Page 54 of A Killing Frost

Until I couldn’t breathe.

FOURTEEN

“YOU AREN’T THE TRAITOR’S GRANDCHILD;that baby died in your grandmother’s womb, an unexpected victim of a night that had been coming from the beginning but should still never have happened.” The Luidaeg’s voice was low and earnest; the voice of a woman who was taking advantage of some sort of loophole in the world to say things she otherwise couldn’t. I kept my eyes closed, tensed against the transformation I knew was coming. “No human child could survive being exposed to that much transformation magic, and while your grandmother wasn’t the one changed, her lover the traitor was, and the baby was too close to the spells my mother was using in her own defense. I don’t think she meant to kill the bairn. She was never cruel to children. But she was fighting for her own life, and it was a mortal babe, and they were so common and died so often in those days, and so I don’t think she ever paused to ask herself what she was doing.”

She stepped closer, the fabric of her dress rustling against the sand, and cold fingertips caressed my cheek. “Your grandmother’s body never changed, save in the ways a mortal woman’s body is meant to change, and Mother took more than half of those away from her when she stopped the clock and bound her to immortality, but she was singed by the flames of her lover’s transformations. Her blood remembered. Your blood remembers. It is the weakness of your line, October Daye, daughter of Amandine the Liar. You will always be easy to change, because your blood still sings with my mother’s work, even at this distance, and it always will. Don’tbe too angry. Every line has a weakness. At least yours is balanced by your strengths.”

She touched my cheek again, I knew she did, but it felt like she was reaching down this time, which made no sense. I couldn’t be getting smaller. I could still breathe. After the initial shock of the rising scent of the sea, I had gotten my breath back. If I was getting smaller, I wouldn’t be able to breathe, would I?

“Transformations last longer with the children of Amandine’s line, because your bodies yield to them so easily. It makes you a pleasure to change. I can show the full strength of my art. Or could—if you weren’t so easily upset.” She sounded almost amused.

I opened my eyes, and she was far, far above me, towering like a titan. But I could still breathe. The air hadn’t left me. I tried to protest, and all that came out of my throat was a guttural squeak that bore no real resemblance to speech. What the hell had she done to me?

I looked down at myself. I didn’t have to look far. My body was a tubular stretch of brown fur, ending in short, clawed hind legs. I was naked, except for, again, the fur, and spending time around Cait Sidhe has taught me that no one with a decent pelt is ever really naked. I looked back up at the Luidaeg and squeaked again, furious and confused.

She stooped down to scoop me into her arms, carrying me toward the water line. I didn’t fight. I was too busy glaring at her.

“You thought I was going to turn you into a fish, and I’d be mad at you for that if you were in your right mind,” she said. “I would never do that to you if there were any other choice in the matter. That kind of cruelty is my sister’s domain. But sea otters have been native to the Pacific coast since long before the fae sailed here in our tall-masted ships, and the body you’re wearing knows these waters better than you can imagine. Go to the wall, and down, until you find the opening in the wards Dean carved out for the Merrow of Saltmist. They’ll let you in as well. They know you.”

I wrinkled my nose, feeling my whiskers crinkle—not a sensation I was used to—and tried to roll over in her arms. My body still wasn’t sure what shape it was, and it didn’t want to do what I told it. Those didn’t seem like the ideal circumstances for a dip in the ocean.

Not that I was going to have a choice. The Luidaeg bent forward and tipped me into the water. It wasn’t as cold as it had seemedfrom the shore, or maybe my fur was insulating me more than I expected, because it felt like being dropped into a pond, something shallow enough to be completely warmed by the sun. I rolled onto my back, the air pockets in my fur letting me float without effort.

She smiled down at me. “You’re adorable, and much less mouthy this way,” she said. “Now go on, swim. Save your squire. I’ll be right behind you.”

I cocked my head, waiting to see what she was going to turn herself into. Nothing as adorable as an otter, that was almost guaranteed, and indeed, as I watched, she folded inward on herself before blossoming outward like a flower, flesh turning corrugated and rough, arms going boneless. Her skin flushed vivid orange, then darkened to a deep, bruised gray, as the massive black octopus she had become swirled through the water next to me.

It was impossible to say whether Disney had gotten something right, or whether she was making fun of them for being so far off the mark, and it didn’t matter either way, because she was diving, vanishing in an instant and leaving me alone. I squeaked in surprised alarm and dove after her—or tried to, anyway. The same air pockets that had been allowing me to float without effort kept me functionally stranded at the surface, refusing to let me duck more than a few inches below the water.

I would have had better luck diving as a human. The thought was frustrating enough that I spun in the water, effectively centrifuging the air out of my pelt. This time, when I tried to dive, it worked, better than I could have imagined. I sliced through the water like a knife through flesh, scything smoothly and unerringly downward.

