Page 43 of A Killing Frost

It was an act of will to turn my back on May, especially since I knew that if anything capable of detecting her presence came along, I wouldn’t know she was gone until I came back and found my spell not covering anything at all. The fae versions of invisibility all have their issues.

I began making my way deeper into the rose garden, looking for dancing lights where there shouldn’t have been any. It took longer than I’d expected, probably because of that wrought iron fence. Eventually, however, I saw specks of light, like a Christmas tree gone feral, buzzing and dancing through the air around a large lavender bush. I angled myself in that direction, relaxing when I confirmed that I’d found one of the local pixie flocks.

“Hi,” I said, before I got too close. The pixies froze, some in the act of picking flowers, others hovering in midair. “I’m October Daye, and I need your help.”

The pixies remained frozen for a few endless seconds, long enough that I began to worry they would attack me when they finally unfroze. I took a step backward, raising my hands in a defensive position. “Sorry to bother you, I’ll find another way to—”

Wings chiming in joyous cacophony, they flung themselves at me and swirled around me in a bright spiral of glittering lights, every color of the rainbow dancing past my eyes. I tensed until I realized they weren’t attacking, only rejoicing in the movement and the moment and the wind that lifted them up and the gravity that bore them down. They began to settle on my head and shoulders, wings still chiming, and while I didn’t recognize any of them—not the way I recognized the pixies who belonged to Poppy’s original flock—they seemed pleased to see me.

That was a nice change.

“Hi, so, my Fetch and I are trying to get to campus,” I said. “But it’s after dark and the fence is locked, so we can’t get out of here. I can’t touch the lock long enough to pick it without burning my fingers. Do you have any ideas? I know this is an imposition, but I need your help.”

The pixies listened solemnly, tiny faces grave, before they turned to each other and began to argue in their squeaky, high-pitched voices. I couldn’t understand a word they were saying. The size difference between us was too great.

The size difference. I stood up straighter, inspiration lighting up my eyes. I probably looked like I was having a stroke, when really I was having an epiphany. “I hate to ask this of you, and I’ll owe you, like, an entire Thanksgiving dinner prepared specifically for your flock if it’s something you can do, but you’re small enough to fit between the bars, and the flock that lives in the swamp beyond my mother’s tower used their magic to make me and my traveling companions pixie-sized once, when we stumbled into their territory uninvited. I know it’s a big request to make, but if I go get my Fetch, do you think you could make us both temporarily small enough to exit?”

A series of loud, excited chimes followed my request as the pixies conferred among themselves, before a female pixie glowing the bright cherry-red of store-brand NyQuil launched herself off my shoulder and came to hang directly in front of my face, expression grave. She nodded, then raised her hands, palms outward. I took a quick step backward.

“Wait!” The pixie lowered her hands, and ringed a perplexed chime. I smiled unsteadily. “I need to get my Fetch,” I said. “I left her by the big oak, and it would take too long for me to walk to her if I were your size.”

The pixie chimed an inquisitive note. I started walking back the way I’d come, gesturing for the flock to follow. “Do you know Shade?” I asked. “She’s the local Queen of Cats. I bet she can help me find a safe place to lay out a whole Thanksgiving dinner for your flock, without attracting the attention of the mortal authorities.”

The pixie chimed again, flying a lazy circle around my head as I walked. I took that as an affirmative. With our current communication barriers in place, it wasn’t like I could do much of anything else.

“She isn’t a close friend or anything, but she knows who I am, and she knows I have ties to San Francisco’s Court of Cats; I think she’d be willing to help me out, if it’s for the sake of her local pixies.” I had reached the tree where May was sleeping. I reached down and felt around until my fingers hit something they tried toinsist was a tree root, despite the fact that it was soft and yielding and tacky with blood. The spell I’d used to hide her was doing its best to keep her hidden, even from me.

That’s the thing about magic. We can spin it, shape it, and put it into the world, but once it’s there, it’s going to do what it was made to do, not what we later decide we wanted. The spells are shaped by intention on the part of the caster. They aren’t changed just because we realized we were wrong.

I hooked my fingers into the air and hissed a quick line from one of Shakespeare’s sonnets, focusing on how much I wanted the magic to unravel and return to its unshaped form, and let me have May back. There was a pause while the smell of cut grass and bloody copper rose around me, and I almost thought it was going to refuse. Then the spell burst like a soap bubble, taking the magic with it as it wafted back into the world around us, and May was revealed.

As one, the pixies recoiled, their wings ringing a clarion chorus of alarm. I straightened, raising my hands.

“Hey, hey, it’s all right! She’s alive, she’s just been elf-shot. And, you know, wounded.”

Looking at May, it wasn’t hard to understand why the pixies reacted that way. She looked even worse now than she had before, partially because I’d had a few minutes away from the severity of her injuries. The hole in her stomach was gone, but her clothing and hair were drenched in blood, not all of which had dried. She looked like the result of a one-woman assault on an entire army, and it wasn’t clear whether she’d come out on the winning side.

The pixies rang again, more cautiously this time, and the ones nearest to me were watching me uncertainly, like they expected me to reveal myself as a serial killer at any moment. I bent and scooped May’s body awkwardly into my arms, hefting the functionally dead weight of her as I straightened back up. Her arms dangled like the victim in a monster movie. I braced myself, fighting to keep us both upright, and breathed in through my nose.

“There’s a neat little lass and her name is Mary Mac, make no mistake she’s the girl I’m gonna track,” I recited, as slowly and sonorously as I could. “Lots of other fellas try to get her on the back, but I’m thinking that they’ll have to get up early...”

Magic rose, consolidated, and collapsed around me, crashing with such force that it was almost dizzying. My head gave another throb of pain, almost as an afterthought. The magic-burn fromshifting my blood too quickly was still with me, but the problem now was that I didn’t know how hard to pull when I wanted to cast a simple spell.

It didn’t matter in the moment. The magic drifted over both of us, leaving me still holding May in my arms, but leaving her entirely changed. The blood and tattered clothing were gone, as was the limp, boneless sweep of her body, replaced by a girl roughly Gillian’s age, her head propped against my shoulder, sleeping.

I’d still have a problem if the police wanted to pick us up for her apparent public drunkenness, or if they wanted me to wake her up for some reason, but Berkeley is a college town. Students get blackout drunk sometimes, and then their friends have to carry them back to their dorms. This was cause and cover story all in one illusion.

I turned my attention back to the pixies. “All right. We should be able to make it to campus now, if I can just get her out of here.” I walked toward the fence as I spoke, trying to get this over with faster. We’d wasted enough time already, and the urgency of the situation was starting to weigh on me.

Simon had Quentin. Patrick might be in danger. All of us might be in danger, if Simon was able to remember enough about what wasactuallyhappening to find someone who’d have access to the elf-shot cure. This felt like a monster of my own creation, even though I knew that much of the blame for our current predicament could be laid firmly at the feet of the Firstborn, who needed to stop prowling around and trying to manipulate us all the damn time.

Knowing something is true doesn’t make it feel true. If it did, we’d spend a lot less time pointing fingers at each other.

The pixies looped and swirled around me, wings chiming. I offered them a smile, hoping it would look as sincere as I needed it to. “All right,” I said. “I’m ready.”

The pixies swooped closer and closer, leaving glittering trails of pixie-sweat in the air behind them, and the ringing of their wings got louder until it sounded less like chimes than it did like the tolling of massive alarm bells, and I kept walking, but I didn’t seem to be making any progress, for all that the fence was so close that it seemed to have more than doubled in size, and I—

Oh.

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