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“I didn’t sleep well, but I’m fine. I’m a bit concerned about Lord Rogue—have you seen him?”
“Oh no, but I don’t expect to. I wouldn’t worry about that one. He comes and goes as he likes. He’ll no doubt turn up this evening, as is his habit.”
I was beginning to feel like the distressed spouse who has to wait twenty-four hours before filing a missing-persons report. They were all correct that none of this was out of Rogue’s usual pattern of behavior. Only the nagging sense of wrongness led me to think otherwise. That and the ugly coil of knotted memory loss that lurked beneath my thoughts, a bad taste at the back of my throat.
The afternoon stretched out in a glorious golden haze, Faerie at its cliché best. The sky arched in perfect crisp blue, the apples shining bright, piled into baskets. Music played and everyone, fae and human alike, sang as they picked.
No one ate the fruit, of course. They had a slightly dead feel in my hands, though nowhere near the null-existence of the dragon-related items.
As evening closed in, bonfires sprang to life and people crowded around, pressing mugs of warm cider into my hands—presumably not made from the poisonous variety of apple—and loaded their plates from the tables piled high with food. I refrained from drinking the cider all the same. Call me paranoid. I refused offers to dance too, holding vigil at the edge of the festivities, searching the dark for a glint of amber eyes, perhaps.
No sign of the Dog. Or Rogue.
I alternated between the hollow certainty that he had abandoned me for some arcane reason and the deeper alarm that his absence had a more sinister implication. After all, the day was drawing to a close and he had not given me a lesson nor a kiss. What would happen if he failed to meet his bargains with me? Worse, what if Falcon called us in to do our promised service and I was unable to produce Rogue? The worry ate at me, a looming thunderhead of dread with flickers of panic lighting the edges.
Time seemed to accelerate. The dancing around the bonfire became frenetic, a video played on fast-forward. People whirled, human and fae, in a strobe pattern of phantasmagoric glee. Once, I thought I saw Liam across the crowd, staring at me sitting alone at my table. But when the dancers parted again, he had disappeared from view.
For my part, I waited. It wasn’t like I could go walk the woods, calling for a lost pet. If midnight came and went, then Rogue would have violated two promises to me—something I felt sure he’d never do willingly. I only had to wait to find out. Midnight.
I reached for Darling and he popped out of the swirl of bodies and leaped, graceful as thistledown onto my table. For once he didn’t tease, simply rubbed his head under my chin and inserted the image of fifty-three topazes into my head. His way of communicating fifty-three minutes to me. Less than an hour left, by my handy kitty clock.
He stayed with me, sitting in Egyptian cat pose, a sphinx overseeing the increasingly wild festivities. Thanks to his magic, the revelries continued without pause, one dance blending into the next with full abandon. No one tired. None of the ladies kicked off their uncomfortable high heels—neither did the gentlemen for that matter. Even Blackbird whirled past, her ample white bosom pushed into high curves by a tight corset, her dark glossy hair swinging free nearly to her ankles.
Darling sat up when the moment arrived, wrapping his tail around my arm.
Midnight.
And nothing.
I half expected a tolling bell in the distance, the lonely clang of the clock tower warning that the witching hour had commenced. It would fit the dread gathering in my chest.
But the frenzied music only played louder, with no pause, no mass-mind acknowledgment of a vow broken.
Somewhere, deep inside, that connection to Rogue, the something that breathed blue-black wild magic through me, shifted. It didn’t quite go away, but it thinned, moved farther away. My earlobes tingled as the earrings swayed. I reached up, but they didn’t come off in my fingers as I’d thought they might. It seemed they would be permanently attached until, and if, Rogue ever returned.
I should have kicked myself for not making him take them off before we fell asleep, but perversely, I was glad for them. I closed my eyes against the wild harvest party and sent a message to Rogue, wherever he might be. Not vocalized. Just a feeling. A vow.
I was coming after him.
Part III
Recalibrating
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Chapter 14
In Which I Am Treated as a FragileVessel
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The residue of memory removal feels less like a locked door or vacant space and more as if that place in the mind is connected to a wormhole that pulls it away to another place entirely. And I can’t believe I just wrote that down as anobservation.
~Big Book of Fairyland, “MemoryInterferenceInconsistency”
In the morning,there was much marshaling of the entourage, now exponentially multiplied by the addition of Blackbird and all the things she seemed to feel we had been doing without and shouldn’t be.
I found her, to tell her Rogue had never returned, but stopped midsentence at the grave sympathy in her eyes.