The Luidaeg was there, about ten feet below the surface, floating motionless with all her limbs extended. Each of them ended in a hooked claw, like the talon of some great raptor, and her suckers flexed hungrily, eager for prey. I steered clear of her reach, not wanting to tempt whatever instincts her new body came with. The mind matters more, absolutely, but every shape I’ve ever worn has had its own opinions about what I should do.

The wall loomed ahead of me, smooth and gray and faintly pearlescent. I swam close enough that my tail brushed the stone—another strange sensation—before diving deeper, looking for the opening that had to be there. Patrick and Dianda used it, and Diwasn’t small, especially not in her natural form, where the musculature of her tail would necessitate a reasonably sized hole.

Deeper and deeper I dove, until I started to wonder if the hole even existed. I didn’t feel any discomfort; while I hadn’t intentionally held my breath when I went under, this body knew what to do, and it was happily doing it. The Luidaeg flashed by me, deeper dark against the increasingly shadowed water, and then she was gone. I angled my body in her direction and was rewarded with a vast circular opening in the wall. It was probably no bigger than a manhole, but in my current reduced state, it felt broader than a highway. I tucked my body down and shot through it, moving faster than anyone bipedal could have even attempted. Otters are much more aerodynamic than people.

Why wasn’t everyone an otter, all the time? Patrick would probably have had an easier time dealing with the transition to the Undersea if he’d been an otter. Just float around looking cute, eat the occasional raw fish, and swim like it’s your job. The water here felt shallower than the water on the other side of the wall, and I shot toward the surface, breaking through into the light of the cove-side receiving room. I scrubbed the sides of my face with both paws, wiping the clinging water off my whiskers. It was getting harder to focus on what we were here to do. Otters are mammals. They have more room in their brains for complicated thoughts than fish do. They’re still not people. I’m not a natural shapeshifter; my magic wasn’t protecting my thoughts from fading into the thoughts of the animal I had become.

That was enough to make me roll in the water, making an alarmed chittering sound. I wasn’t going to be able to save Quentin if I didn’t have thumbs. Thumbs seemed like a fairly key component to getting things done.

The water next to me churned, before the head of a large gray-purple octopus broke the surface, alien eyes fixed on me. The Luidaeg reached out and wrapped two tentacles around my body, stopping my panicked roll. They were tense and muscular, like being restrained by two boneless snakes, and something about them set off a deep-set instinct that wasn’t normally mine. In the face of increasing panic, I did the only thing that came naturally.

I bit her.

What flooded my mouth didn’t taste like blood, exactly, or not blood as I normally understood it; it tasted too strongly of salt andcopper, like it had been boiled down to the essentials of what blood could become. The octopus heaved in what I would probably have seen as a sigh had she been in her usual shape, and began swimming toward the beach with her six free arms, still holding me tight, even as I bit into her rubbery flesh again and again. Neither memories nor magic sparked in the thick substance filling my mouth; if this was her blood, one or both of us was too changed for me to read it.

The thought that a simple transformation could be enough to lock me away from my magic made me panic more and bite harder, until the Luidaeg’s grasp loosened and I slipped out of her arms, swimming as fast as I could toward the only thing that looked remotely like safety: the long, creamy crescent of the cove shore, which gleamed in the pearly light emanating from everywhere and nowhere around us. If I could get to land, the octopus that was trying to attack me would be unlikely or unable to follow, and I could go back into the water farther down the shore, well away from the mighty predator.

So I swam until my paws brushed the shore, then ran up onto dry land with an odd, rollicking gait that felt almost like I was jumping every time I tried to take a step. When I was well clear of the water, I turned and chittered triumphantly at it, giving that octopus a piece of my mind.

It wasn’t there. I stopped, blinking, and sat back to scrub at my whiskers again. I had defeated it, clearly, driving it back down to the depths where it belonged.

I barely noticed the water starting to churn. It extended upward into a tall column, and popped like a bubble atop a frothing wave, leaving a woman standing on the surface of the water. She was dark-haired and oddly dry, wearing something long and flowing that merged into the water beneath her feet. She walked toward me, held up by the tide, and I backed away, chittering in as warning a manner as I could manage. No, human. No, this is my beach. No, you are not welcome here.

Then she was stepping onto the sand, looming over me, an odd expression on her face. I hissed before chittering louder, showing her the sharpness of my teeth. She had already encountered the sharpness of something else’s teeth; her forearm was punctured and torn, as if something had tried to gnaw it off of her body. The injury didn’t seem to be bothering her, or making her any morecautious or clever, because she reached for me with that hand as she bent forward, ignoring my increasingly frantic threat display. She was between me and the water, and I wasn’t fast enough on land to evade a human that wished to do me harm.

She grabbed the scuff of my neck, seizing the loose skin that hung there in a tight grip, and I twisted around, sinking my teeth into her wrist.

---