Page 14 of The Innocent Sleep

“I offered you blood,” she said, mildly. “Isn’t that enough?”

“It never has been before.” A figure separated from the greater darkness, moving closer to Amphitrite’s light. It looked like her in silhouette, sharing her shape and size. It swam toward us, stopping before the light could reveal any proper details of its form. “We’re hungry, Auntie.”

“No wars in these waters, no wars for ages.”

“Would there be a war, do you think, if we gulped down the one who claims dominion? Would her holdings fall into chaos as her heirs fought to claim the throne? Nothing like a regicide to inspire a little healthy bloodshed.”

“Delicious bloodshed . . .”

“War is coming,” said Amphitrite. “Titania has seen to that. She can’t turn away from what she’s done, and the seas will soon enough run red, you have my word of that. We’re here because we need your help.”

“Help? Us?” The figure leaned closer, face moving into the sphere of Amphitrite’s light. I fought back the urge to recoil.

It was made of eels. Dark gray, slick, limbless eels, their bodies pulsing as they writhed within the confines of their current shape. They leaned in until the face they had formed was only inches from Amphitrite’s, then burst apart, scattering in all directions, back into the pulsing dark around us.

We were surrounded.

“We don’t help.”

“We harm. We do that very, very well.”

“Shall we harm you, Auntie?”

“The shadows open for you,” she said, as if they hadn’t said anything, as if their words contained no threat. “Here where the dark of Faerie is deepest, where the remains of the Abyssal Road once fell, the Shadow Roads still open.”

“We don’t like them.”

“No water there. No air.”

“Passage is hard.”

“But you use them all the same, when something falls in the waters of your kin. Because of the Shadow Roads, every abyss is the same abyss for you, and you can always find a morning meal. You can open and access them.”

“So?”

“So?”

“So the visitor you noted, the one who is not a sacrifice, is a King among the Cait Sidhe of the land above. The cats run the shadows as well as you do, and their presence keeps those roads open even in the brighter places. He’s here because Titania has ensnared the world again, making things wrong, and sundering him from his family. He’s trying to get home. Can he use your entry to the Shadow Roads? Down here, where the connection is strong, and he can make the journey without being lost?”

“A King?”

“A King of Cats?”

“Which one?”

That last question carried a dangerous, familiar note. I straightened in the water, pulling myself up as if I were to face every noble of the land who had ever questioned my right to place or to title.

“Tybalt, King of Dreaming Cats,” I said, and was pleased when my voice came out clear and steady. Water magic still wasn’t familiar to me—might never be—but at least it was willing to work a little in my favor.

“Not always, though,” said the whispers in the dark. “From far away, once.”

“I was originally of the Court of Fogbound Cats,” I said. “After, I served other places, but the farthest was fair Londinium, where I began my journeys.”

“I remember you,” whispered the dark.

I glanced at Dianda, at what I could see of her outline. She squeezed my hand, encouraging. “Do you?”

“They took me in the night; they threw my body to the sea. The Almere had me, for all that I had been of their jurisdiction for only a short time, and then only in a thief’s weeds. They carried me below, and they kept me so.”