Page 60 of A Divided Duty

“Traumatized-teen slumber party,” she said shortly. “Chelsea’s here, along with Quentin and Dean. Raj keeps popping in and out as his duties allow. Dean’s threatening to call Diva.”

“Wow, a full house,” I said, trying to keep my tone light. “How’s Miranda taking it?”

“She’s mostly been sleeping. She wakes up periodically to fuss for food or a change, but she’s still enough of a potato that this isn’t totally upsetting her. It’ll be a different story in six months. Dean keeps trying to make off with her. He doesn’t get enough time with his new baby sisters, and he wants to practice holding a real baby while he has the opportunity.”

“All right, that sounds adorable,” I said. “We’ll be home as soon as we can, I promise. But we can’t go anywhere until Acacia wakes up.”

“I want to help.”

“You said Chelsea’s there. Can you call her father and ask whether anyone in the knowe was asking questions about Raysel recently? When she was coming back, what she was doing, anything like that? Luna wasn’t exactly subtle about expecting Raysel to be coming back to Shadowed Hills soon, but that doesn’t mean everyone in the duchy is going to be a suspect.”

Root and branch, please, let everyone in the duchy not be a suspect. The thought of trying to talk to that many people was enough to give me hives.

“I can do that,” said May, and she sounded relieved enough by the idea of having something to do that I almost felt bad.

Only almost. “If you need to go somewhere, I trust Dean to babysit,” I said. “If he’s free to stay. If he’s not, call the Luidaeg.”

As Miranda’s godmother, we could ask her for babysitting without winding up deeper in her debt. That was a small wrinkle of the situation that I hadn’t initially considered, but was now endlessly grateful for. The list of people I’d actually trust with my baby was phenomenally short.

“I think I’d need to physically remove him from the house, and I don’t have anywhere else to be,” she said. “I’m fine staying with her, but you’re going to owe me a really nice spa day when you finish running all over hell’s half-acre looking for answers, got it?”

“I got it,” I said, deeply relieved. “I owe you one.”

“Sister mine, by this point, you owe me so many that you should be grateful I’m not charging you interest,” she said. “Get home soon and safe, okay? I am not explaining to your kid how Mommy and Daddy couldn’t stop messing around with the Firstborn and got themselves sucked into some sort of messed-up shadow realm for a thousand years.”

“Even if you don’t trust me, believe that Tybalt is smarter than that, okay?”

“Yeah, sure,” she said, and hung up in a gale of raucous laughter.

I dropped the phone back into my pocket, turning to Tybalt. “We owe May a spa day,” I said.

“Noted,” he affirmed.

“But she knows we’ll be a while, and she says she’s fine with it, which means we can keep looking for information.”

“We’re stuck here. We’d be doing that anyway.”

“Yeah, but now we don’t have to feel bad about it.” I shot him what I hoped would qualify as a winning smile. “Come on. You get annoyed when I go to work without you. Now you get to go to work with me.”

“This is not what I meant when I said I preferred you avoid dangerous situations on your own,” he said. “I mostly meant that I would prefer you avoid dangerous situations.”

“Sure, but where’s the fun in that? Come on.”

Out of deference to his trauma, I didn’t turn back toward the bonfire, but started toward the main source of my own trauma: the stables. While fae children would eventually have their minds erased and replaced by the psyche of one of Michael’s Riders, human children would be transformed into horses. It was a horrific process, and twice as terrifying, since the humans who endured it had no idea what was happening to them.

Of all Michael’s cruelties, the stables might be the worst of them, and the most extreme. The memory of what Quentin’s human girlfriend had become by the time I’d freed her would haunt me for the rest of my life.

The stables were still as I remembered them, crumbling and draped in clinging briars, their thorns providing all the security the structure was ever likely to need. A single Rider was there when we approached, still wearing their armor as they ran a curry comb along the side of a speckled gray mare.

The horse had probably been human once, but there was nothing to indicate that in her stance, or in the languid way she flicked an ear at the sound of our approach, continuing to stand placidly as she was groomed. The Rider looked up, brush stilling, eyes a flash of brown through the slit in their helm. We paused where we were, giving them a chance to retreat if they chose.

Instead, they went back to brushing their horse, and we resumed our approach.

Once we were only a few feet away, the Rider spoke, in a voice like stones rattling down the side of a hill: “Hello to our Lady’s guests.”

“Um, hi,” I said. “Do you … remember me?”

“It would be difficult for any among our number not to, given that you were the ending of our Lord, and hence the ending of all Rides,” said the Rider. “Yes, I remember you. Your companion I remember as well, for I have seen him before, at a distance.”