Page 42 of A Killing Frost

“Spike, get us out of here,” I said wearily. The rose goblin chirped and took off at a run. I followed more slowly, trusting it to wait when it reached whatever exit was going to take us home. We wouldn’t be able to access the Rose Roads again without a Blodynbryd’s help, but I could go to Portland and ask Ceres if I had to. Not that it mattered. Simon wasn’t at the other end of the Rose Road anymore. He was loose in the world, ready to wreak havoc on behalf of his sleeping lady, and he had my squire.

More, and maybe more immediately pressing, he knew Patrick Lorden was alive, and there was a chance that in his desperate fumbling for connection, for anything that would make him feel like home was an achievable goal, he’d go looking for his old friend. I needed to warn Patrick and Dianda. This whole fool’s errand was their fault, but that didn’t mean they deserved to be menaced by a frantic Daoine Sidhe who’d already demonstrated that he wasn’t above abduction and assault.

“I really messed this one up, huh, May?” I asked my sleeping Fetch. As expected, she didn’t reply, just hung peacefully in my arms. Most of the time, it wasn’t upsetting to look at her and see my own face—I’d had plenty of time to come to terms with the fact that she looked like the woman I used to be. Now, with her fully relaxed into slumber and a smear of blood down one cheek, it was unnervingly like I was carrying my own past self toward an unknown future.

But that’s what we’re all doing every day, isn’t it? We carry ourselves forward through time, with no possible way of knowing what’s on the other end. We have to keep going, because standing still isn’t an option. It never has been. That’s where people like my mother and Eira get it wrong: they think if they stomp their feet and hold their breath, they can keep the world from changing. And it doesn’t work that way. It never has.

Spike had stopped just up ahead, waiting for me to catch up. It looked at me and rattled its thorns, giving an inquisitive chirp. I hesitated.

“We don’t want to go back to Shadowed Hills if we can help it,not with me exiled and everything. I guess we can figure out a way to pick up the car later. Can you put us out in Berkeley? Is that possible?”

Spike looked at me witheringly, like I was a fool for asking, and rattled its thorns again.

“Oh, right, the Berkeley Rose Gardens,” I said. I would have slapped my forehead if my arms hadn’t been full of May. “All right, put us out there, and I’ll carry May to campus.”

And hopefully I could cast a decent illusion with May in my arms, and we wouldn’t get busted by the local police for being the victims of a clearly violent assault. I don’t have the best relationship with the Bay Area police departments—pretty much any of them. Not only am I a private investigator, which means our paths have occasionally crossed in ways that made me look less than squeaky-clean to their trained eyes, but I’m an unsolved disappearance who has never been able to quite account for her fourteen missing years.

Oh, and then there’s the little matter of my various arrests for disorderly conduct, and the fact that one of the SFPD’s officers vanished without a trace while he was following me around the Bay Area, something he shouldn’t have been doing, sinceIhadn’t been doing anything wrong. I’d been trying to find Chelsea Ames, who had been teleporting uncontrollably due to her powers being greater than her capacity to control them.

But Officer Thornton hadn’t been able to leave well enough alone, and he’d decided I had something to do with Chelsea’s disappearance. He’d continued to follow me until his actions had brought him into the crosshairs of Duchess Treasa Riordan, who had been trying to use Chelsea to her own ends. As a consequence, he’d spent more than a year lost in Annwn, one of the deeper, supposedly sealed lands of Faerie.

Human minds aren’t designed to handle the stresses of deep Faerie. Human bodies didn’t evolve to thrive there. Much as the mortal world slowly damages the fae, between dawn ripping down our magic and iron shredding our bodies and souls, deep Faerie harms humans. I still don’t know how he managed to survive for as long as he did.

I’d stumbled over him when I went back to Annwn looking for August, and I’d brought him back to San Francisco. I hadn’t beenable to give him back his life. He was still a missing person as far as the police were concerned, and any family he had was still mourning him, convinced he’d been swallowed by a world that isn’t always friendly toward law enforcement. Which, while technically true, didn’t extend to “and now he’s in a magically-induced coma in the Luidaeg’s spare bedroom, and we have no idea when he’s going to wake up, if ever.” So if my illusions didn’t hold, we were more likely to wind up in a police station than an emergency room.

Not that the emergency room wouldn’t be bad enough. May might be healing more slowly than I would have, but she was healing so much faster than any human, as well as missing several essential internal organs. The doctors would have no idea how she was still alive, or why her ears were pointed, or...

No. Avoiding the police was our only good option. Spike paused in front of another patch of wall, which twisted and writhed apart into a familiar-looking opening. I took a deep breath, gathering my magic in a bloody haze. It came swift and easy, so thick I could virtually taste it. It tasted more like blood than ever before, coating my tongue and back teeth, and nearly making me gag. I swallowed and closed my eyes, grabbing the rising magic with mental hands, and spinning it around the pair of us like a veil of cotton candy, thin and tenuous and surprisingly sticky.

