Page 31 of A Killing Frost

I didn’t have to go far before something even more helpful than her voice reached me: the smell of blood. It was hot and thick, but not enough to become overwhelming—there was still blood inside her body, it wasn’t all out here with me. The phantom scents of cotton candy and ashes were wrapped around it, ghosts of the magic May carried in her blood.

If she was bleeding magic, she was hurt even worse than I’d been afraid she was.

“Toby?” Quentin sounded worried.

“Shh,” I replied, and kept walking forward, letting the smell of the blood guide me. The ground was fairly level; I didn’t trip or shove my foot into an unexpected hole. That was good, except for the part where it meant we still had no landmarks apart from the tree that had broken our fall.

The fingers of my left hand hit wood. I immediately grabbed hold, feeling around until I was certain it was a tree, smooth, with a fragile, papery bark that dissolved under my fingertips, turning into motes of dust too small for me to catch as they fell away. May was very close now. I could smell it.

Even so: “May? Where are you?”

“Right here,” she replied. Her voice was on roughly the level of mine. She might be in the tree, but she wasn’t that high off the ground. That was a relief. It would be easier to get her down if I didn’t have to climb in the dark.

I kept inching forward, feeling in front of me with both hands, and stopped when I hit the soft, yielding flesh of May’s hip. The fabric of her jeans was drenched with blood. It squelched between my fingers like unpleasantly warm jelly, but I couldn’t feel a wound. That wasn’t great.

From the angle of her body, it felt like she was hanging draped over something, but I couldn’t feel anything for her to be drapedon. It was a terrible mystery that I didn’t like at all. I ran my hands higher and froze when they hit wood. As in, the side of the huge, jagged branch that was sticking out of my sister’s stomach.

“May,” I said, fighting to keep my voice level and not alarming, “are youimpaledright now?”

“I think so,” she said, with a weak laugh. “I can’t move much, but it feels like that branch went right through me. I can feel my toes, so I guess it missed my spine. That’s good, right? That it missed my spine?”

“Yes, since we don’t know whether your nerves would regenerate from that sort of trauma, that’s a very good thing. Hold still.”

“I wasn’t planning on doing anything else right now,” said May dryly.

I kept feeling around the branch, trying to establish the diameter of the wound. It was at least a foot around, occupying most of the space that should have been her abdomen. Not great. Even worse, I didn’t know how we were going to get it out of her. I had a single silver knife, and even though the blade had been magically hardened to allow me to slice through most things short of metal or stone, it didn’t have a serrated edge; if I tried to saw through this branch, we’d be here long after Quentin had died of hunger. May didn’t have any weapons.

That left... “Quentin! Do you have your short sword with you?”

“You came to get me while I was on a date. Do you normally bring weapons on your dates?”

“I bring weapons everywhere. Tybalt wouldn’t know what to do with me if I didn’t.”

Quentin made a soft scoffing noise that I could only interpret as “adults are weird.” “No, I don’t have my short sword with me. Orany other kind of sword. I am sword-free. Why? What’s going on?” His tone turned suspicious on the last question, thus proving that he was a smart kid.

“Nothing you need to worry about,” I shot back. “May, I need you to keep breathing while I take care of things, all right? There’s nothing for you to worry about, either.”

“I have a branch sticking out of where I’m pretty sure my liver is supposed to be,” she said. “This is really more your kind of thing, and you didn’t do this before I was created, so I don’t have any memory of how to handle this kind of bullshit.”

“A branch sticking out of herwhere?” demanded Quentin.

I swallowed a sigh. “I’m handling it! Just stay where you are and let me work, okay?”

“Okay,” said Quentin, sounding uncertain.

I reached further up, finding May’s shoulder, and gave her what I hoped was a reassuring pat. “It’s going to be fine. I promise you, it’s going to be fine.”

“I don’t think you get to make promises right now,” she said.

“Like that’s ever stopped me.”

All my magic centers on blood. Well, there was plenty of blood around, and I had my knife if I needed some of it to be mine for whatever I was going to achieve. There was no way this little pocket of nothingness happened naturally—or even what passes for naturally in Faerie, where the rules are sometimes more flexible than they would be in the human world. I could tell even without exerting myself that we were standing in something created.

What I couldn’t tell just yet was whether it was the bubble Simon had created to contain Luna and Raysel or something else. I wasn’t sure that part mattered. If this was his handiwork, it would mean Spike had opened the door for a reason, I supposed. But it was so hard to say.

One of the other gifts of the Dóchas Sidhe is breaking things. I don’t do it nearly as often as my reputation implies and it’s not like I’ve had any real training, since that would require my mother to acknowledge that I understand my own magic well enough to use it, but I can do it. Give me a spell I don’t like, and I can probably pick it apart, given sufficient time.

The tree was a part of the black void around us, which, if it had been magically created as I suspected, meant it was part of a large, complicated spell. When Simon had described making somethinglike this, he’d called it forcing magic into the membrane between worlds. If I unraveled too much and popped the bubble, we could wind up exposed and unprotected in that membrane.

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