Page 93 of Sleep No More

His expression turned briefly murderous. “And we’ll be discussing that, once she has been recovered from wherever she’s being held. She should have known better than to risk you so.”

I turned to the Luidaeg. “I still have the Summerlands key,” I said, a note of desperation in my voice. “Could we take one of the old roads?”

“Accessing them with this much iron nearby would be a complicated trick, and not one that I’m sure would play out the way we want it to,” she said. “There are a lot of roads under the heading of ‘old roads.’ We could wind up on the Road of Rust, that was opened for the Gremlins, and die in a place where our bodies would never be found. I have a slightly better idea.” She gestured toward the door. “Does that thing look like it contains any silver to you?”

I blinked. “No. Why?”

“Because bound and limited as I am, I remain Firstborn, and I know how the Firstborn die,” she said. She held up one hand, fingernails growing long and wickedly pointed, like the talons of some great bird of prey or prehistoric creature of the depths. “We die by iron and silver. We don’t die by iron alone. Go comfort your father-failure. He thinks he’s lost you all over again.”

I glanced over my shoulder at Tybalt as she moved toward the door. He nodded, and so I stepped away, heading for Simon, still huddled in the corner.

When I got there, I found that he wasn’t alone: Garm was with him, back to the wall, face wan as whey beneath the natural gray pallor of his skin. Gwragen always bore a faint resemblance to human corpses. That resemblance was much more pronounced now. He had his knees drawn up, hugging them to his chest, and looked less like a knight than like a frightened child as he warily watched my approach.

“Hey,” I said, and the way he flinched from that easy familiarity told me, clearly, that he hadn’t had his real memories unlocked yet: this was still a version of Garm who expected me to be polite and biddable, unable to even consider being informal with a titled pureblood. Well, this was going to be fun for him.

I knelt next to Simon, putting a hand on his shoulder. He tried to cringe away from me and lean in my direction at the same time, which was a heartbreakingly impossible combination, and in the end had to settle for looking at me with sheer misery in his eyes. “Hey,” I said again. “Simon? You okay?”

“Not by any definition of the word,” he said, voice dull.

“Yeah. It’s a shock to the system, that’s for sure.”

“I allowed you to be treated as . . . as something less than your sister,” he said. “I was willing to lie with Amy, whom I have foresworn, in violation of my marriage vows, even if she did not choose to have me. I bowed before the woman I swore never to serve again, and while the tasks she set me in this world were less cruel than the ones she set me in ours, they were still bitter things, and I still did them willingly.”

“We were all enchanted,” I said. “And anything you think you remember doing more than four months ago didn’t actually happen. Thankfully. She didn’t change the past, she just . . . changed the way we remember it. So come on. Let’s go change it back.”

He frowned, slow and deep. “You should hate me,” he said.

“Yeah, maybe, but I don’t, so I guess that’s one more thing I’m not doing,” I said, and shrugged. “I really hate doing what I’m told when I don’t understand the reasons behind it, y’know?”

“You know, now that I can remember you more properly, I had missed your irreverence,” he said. “Manners and civility have never been your strongest suit.”

“Titania sure tried to make them my strong suit, but yeah,” I agreed, and smiled at him. “So what do you say, Dad? You going to come and help us kick Titania’s teeth in?”

Garm winced at the threat of physical violence toward the Summer Queen, but Simon smiled, somewhat cautiously. “I would be honored.” He took my hand, letting me pull him to his feet. Then he hesitated. “You still think of me like that?”

“I’m always going to wish my mortal father could have been a part of my life, but he wasn’t, even if that wasn’t his fault,” I said. “I remember a life where you raised me—and you didn’t do all that terrible a job, especially not when you consider how much Titania tried to convince you to do. She couldn’t make a world where you were actively abusive to children you considered your own. You were a pretty good dad. I think I’ll keep you.”

This time, there was nothing cautious about his smile. This time, it could have outshone the sun. He pulled his hand out of mine and embraced me, quickly, then asked, “Is the baby . . . ?”

Of course. Simon was one of the few people who’d actually known I was pregnant before everything went to hell. I nodded. “Baby’s fine,” I assured him. “I heal like it’s my job, and I guess that extends to keeping bad choices made while under a world-revising enchantment from completely destroying my life. Now let’s see what horrible thing the Luidaeg is doing.”

The horrible thing the Luidaeg was doing was picking the lock on the iron door with her daggered claws, working them into the keyhole and wiggling back and forth until she either heard a click or smoke started to rise from the lock and she pulled her claw free, showing char marks where it had been pressed against the iron. Eight of her ten claws were already scorched when we approached, and she was scowling as she wiggled her ninth claw in the lock.

August moved to my side, looking a little lost. Raysel was standing nearby, watching intently. I was half-afraid she was going to produce a set of lockpicks and ask if she could have a try. Dean leaned against the wall, eyes shut, four months of waiting having worn him into a resignation of waiting forever.

I looked at the Luidaeg’s hands and blinked, alarmed. “Luidaeg, are you—?”

“I’m fine,” she snapped. “This hurts like a fucking bitch and a half, but it’s nothing I can’t handle, and if you just shut up and let me—get—this!”

She made a triumphant sound as there was one final click and the door swung open, leaving her shaking her scorched and blistered hands as if she could brush the pain away. The talons didn’t transform back into fingers.

“We’re out,” she said. “Now we storm the castle with . . . no weapons, not enough fighters, and two people who still think this is the way the world is supposed to be. Isn’t this going to be fun?”

“No,” said Dean bluntly.

“I do some of my best work while dramatically underprepared,” I said. “Good job on the door.”

She was old enough that I wasn’t always sure the rules around saying “thank you” applied to her, and she had thanked me in the past. Even so, I didn’t want to push it by thanking her directly.