Page 25 of A Killing Frost

I stared at him. “You can’t be serious.”

“Oh,” said the man I once trusted more than anyone else in Faerie. “But I assure you, I am.”

SEVEN

“WHILE SHE SLEEPS,her blood is closed to me,” he said, wading into the roses around the coffin. They retracted at his approach, thorns twisting away from his skin. The worst of it was that I couldn’t say whether that was proof Luna still loved him enough to want him unharmed, or proof that she no longer wanted anything to do with him, not even as nourishment for her roses.

Roses thrive surprisingly well on blood. I guess that’s why they’re such a foundational part of Faerie.

“I need to know she doesn’t blame us for what’s happened to her,” he continued, laying a hand flat against the top pane of Raysel’s coffin. It shimmered, seeming to shiver like the door that had allowed us to enter this room in the first place. Then the surface of the coffin swung open, exposing her to the rest of the room.

Glass coffins may be cliché, but at least this one meant she wasn’t dusty, as so many elf-shot sleepers tend to be. She looked as fresh and peaceful as someone who was just taking a nap, the very picture of pureblood health. It hurt to look at her.

“What if she does?” I asked. “Blame you, I mean. Will that mean you refuse to let us speak to Luna?”

He gave me a look of infinite pity and equally infinite sorrow. In that moment, I remembered that we had one more thing in common: neither of us had been allowed to raise our own daughters. Simon had taken them away, returning them to us as women who didn’t understand us and didn’t seem to want to. In my case, I wasthe one he’d stolen from home, while in Sylvester’s case, Raysel had been the victim, but the parallel was there.

“If you tell me the truth, I’ll let you talk to my wife,” he said. “I’ve never asked you to lie for me.”

You’ve never done a lot of things you’ve been doing recently,I thought, and took a step forward. “All right,” I said. “But you know she’ll have to bleed for me if I’m going to talk to her while she’s sleeping, right? And you know I haven’t really done this before.”

Normal blood magic involves sampling a person’s blood to get to the memories contained there. It can be difficult and traumatic for everyone involved—the blood-worker because they can’t always control the memories they get, and the one who does the bleeding because the more they try not to think about something, the more likely that thing is to show up in the blood. Don’t think about elephants, in other words.

What Sylvester wanted was stranger and more difficult, and honestly, not something I was sure I was capable of, although I was willing to try. When I changed the balance of someone’s blood, giving them the Choice, the process manifested as a sort of dreamscape, myself and the person standing in a landscape shaped from their own blood, able to converse.

I’d never done it without blood to change before, and Rayseline had nothing left to shift. Everything she was belonged to the Daoine Sidhe now, and I couldn’t give back what I’d taken from her even if I’d wanted to. What was lost was lost forever.

“You’ll do your best,” he said. “I believe in you.”

That made one of us. I approached the coffin, gazing at Raysel’s familiar, unfamiliar face, and wished there were a way I could ask for her permission before invading her privacy one more time. She deserved to be left to recover in her own way. Which was never going to happen if her parents didn’t let her wake up.

I started to draw the knife belted at my hip, and then hesitated. Luna was watching through the roses. Even if she wanted this—which she clearly did—stabbing her daughter in front of her probably wasn’t the best way to convince her to help me. I turned to the nearest cluster of roses. Sylvester already knew Raysel had to bleed for me. I needed Luna, through the proxy of her roses, to consent.

“I need her to bleed if I’m going to do this,” I said, reaching into the coffin and lifting one pale, limp hand with my own. The sleeve of her velvet gown fell back as I pulled her arm almost straight,revealing the creamy skin of her inner elbow. “Can I borrow your thorns?”

There: make her a part of the process, even if she wasn’t here to actively help me. A long rose vine, devoid of blossoms but bristling with thorns, uncurled and swung toward me, hanging, serpentine, in the air. I nodded. “I appreciate it,” I said, and reached for the vine.

It twisted in my loose grasp, driving thorns into my palm and fingers. The pain made me gasp, but I didn’t let go, only looked reproachfully at the same cluster of roses.

“That wasn’t necessary,” I said. “I’m just doing what I was asked. I’m trying to help.”

The vine didn’t twist again as I tugged it toward Raysel’s arm. The punctures in my hand were already healing, leaving my skin sticky with blood but otherwise unmarred. I don’t like a lot of the magic tricks I inherited from Mom. The rapid healing is an exception.

Careful not to cut too deeply, I pressed the vine against the skin of Raysel’s wrist, pressing until the thorns broke the skin and blood welled to the surface. Behind me, Sylvester made a wordless sound of protest. I looked over my shoulder at him, one eyebrow lifted.

“Yes?” I asked. Maybe that was a little curt of me, but nothing that had happened since we’d entered this room left me feeling charitable.

“Nothing,” he said. “Continue.”

“I will,” I said. “Normally, if I were trying to talk to someone who can’t talk back, I’d be changing their blood or at least trying, and that pulls on my power. There’s nothing left in Rayseline for me to change. She’s going to have to do some of the heavy lifting.” I didn’t know how I knew that; I just did. It’s not like my mother ever gave me any lessons on our particular brand of blood magic. Everything I know how to do, I’ve figured out through trial and error. Occasionally massive error. It’s fun and not at all terrifying to figure out an entire school of magic on my own. Really.

Turning back to Raysel, I pulled the vine away from her arm and ducked my head, bringing my mouth to the breaks in her skin. Her blood was salty and sweet at once, and between one blink and the next, the room was gone, replaced by the red veil of blood memory descending over everything.

No, I thought, keeping myself forcibly separate from the memories threatening to rise up and overwhelm me.That’s not why I’m here. She gets to keep her privacy.

I could feel my body, but distantly, like it was on the other side of a thick wall of fog. I fumbled at my hip until I found my knife, then brought it to my other hand in a quick slashing motion, laying my palm open. As was so often the case, I cut too deep, stopping when I felt the blade strike bone. There was no pain. My body was too far away, even as I raised my hand to my mouth and drank deeply of my own blood.

It mixed with Rayseline’s in a cloying flood, and the world finished the process of dropping away. It took the haze with it; I blinked, and there was nothing remotely red about the shadow-struck wood in which I found myself. Not even—or maybe especially not—roses. I was surrounded by dark trees, their trunks streaked in bands of charcoal and their leaves a green so deep that it seemed virtually black. The ground was carpeted in tiny white flowers, gleaming like stars against their surroundings, but there was no other color to be found.

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