Page 61 of A Killing Frost

The kitchen door slammed open as Elsa and Nathan returned, now with a clearly inebriated Elizabeth Ryan in tow. Diva’s motherwas a tall, blonde-haired woman whose face had already started to youthen, courtesy of her transformation from part-time fae to actual pureblood. Unlike most Selkies with children of her own, Liz hadn’t needed to give her skin away if she wanted her child to be immortal. Diva got Faerie from her father’s side of the family.

Hopefully, she’d inherited more than that from him, and would dodge her mother’s alcoholism. Liz was holding a tumbler of amber liquid in one hand, a baffled look on her face that only deepened when she saw me.

“October,” she said. “You’re really—they said, but I thought—I didn’t think you’d come here so soon. Show your face here so soon. What’re you doing here?”

Sometimes I envy people whose metabolisms are slow enough to let them drink. Other times I wonder if I looked that ridiculous back when alcohol was an option for me, and I’m privately grateful for my limited options. This was one of the second times. “You have my squire,” I said, swallowing my mouthful of blood and trying to hold fast to the magic I had raised in the kitchen. “I wanted him back, and that meant I had to go where he’d been taken.”

“Oh.” Liz blinked, bewildered. “Well, what’s your squire doing here? He doesn’t live... he’s not... he shouldn’t be here.”

“I didn’t ask you to gogether,” I said, glaring at the two young Roane who flanked her. “I asked you to tell her I was here. Not the same thing.”

“You said you hadn’t seen her in a while,” said Nathan. “That made it sound like you wanted her to come. We were trying to help.”

I resisted the urge to put my hand over my face. “Good job, kids,” I said. “All right, Liz, Quentin is under a compulsion spell, and I don’t have a lot of time before the man who cast it causes some pretty serious problems between us and the Undersea. Can you take your teenagers and give us a moment’s privacy so I can take the spell down?”

“No.” Liz crossed her arms, nearly spilling her drink in the process. “I can’t do that. I’m not leaving you alone to hurt this boy.”

Elizabeth Ryan has never particularly cared for me. First, I was the changeling of no particular status or bloodline who was trying to have a relationship with one of her Selkies—my old boyfriend, Connor O’Dell. Then, after we’d been safely dissuaded fromgetting involved and Connor had been married off to Rayseline Torquill, I had been the semi-disgraced knight responsible for the loss of a Selkie skin when it was caught, along with myself and Quentin, in an exploding car in Tamed Lightning. As if that wasn’t enough, I had been dating Connor again after his marriage ended, and I was with him when he died. Elizabeth Ryan had plenty of reasons to dislike me.

And that was all before she had become de facto guardian of my teenage daughter, a formerly mortal girl who had abruptly hopscotched over dozens of patiently waiting Selkie kinfolk to find herself draped in one of their lost skins, granted admission to the waters by none other than the Luidaeg herself—Elizabeth’s former lover. AndthenI’d accompanied the Luidaeg to the Duchy of Ships to help her call in the bargain that originally created the Selkies.

It was no wonder that I wasn’t Elizabeth’s favorite person. It was something of a miracle that she didn’t have standing orders for me to be shot on sight.

“Fine,” I snapped, and drew my knife again. “Just don’t get in the way. I need my squire back.”

Quentin was still eating his chowder, not appearing to notice any of the drama unfolding around him. It was a well-crafted compulsion, if a bit more brute force than I tended to prefer. I could almost admire it, and probably would have, if it hadn’t been cast on my squire.

The two Roane teens flinched, looking worried, as I ran the blade of the knife across the ball of my thumb again. I winced at the pain. The original wound was healed, but it sometimes feels like my body remembers and resents it when I cut myself in the same place more than once in a short period of time. Blood welled to the surface of the skin, and once again I stuck my thumb in my mouth, calling my magic back out of the air.

A bolt of pain shot through my temples. The strain I’d placed on my magic when I’d involuntarily changed the balance of my own blood was still there, ready and eager to make things difficult for me. I swallowed anyway, trying to coax more blood out of the already-healing wound. It didn’t want to come, and I didn’t want to cut myself a third time, so I abandoned the attempt, pulling my thumb out of my mouth and taking a long step toward Quentin.

The air around me was practically crackling with my magic. It was hard to say whether Liz and the teens could smell it—the capabilities of the Roane are still a little unclear to me, and the Luidaeg hasn’t exactly been forthcoming about the strengths and weaknesses of her reborn descendants—but I knew Quentin should have been able to. And yet he ignored the swelling static in the air in favor of reaching for another roll, still eating like he thought he was never going to have another opportunity.

I stopped a foot or so away, close enough that I could have reached out and touched him if I’d wanted to, and allowed my eyes to unfocus until a sickly web of gray-and-orange lines appeared around him. They were more tightly woven than the spell in the shard realm had been, maybe because the spell was smaller and simpler and didn’t need to stand up to as much strain, or maybe all spells had the same number of strands and I just hadn’t looked at enough of them to know what I was seeing. I hated using Quentin as a test subject. I didn’t see any other option.

Reaching out, I hooked my fingers through the top layer of the web and yanked it apart as hard as I could, wrenching and ripping until the strands began to fray and snap, releasing the smell of smoke and rotten oranges into the air. I gagged but refused to let go. I was only going to get one shot at this; I might be able to attempt tackling the spell again, despite my growing headache, but Quentin might know what I was doing, and I couldn’t imagine the spell wouldn’t at least attempt to protect itself from me if it was aware that it was being broken.

It’s safest when working with magic to assume that everything is at least a little bit alive. I kept yanking and ripping, until a new sound appeared—one that would normally have been unwelcome, but which was, under the circumstances, proof that I was doing something right.

Quentin started screaming.

The spell wasn’t visibly harming him, not transforming him or wrenching out chunks of his magic. It was just fighting back, trying to work its hooks more deeply into the tender parts of his psyche. I continued pulling, hard and unmerciful, until it came apart under my hands. Quentin stopped screaming and stared at me, cheeks pale, eyes wide and glossy and filled with unshed tears. He glanced at the bowl in front of him and his pallor turned greenish as he shoved it away and lurched to his feet.

I couldn’t see any fragments of the spell left in the air around him, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. I allowed my eyes to focus properly again. “Hey, kiddo,” I said cautiously. “How are you feeling?”

Quentin responded by sprinting past me to the kitchen sink, where he was loudly and vigorously sick. I turned to watch him go, raising an eyebrow. “Guess you had a little too much chowder, huh?”

Liz belatedly seemed to realize my squire was throwing up on her household dishes. “Hey!” she objected. “Use the toilet like a normal person!”

“I think it was either the sink or the kitchen floor,” I said. “He made the right choice.”

Liz frowned. “He’s doing those dishes.”

“No, he’s not,” I corrected. “As soon as he’s done throwing up, we’re leaving.”

For a moment, I thought she was going to argue and force me to play the Luidaeg card. The fact that I was here on semi-official business for the sea witch had to count for something, even if I’d been the one to get her involved. Fortunately, I didn’t have to say anything. Liz’s shoulders sagged, and she took a swig from her tumbler—probably a larger one than was a good idea with what looked and smelled like reasonably decent whiskey.

“Fine,” she said sullenly. “Just get him out of my house before he vomits on a couch.” She turned and strode out of the kitchen, shoulders back and head high, like she thought she was somehow making a dramatic exit.

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