Page 66 of A Killing Frost

I smiled. “Salvation,” I said, and opened my eyes.

My eyelashes were frozen together. I felt some of them shatter when I pulled them apart. The cold struck me a moment later, ice caking my face and hair. I couldn’t move, but I could freeze. That was normal enough. Danny must have called for Tybalt before he’d come running, and then my glorious, reckless fiancé had carried me along the shadow roads, as he always did when he needed to save me from the consequences of my own actions.

I allowed my eyes to drift closed again, not quite comprehending the blurry shapes and lights of whatever I’d been looking at. Itseemed less important than lying quietly and starting to thaw. I wasn’t sure I’d ever been so cold.

Cold or no, the feeling was coming back to my fingers, and I could tell that someone was clutching my hand so tightly that it would probably ache, once I was capable of comprehending pain.

“—her up,” said Tybalt, voice quick and urgent. “You need to wake her up. She can’t sleep for a century. I can’t endure a century without her. I’ve endured too many already.”

“She’s awake,” said Walther. He sounded utterly exhausted, which made sense; he’d already been fighting to wake May and must not have been expecting to have me dumped on his plate as well. I made a mental note that we owed the man some good strong coffee, and maybe a trip to the massage parlor of his choice. He was going to need to relax after this night.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” demanded Tybalt.

“Shejustwoke up,” said Walther. That was all he had time to say before Tybalt was gripping the sides of my face, lifting my head off whatever I’d been lain out on. I tried to open my eyes again. They refused to accommodate me.

“She’s awake, but she’s not likely to be responsive for a while,” said a third voice—the Luidaeg. I officially had no idea where we were. Evening must have been lying about how long I’d been asleep. That was no real surprise. Tybalt was fast. He wasn’tthatfast. “My darling sister put her blood into that elf-shot mixture, or more accurately, convinced the failure to do it for her. Toby’s not a descendant of Titania. The stuff will be eating at her until she manages to expel it.”

“Can we help at all?” Walther again. Good old Walther. How does anyone function without an alchemist on call? I guess they have to make much more of an effort not to get poisoned, which seems like a lot of work.

“You’re already helping,” said the Luidaeg. “But your countercharm doesn’t purge the body; it just breaks the connection between the ingredients. There’s no way to purge blood from her system without some really nasty side effects. Like exsanguination.”

“I should never have allowed her to go off without me, whatever the little dream-walker said she saw,” said Tybalt, slowly taking his hands away from my face. He didn’t move away; I could still feelhis presence, warm and close and comforting. “She always gets herself into trouble when I’m not around.”

“Be fair to yourself, kitty-cat,” said the Luidaeg. “She gets into trouble when youarearound. She gets into trouble like my father is paying her for it.”

Her father. Something about Oberon... my conversation with Evening wasn’t fading like an ordinary dream, maybe because it hadn’t been a dream at all. It had been all too real, and I had come all too close to being trapped there. But something Evening had said about Oberon was nagging at me.

I opened my eyes again. This time, the room around me came more immediately into focus; I was looking at the ceiling of the Luidaeg’s apartment, not at Walther’s office. How many people had Tybalt transported?

“Welcome back,” said the Luidaeg. “I’d say I’d been worried, but I can’t lie. Your kitty is another story. Maybe reassure him.”

Tybalt’s face appeared in my limited field of vision, as his hands returned to the sides of my face. “October?” he asked. “Are you all right?”

Well, I couldn’t speak or shake my head, so clearly, I was not all right. I blinked, and promptly regretted it, as my eyes didn’t want to open again once they were closed. This was getting tedious.

Opening my eyes took the kind of effort I normally associated with hard labor, but I was determined, and Tybalt was holding me, and in the end, I achieved it. He looked me in the eye and laughed, an oddly choked sound that teetered on the edge of becoming a sob. I wanted to comfort him, and the fact that I couldn’t was one more thing I was never going to forgive Evening for. That woman had a laundry list of offenses to answer to, and while many of them weren’t crimes by either human or fae standards, I was going to hold her to them as if they were.

The thought was comforting enough to make me feel a little warmer, although that could just have been the ice in my hair continuing to melt. This time when I blinked, my eyes opened again easily. That wasn’t enough for Tybalt; he gave me a concerned look before turning to look at someone I couldn’t see, hands still cupping my face.

“She’s not moving. Luidaeg, why isn’t she moving?”

“The little alchemist—”

“Walther,” Walther interjected, mildly as if he weren’t interrupting the sea witch.

“—was able to counteract my sister’s new elf-shot blend, barely, but it had time to do plenty of damage, and October is still piecing herself back together. Yes, this is unusually slow for her, but I don’t think it’s a problem: she’s had my sister’s blood inside her body a lot longer than would be good foranybody, much less one of my father’s children with nothing of Titania in her to fight back. We can be sure she’s all right once she starts talking.”

Talking. The idea was appealing and incredibly daunting at the same time, like a mountain too insurmountable to consider climbing. I took a deep breath and tried to force a sound out from between my lips, succeeding only in making a squeak so soft it was barely audible even to my own ears. No; there wasn’t going to be any talking for a while yet.

I wanted to know who else was here. Danny had called Tybalt, and there was no way they’d left Quentin on the beach while they carried me back to the Luidaeg. But where was Simon? Was Cassandra here? Were we almost finished with this day’s work, or was it just beginning?

I tried again. This time, I made a louder sound, one that was audible outside my own head. Tybalt’s head snapped around, pupils narrowing to slits as he stared at me. “October?”

I took the deepest breath my lungs allowed and finally managed to whisper, “Quentin...?”

“He’s here,” said Tybalt, stroking my cheek with one hand. “He was with you on the beach when I reached you. That boy should have been Cait Sidhe, he has the heart of a lion. He had the knife from your belt in his hand and was squaring off against a sorcerer with bow and arrow. He is, perhaps, a little too accustomed to your invincibility, and forgets he isn’t actually your son. He can bleed almost as well as you can.”

I blinked again, managing to force the slightest sliver of a smile. Tybalt laughed in earnest this time, beaming down on me.

---