Making us look human would have been more work than making us disappear entirely, and so I went with what felt like the easier option, draping us in the delicate folds of a hide-and-seek spell before I stepped through the opening.

The world performed a sickening duck and roll, sending my stomach and my equilibrium spinning. I held tight to May, refusing to allow myself to either drop her or fall over.

Eventually, the world calmed down, and my stomach calmed with it. I lifted my head, risking a deep breath of cool night air, and looked around at our new surroundings.

There was no question of whether we’d returned to the mortal world: the streetlights a few yards away from and above me were a clear illustration of where we were, and if that wasn’t enough, telephone wires hung above them, heavy and black, blocking out swaths of sky. They wouldn’t have seemed so jarring if we hadn’t just been wandering around in Faerie, where that sort of thing has yet to take hold.

We were in the rose gardens, as I’d requested, a sort of rustic amphitheater formed of rose beds and twisting pathways, all winding their way down toward a swath of green lawn. Spike’s door had let us out about halfway down one of the paths, which meant I would have to carry May all the way back up to street level. I adjusted my grip on her, glanced one more time at the rosebushes all around us, and started walking.

These roses were almost reassuring, because healthy and vibrant as they were, they were roses Iunderstood. They had been planted in mortal soil by human hands, and some of them weren’t perfect. There were holes in their leaves where the aphids had been at them, and there were bruised edges on their petals. These were roses that would inevitably lose those petals and fade away, returning to the soil.

Sometimes people assume I have a death wish, and in a way, I think they’re right: one of the first things I learned in Faerie was that to be a changeling is to be mortal. We burn bright because we don’t have a lot of time when compared to the elegant immortals around us. Changelings are mortal, and mortals die. So part of me grew up knowing I didn’t have forever, and that part is still with me now, motivating me, driving me forward. It’s an essential part of who I am, and on some level, I’m afraid that if I give it up, I won’t be October anymore.

I couldn’t see May, but I could feel her, heavy in my arms, her hair tacky with half-dried blood. Everything we’d been able to research or deduce about Fetches told me she’d be fine, once she’d had time to recover from her injuries; she wasn’t going to die, because that wasn’t possible. She might be the only truly immortal being in all of Faerie. And still, I was terrified for her, almost as much as I was for Quentin. The thought that she might somehow slip away made me feel like my skeleton had been replaced with a block of ice, and I knew it couldn’t happen.

Was this how Tybalt felt every time he saw me covered with my own blood and trying to yank someone else’s armory out of my intestines? If so, it was sort of a miracle that he hadn’t held me down and shouted until I agreed to remove my own humanity a long time ago.

Carrying May to the top of the rose garden pathway was as difficult as I’d expected it to be: I didn’t drop her, and I only had to stop to rest and reposition her twice before I reached the fence thatkept people from wandering into the rose garden when it was closed. Like, say, after dark. I freed one hand to shake the gate and check for weaknesses, then pulled away with a hiss of pain.

Wrought iron. Of course it was wrought iron. The stuff isn’t even attractive—it’s like the bold type equivalent of a chain-link fence, all bulky and aggressive and unnecessarily prone to rust—but something deep in humanity’s genetic makeup remembers that the fae are out there, roaming the night, and that sometimes when we get bored, whole villages can disappear. So they deny we ever existed out loud, and they quietly ornament their homes and gardens with as much iron as they can yank out of the hills. They’re still working at keeping us out.

Well, right now, they were doing a much better job of keeping usin. I took a step back, trying to see a way out of this. There wasn’t an obvious one. The fence ran all the way around the rose garden, the gates were locked, and even if they hadn’t been, they were made entirely of iron. I needed a way out of here. I’m pretty good at picking locks—it’s a skill I spent a lot of time developing when I was one of Devin’s stable of private street rats—but that wasn’t going to help if I couldn’t touch the bars without burning myself.

Gingerly, I carried May back down to an oak tree that had been planted among the roses on the first tier. It probably wasn’t much longer for the garden, having grown and thrived until it cast a wide shadow visibly stunting the rosebushes around it. This wasn’t the Berkeley oak tree garden, and its success was going to be what inevitably condemned it to the ax. I settled May in the grass at the base of the tree, careful not to peel her out of the hide-and-seek spell I’d cast. Of the two of us, she was currently the bloodier, and the much less equipped to cope if we attracted the wrong kind of attention.

The spell I’d spun was strong, but not subtle. It refused to split into two pieces. In the end, I peeled it off myself and settled the whole thing over May, letting her disappear from the world. I combed my fingers through my hair as I straightened, pulling it over my ears. From what I could feel of my face, I still looked enough like myself that anyone human who saw me wouldn’t jump straight to “call Tolkien, one of his elves got loose,” not when “pretty person thinks the laws don’t apply to her” was a much shorter leap.

It’s funny that I still have trouble thinking of myself as pretty when I look so much like Mom these days. But Mom is beautiful according to any standard you want to use—delicate, refined, built on a scale humanity has never had access to—and if I look like her, I must at least qualify as pretty.

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