Page 40 of A Killing Frost

Onlymy skin. Neither May nor Quentin made a sound. Interesting. He was trying to do as little harm as possible.

It was hard to give him much credit for that under the circumstances. I winced as the thorns ripped into me, ripping holes in my tank top and bringing blood bubbling to the surface of my skin almost everywhere. I coughed, forcing myself not to struggle, and met his eyes as I said, “You don’t have long. I heal fast. Drink. See what you need to see, believe me, and let me take you home.”

That last word made him wince, as if on some level he knew and understood what he had allowed the Luidaeg to do to him. But he reached into the briars around me with his free hand and grasped my wrist, pulling it through a gap in the thorns and closing his lips around my thumb.

There was a brief jolt of magic in the air, smoke and rotten oranges and a hint of spice, like the mulled cider and sweet smoke scent that was his by right was trying to reassert itself. It was quickly washed away by the scent of blood, and a narrow ribbon of my own cut grass and copper. It did at least still smell somewhat like metal, and not entirely like a slaughterhouse. That was enough to let me relax a little.

Not completely. He was drinking my blood and with it my memories, and there’s no way to control what a blood-worker sees when they ride the blood—at least not any way I know of; Eira has demonstrated the skill to edit her blood memories in a way I would have sworn was impossible. For all I know, I could do that also, if someone trained me. But I know that thinking too hard about the things you don’t want someone to see can cause them to rise to the surface and become the focus of the memory. So I didn’t think about all the complicated reasons I had for reaching out to Simon, or how horrified I was by this assault, or how much I hated Evening. I thought about Patrick instead. Frustrating, glorious Patrick, and his disastrous danger of a wife.

If someone had told me a couple of years ago that a mermaid and a man who thought marrying a mermaid was a good idea would be two of my most trusted allies, I would have laughed in their face. But however mad I was at them, the Lordens were good people. Confusing, sure, and subject to a set of laws that was just different enough from the laws I had to follow that we didn’t always align, but good.

I thought about Dean and Peter, and about the pixies in the swamp between my mother’s tower and the Luidaeg’s back door. I thought about Poppy—and maybe that was my mistake. Poppy was a member of the pixie colony Simon protected on Patrick’s behalf when Patrick married Dianda and moved under the sea. She isn’t anymore, because she gave up her pixiehood for Simon’s sake, to save him. She’s Aes Sidhe now, one of only two that I know of in the entire world.

Simon pulled my thumb out of his mouth, blood crusting around his lips, and stared at me, honey-colored eyes gone wide and disbelieving. “Poppy?” he breathed. “You let her hurt herself to save me?”

“She seems happy,” I said. “The Luidaeg is teaching her things. I don’t know exactly what things, because I’m not the Luidaeg’sapprentice, but Poppy’s safe and taken care of, and figuring out how to move in the world of larger fae.”

Simon shook his head. “You should have stopped her.”

I blinked. “Yeah, no, I needed you awake, and she’s a big girl. Bigger now than she was then, sure, but either way, she had the right to make her own choices. Wait—does this mean you remember?”

“Remember, no; none of what I saw in your blood is a memory to me, and I don’t feel them as memories,” he said, before reaching up to wipe his mouth self-consciously with one hand. “But it was a memory to you, and as I know of no method through which you could manipulate your own memory, either you speak truly, or you are the most cunning trap that has ever been set to capture me. If the latter proves true, I would like to know, for my own sake and for the sake of my lady, who has the skill to do such things with blood.”

“So you’ll come with us, and not threaten to elf-shoot anyone?” I asked, trying to mask my eagerness. We had a cure for elf-shot, but given the strength of what he’d supposedly brewed, I didn’t want to test it.

“I suppose I must, if I want to know the truth of the matter,” said Simon. He stepped back, expression turning wistful. “Even if your memories lie, I believe you’re speaking truly when you tell me Patrick is... when you say the man I knew survived the earthquake. Your memory could have been modified and gilded like the proverbial lily. No one could have made a vision of him intimate enough to fool me. Of all the people in this world, I would always know him.”

I wanted to ask what else he’d seen, if he knew now what we were and what we had been to one another, if he could see my mother in my face. I didn’t. Getting him to come with us was miracle enough for right now, and I didn’t want to push us too close to bringing him home.

He snapped his fingers. The vines uncoiled from around all three of us and pulled back into the ground, leaving us free to stand on our own feet. My wounds were already healed. My shirt was still ruined.

“You have my word that this is not some sort of trick to leave your lady unguarded, and since right now, you have my blood,” I gestured toward the red streaks on the back of his hand, “you know I’m not lying to you.”

“I do,” he said. “And I had hoped you wouldn’t notice that.”

“I’ve learned to pay really close attention to where my blood is going. Self-preservation,” I said. I looked down at my feet. “Spike, can you get us out of here?”

The rose goblin rattled assent and trotted deeper into the forest, presumably to a place where the Rose Road would open. Simon watched it go.

“That is one of Luna’s goblins, is it not?” he asked.

“No, it’s mine,” I said. “But it was hers, before I named it. I didn’t realize when I did that rose goblins took names as a claim of ownership.” The longer I spent with Spike, the less comfortable that made me. It was intelligent enough to understand me when I spoke to it, making it at least as smart as a mortal dog, and it had access to some reasonably impressive magic tricks. Was it really right for it to beowned, by anyone?

But it had chosen me of its own free will, and I had little doubt that if it wanted to go back to Shadowed Hills on a permanent basis, it would. I was just where it wanted to be right now.

Sometimes being where you want to be is the most important thing of all.

May pushed away from her tree, and Quentin fell into step behind me as Simon and I started to walk, following the rose goblin into the gloom, leaving the slumbering form of Eira Rosynhwyr behind.

ELEVEN

CONVENIENTLY ENOUGH,Spike’s door back onto the Rose Roads had been tucked away in a grove overrun by roses, their flowers blooming broad and bright and perfuming the air with a scent almost identical to Evening’s magic. Simon had paused to pluck one of them and tuck it into the pocket of his shirt, a wistful look on his face. He was still her creature. He might be willing to come with us and hear what we had to say, but he was hers, because he didn’t remember how to be anything else, and we couldn’t afford to forget that.

The new stretch of Road was carpeted in white-and-yellow roses, their petals ranging from pale cream to a shocking sunset orange so bright it probably glowed in the dark. Their perfume was brighter and fresher than the roses along the last stretch had been, and while it was still cloying, it was oddly easier for me to breathe.

“Did you really ride Dianda down a hill?” asked Simon abruptly. When I nodded, he chuckled, and said, “I would have liked to have seen that. Your memory of the moment is of necessity less impressive than actually watching you ride a shrieking mermaid into the Bay.”

“She didn’t enjoy it very much, no,” I said, trying to keep my tone neutral. He’d taken my blood by force, and I had no way of knowing what all he’d seen in my memory. I needed to be cautious with him. He was still under the Luidaeg’s spell, and I didn’t fully know whatthathad done, either. He hadn’t just lost his way home:he was still losing it, over and over, forever. If he started to truly believe that I was leading him to safety, he could forget everything that had happened in an instant, turning on us without remorse.

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