disappointed.

I might be a changeling, but I was my father’s daughter, whether or not I had the right to his name, and Torquills do not beg.

“Psst.”

The voice was female and not far away. It sounded like the speaker was actually in the room with me, which was impossible. I nestled harder into my corner.

“I think she’s ignoring you, dear sister,” said a second voice. “Quite rude, really, especially for a convicted criminal. Do you think they’ll bother with the pretense of a trial, or go straight to the execution?”

I whimpered and burrowed even harder into the corner.

“There: now you know she hears us.” The speaker sounded remarkably smug for someone whose primary accomplishment had been speaking in a place where they couldn’t reasonably be.

Then again, maybe that was impressive enough to be proud of. With an iron door on the cell, all attempts to teleport or open portals into the room should have been blocked. And these people, whoever they were, had clearly opened a portal.

“Ow!” said the voice. “What’d you go and do that for?”

“You’re being a dick,” said the first person—at least I assumed it was the first person. It’s hard to recognize someone’s voice from a “psst.” The thought of dealing with more than two strangers right now was too much for me to handle. “Dicks get swatted.”

“At last, we see the reason my sister never dates.”

“Ha-ha, you’re hilarious. Come on. We need to get her out of there.”

“I’m not going through.”

“Of course not. You’re a coward.”

There was a soft scuff, as if someone had stepped to the floor near me, and a hand touched my shoulder. “Excuse me, but are you October? October Torquill?”

The stranger was close enough now for me to tell that the redwood-and-blackberry scent was definitely hers, and more, she was a pureblood. I didn’t always get that from a person’s magic, and especially not this strongly, but there it was, marking her like a brand.

I couldn’t ignore a direct question from a pureblood, even if I wanted to. Slowly, fighting the throbbing pain in my skull, I raised my head and twisted very slightly around, opening my eyes.

A woman was crouched behind me, watching me with obvious concern. She wore a patchwork jacket of some sort over a human-design shirt and pants, making her look like a strange hybrid of the two realities. Her hair was so black it was almost purple, and her eyes were mismatched metal, one pyrite, one mercury. Tuatha de Dannan. That explained how she could open a teleportation circle in the first place, although not how she could get one into a warded cell.

She smiled as she saw me looking at her. “Hi,” she said. “You’ve probably looked better, and I’m sorry to be bothering you at a time like this, but if you could answer my question, that would be fabulous.”

“I’m October,” I croaked, dry mouth stealing most of the inflection from the words.

The woman nodded in satisfaction. “Great. Well, my name’s Arden Windermere, and I’m your ride out of here.”

“How?”

“You mean how am I, and my frustrating but devastatingly handsome brother, able to open a gate into a cell laced with so much iron that my teeth are already starting to itch? Make you a deal.” She smiled again, bright as the sun, and offered me her hand. “Come with us, and I’ll tell you.”

“Or?”

“Or, you know. Stay here and die a painful, inevitable, unnecessary death. I guess the choice is yours.” Her smile faded as she looked at me. “I know what I’d go with in your position, but the Queen wouldn’t put me in your position, would she? Oh, I mean, she would, but for very different reasons. Her advisors would try to find a way to let me go, and all because I can trace my lineage back to Armorica with no diversions into the human realms. Like who my ancestors fucked or didn’t fuck makes me special somehow.”

I stared at her.

“Of course, then my parents had to go and die on us, and Nolan and I got to go into hiding, because that’s always fun and healthy for a pair of orphan kids. We were a whole human children’s book all by ourselves, and that’s something else I can tell you about, if you’ll just come with me.”

A door slammed in the distance, the sound echoing along the hall. Arden tensed.

From the other side of the cell, Nolan said, “Sister dear, I don’t mean to rush you, but I think you’re about to have company.”

I glanced in the direction his voice was coming from. A hole hung in the air, showing a bare-earthed field scattered here and there with the orange domes of pumpkins, and a man who looked very much like Arden standing anxiously at its center.