Page 98 of The Innocent Sleep

“Probably,” agreed the Luidaeg. “Taking Amandine wouldn’t hurt you enough. Neglectful parenting as a form of self-protection isn’t exactly a new one on me, but it’s one I could have happily gone another hundred years without seeing again.”

October had already moved on to her next question: “How do we stop her?”

The Luidaeg took a deep breath. “There are two ways to stop a Ride. If it hasn’t started yet, and you can grab her sacrifice and spirit them away, that should do it,” she said. “They’re supposed to receive seven years of paradise before they go to the Heart. Seven years where they get anything and everything they want handed to them without argument, because they’re doomed to die, and that makes them special, at least in the short term. She’d have to tear down her whole illusion and cast it again to give someone new seven years of paradise after she’s already tricked someone into remembering things that way.”

“Which just puts us right back where we started,” said Dean. He sounded as if he liked that plan as little as I did.

“Yeah, but the sacrifice would be out of immediate danger, and it wouldn’t be Halloween anymore: she’d have to keep the spell stable until Beltaine to have another shot at Riding,” said the Luidaeg. “And now the cats know what to do, and they can do it a lot faster. She can’t remove them from the equation entirely, not with the amount of Dad in them, and they’ll always get loose. Even if we have to replay this bullshit, we’d still have a chance.”

It took a genuine effort to keep my fangs from breaking through, and a greater one not to grab October and bolt. “You’re talking about my wife and child as if losing them would be a small thing,” I snarled.

The Luidaeg turned on me. “I never said that was the only option here, or the best one. But it is one way to stop a Ride, and there’s the possibility it could weaken Titania just long enough to give us time to try to find my mother or father, or to come up with another way to break the spell.”

“And if it doesn’t work out that way?” asked October. “Even if we stop the Ride now, Titania controls the spell. She’s going to remember everything that’s happened. There’s nothing to keep her from changing the rules, making it so the cats are seen as a deadly threat instead of a defeated enemy, or putting me somewhere Tybalt won’t be able to find me. Like Dean said, we’d be right back where we started.”

“Or much worse,” I said, voice dark. “As soon as you give birth, there’s nothing to stop her from taking our child. And by the time the next Ride comes . . .”

“Then there’s no other choice,” said October. “We have to break the Ride.” She focused on the Luidaeg. “How do we do it?”

I turned to October, silently pleading with her to see sense, for once. To resist the urge to be the hero who saved everyone at the expense of saving herself. I loved her as she was, had always loved her as she was, but just this once, I wanted her to stop and consider how who she was impacted everyone around her. How it impacted me. How she would be risking our child if she didn’t say no, not this time, this is a step too far you’re asking me to take; this time, I choose cowardice.

All I needed was for her to take the safe option, just this once. We could find another way. We could . . .

Her eyes cut away, glancing quickly to the side, and I knew that I had lost. “If we stop her sacrifice and she recasts the spell before we can stop her, it’s going to hurt,” she said, with no sign of hesitation. “But it’s the sort of hurt we can recover from, while her pulling this off sounds like the sort of thing we don’t recover from. We don’t give her time to start the Ride. If we can intervene early, we do it.”

I looked at her silently, not saying anything. After a moment, she looked away, clearly ashamed. Good. I understood why she was making this choice, but just this once, I needed her to put her family first.

The Luidaeg snorted. “Great, glad we’ve got that settled, then. Once the Ride begins, you break it by pulling the rider down and holding them as tightly as you can while she tries to use them against you. I don’t know if she’ll go the classic transformations route or what—Mom’s Ride is the only one that was ever successfully broken. She’s more likely to use illusions as a weapon than actual physical change.”

“Either way, this is going to suck, and either way, we grab that rider and we end this,” said October, grimly.

She began to move away from me, following the Luidaeg. I grabbed her arm before she could take more than a step, and she stopped, turning to look at me.

“There is no ‘we,’” I said, flatly. “Your grandmother was pregnant when she interceded with Maeve’s Ride, and she lost the baby for her efforts. You will be staying back, and allowing us to break this ritual.”

“She may not be able to stay back,” said the Luidaeg. “Remember when I took you to break my brother’s Ride? You had to have a connection to the rider in order to be allowed to intercede. Depending on who she has, October’s help may be necessary.”

“I certainly hope not,” I said. Had I been addressing anyone apart from the Luidaeg, I would have said considerably more.

We were approaching a building, blurred by the fog but still standing sturdy, with none of the disrepair I’d seen around the main knowe. The fog cleared as we came closer, revealing a large stable complex, built low, flanked by a barn and a large riding ring already occupied by roughly two dozen horses in a variety of solid colors, from black to white. Their tack was elaborate, braided gold and silver decorated with clusters of gemstone roses. One roan mare wore a bridle covered in living moths, their wings opening and closing as they fanned themselves. None of it was practical. All of it was beautiful.

October paused to look around at the lot of us, then walked straight toward the ring, not giving anyone a chance to object to her normal wrecking-ball approach to tactical planning. We followed her, lacking anything else to do, short of grabbing her and running. She led us around the ring to the open barn doors, where she stopped, looking inside.

We arrayed ourselves around her and did the same.

Inside, the stalls were empty, their doors standing as open as the barn’s. The center was occupied by Titania and her guard, their clothing as elaborate as the tack on their horses, making the final preparations for the Ride that was to come. It was almost anticlimactic, seeing Titania again after four months in her perfect world. She was still unspeakably beautiful, the kind of beauty that hurts the heart, rather than exalting it. Ropes of garnets in every shade, from pale honey to deep blood red, were braided in her iridescent white hair.

She lifted her head and smiled at us, clearly unsurprised by our arrival.

“Oh, good,” she said. “The guests of honor have arrived.”

There was a sudden flickering in the air around her, an unsteadiness that spoke of an illusion being woven but not yet fully cast. I grabbed October’s shoulder, pulling her a half-step back as I brought my lips to her ear and hissed, “Don’t trust her. Something here is not as it seems.”

“What?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said, my frustration painting my words in tones of dull despair. “It takes a moment to shake off an illusion when skillfully cast. I can’t be sure what part of this is false.”

“Reality is just a mirror throwing back one way that things might be,” said Titania. She stepped to the side, letting us all see her company.