Page 32 of A Killing Frost

Given how hostile the roads that travel through the membrane can be, I was pretty sure we didn’t want to be standing in it by ourselves. I was going to have to be more careful than I’d ever been before. More careful than came naturally if I was being honest. I drew my knife.

The whisper-soft sound of it leaving the sheath was enough to make May tense under my other hand and demand, “What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to help,” I said, taking my hand off her shoulder and bringing it around to the edge of my blade. Carefully, carefully, I drew the knife along the tip of my index finger, splitting the skin in a single sharp line of pain. It was already dark. I closed my eyes anyway, sticking my finger into my mouth. This was something that didn’t require vision and would go easier if I wasn’t being confused by the signals I was—or wasn’t—getting from my eyes.

Everyone has a distinct scent to their magic, something they’re born with, and that matures and changes with them as they get older. Sometimes it can transform entirely, as with Raysel after I changed her blood, or with Simon as he’d shrugged off Evening’s influence. His magic had shifted back to its corrupted state as soon as the Luidaeg had taken his way home. But what I didn’t realize until fairly recently is that magic also has an appearance.

It makes sense—I have to see something if I want to take it apart in the most efficient way I can—but it was still a shock the first time Isawa spell. I held onto that memory as blood filled my mouth and the coppery taste of it settled on my molars. I needed to see this one.

Like a ripple spreading from a stone dropped into a still pond, the unseen space around me began lighting up with gray-and-orange lines, twisted and knotted together like the most ambitious macramé project anyone had ever undertaken. Orange and gray. I breathed in through my nose, looking for the scent of the spell. Smoke and rotten oranges. I was right. This was Simon’s handiwork, and if it wasn’t where he’d been keeping Luna and Rayseline, it was a trial run for the same spell.

Good. I was at least familiar with his magic. I turned my head, eyes still closed, until the spell-strands spreading out in front of meincluded the jagged, broken-off shape of a massive tree limb. May must have hit the willow precisely wrong when she fell, snapping it off in the impact and then tumbling to land on top of it before she could hit the ground.

Its strands were connected to the landscape around us in places but were closer to standing on their own than many of the others. This was a decorative feature, not a part of the foundation. That was good. It was a start. As gingerly as I could, I reached out and hooked my fingers into the surface tangle of the spell.

It was malleable enough that I could work my way inside. I kept breathing, kept reaching, even as the scent of smoke and rotten oranges began wafting through the air. Bit by bit, I yanked the threads out of the branch holding my Fetch in place, unmaking the magic that comprised it.

I couldn’t see her with my eyes closed, since she wasn’t a spell, and so it was a bit of a surprise when there was a thump and a yelp. I opened my eyes. The lines winked out, leaving me back in absolute darkness. “May? May, are you all right?”

“I’m right here,” she said, from ground-level. “You sort of took my chair away.” There was a pained laugh in her voice. She was still trying to see the bright side.

And I was still trying to seeher. I blinked and realized I could make out a faint outline through the darkness, which was impossible; I hadn’t been able to see my own hand in front of my face only seconds before. It was like being in a cave so deep that your brain started playing tricks.

Only this wasn’t a trick. I blinked again, and she became even clearer. I turned and looked over my shoulder; Quentin was about eight feet behind me. No details yet, but I could see the outline of his body clearly enough to know where he was.

“Is it just me, or is it getting lighter in here?” I asked, doing my best to keep my voice from shaking.

“It’s getting lighter,” said Quentin. “I can see you. What did you do?”

“Okay,” I said. “That’s maybe not such a good thing. I broke part of the spell making this place in order to get May free, but if I broke too much of it, it might all fall apart, and we could be left floating in the space between the mortal world and the Summerlands.”

“Oh,” said Quentin, with dawning horror. “Oh, I don’t like the sound of that. I don’t like the sound of that atall.”

“Neither do I, so let’s hope that’s not what I just did.” I turned back to May, who hadn’t moved since she hit the ground.

Now that I could see her, I was glad I hadn’t been able to see her before. Her abdomen was a ruin, a hole punched through skin and muscle alike and most of her organs either shredded or missing. Her eyes were closed, but her chest rose and fell in shallow jerks, even though she should by all rights have been dead at this point.Iwould have been dead by this point. Still healing, sure, but absolutely dead.

“May, hey.” I knelt next to her, reaching down to smooth her blood-matted hair away from her face. “Honey, I need you to wake up for me now. Things are getting sort of complicated, and we need to leave.”

Now that the lights were coming up, I could see more and more of our surroundings, and Raysel’s description of the place as formless void was beginning to make sense. The only landmark I could see was the willow tree, which we had landed on through pure dumb luck.

Despite the damage it had done to May, I was grateful for the willow. Quentin could have died if we’d hit the ground without something to break our fall. Even as the thought formed, the willow shimmered, dancing in soap bubble rainbows, and popped just as abruptly, vanishing from the landscape like it had never been there. I blinked.

Quentin stepped up behind me, Spike cradled in his arms. “Did you do that?” he asked, a note of strained terror in his voice.

“I did not, no,” I said, as calmly as I could.

“So the spell is continuing to unravel?”

“I don’t think so, actually. I think that was a part of the spell.” Luna and Raysel had survived in here foryearswithout seeing another soul—not even Simon. But they were both ordinary fae, and they could be killed. Something must have kept them alive. “Hold on. I want to check something.”

I closed my eyes and bit the inside of my cheek hard enough to draw blood, only wincing a little from the jagged grind of molars against flesh. Then I swallowed, letting the blood light up the space behind my eyes where my magic lived. My head throbbed again,still angry from the earlier shift in my humanity. I did my best to set the pain aside. If May could stay conscious and talking with a branch sticking out of her gut, I could handle a headache.

The spell blossomed back into view, a web of gray-and-orange lines that somehow tasted of rotten oranges. The place where I’d unraveled the branch was a scar in the otherwise relatively even weave, but none of the strands looked torn, and nothing seemed to be unraveling; I’d turned the lights on, but I hadn’t broken reality. I didn’t think. We’d find out soon enough if we didn’t get moving.

This was all surface level. I sank deeper into the spell, treating it like a blood memory, something to be ridden, studied, and learned from. Below the surface, the lines grew tighter, more closely interwoven; if the branch had been down here, it would have been impossible to remove it without shattering the spell itself. That was useful to know—or to assume, anyway. I really had no idea what I was doing.

That’s never stopped me before. I bit the inside of my cheek again and used the fresh burst of blood to sink even deeper into the spell. And there, cradled inside the nest of snarls and lines and twisted threads, I found the thing I’d been looking for. It was delicate even when compared to everything around it; I couldn’t have touched it without breaking it. So I didn’t.

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