Page 46 of A Killing Frost

“Okay, well, this is fascinating, and I should ask you morequestions about it later, but right now, I need to move.” I wove my hands together, pulling the illusions away from myself and May and shaking them off my fingers like cobwebs.

Both Walther and Cassandra gasped when May was revealed. Cass clapped a hand over her mouth, looking revolted. Walther’s reaction wasn’t as dramatic. He just moved to straighten May’s legs and tuck a folder of newspaper clippings under her head as a makeshift pillow.

“What happened?” he asked, voice soft.

“We went looking for Simon, because I can’t get married unless I invite him to the wedding, or there’s a chance he’ll claim insult against my house and try to use that to wake up his patroness,” I said. “Karen had a dream and saw me succeeding if I went with only May and Quentin, so we did that. Well, we found the place where he kept Luna and Rayseline, when they were missing. We fell into it, and May got a little bit impaled. She’s mostly recovered from that at this point, but that explains most of the blood.”

Walther nodded, eyes still on May. “It does. Toby, I don’t know if you understand how much blood normal people have, but there’s no way she should still be alive, not if her injuries were as severe as this amount of blood loss indicates.”

“I do understand how much blood normal people have, since I used to be one, and I nearly bled to death at least once before my body got with the program and started making more as quickly as it does now, and May’s a Fetch. She can’t die unless the person she’s here to be a death omen for dies first.”

I could feel both of them looking at me, trying to figure out how serious I was being. Let them wonder. Waking May up was more important.

“We got out of the bubble Simon created, and we managed to track down the man himself,” I said. “He was in the sub-realm where his mistress is sleeping. He knows about the elf-shot cure, although he hasn’t been able to get his hands on a sample of it, or he would already have tried to wake her. Instead, he grabbed Quentin and elf-shot May so he could make his escape.”

Walther visibly relaxed. “Oh, this is elf-shot, not shock? I can fix elf-shot—”

“I don’t think it’s going to be that easy,” I said. When Walther raised his head to blink at me, I said tightly, “This is elf-shotbrewed from ingredients grown in the presence of a sleeping Evening Winterrose. It’s a lot stronger than anything we’ve had to deal with here, where everything’s a little washed out and further away from Faerie.”

“I can take some blood samples, compare them to what I have, and start working from there,” said Walther. “You look antsy. Do you need to go somewhere?”

“He hasQuentin,” I said. “He took my squire and he leapt through a hole in the world, and there’s no telling what he’s going to do in his attempt to ransom Quentin for his mistress’ life.” It was safe to say Eira’s alias here—“Evening Winterrose” was three perfectly ordinary words strung together, there was nothing about it to attract her attention, much less mystically wake her up—but I didn’t want to get back into the habit. Caution was still important.

That might be the first time in my life that I’d even thought that sentence, much less meant it. Maturity comes for us all. I flipped open the pizza box I’d shoved aside to put May down.

“Are you done with this?”

“Our date is well and truly ruined now, thanks to the blood-drenched sleeping woman in the middle of the room, so go for it,” said Cassandra.

I ignored her sarcasm. “That’s really nice of you,” I said, and gathered three slices from what remained in the box, stacking them on top of each other. “My car’s back in Pleasant Hill, I haven’t seen Spike since I got to Berkeley, and I don’t want to call Tybalt and tell him everything went to shit as soon as he let me have five minutes to myself. Can I borrow your phone? The Rose Roads drained my battery.”

Walther looked at me blankly before slowly nodding and producing a cellphone from the pocket of his jeans. It was larger than mine, with a slippery black screen that came alive when he pressed his thumbprint to the bottom of it.

“Who are you calling?” he asked, offering it over.

“Who do you think?” Summoning the keypad was easy enough. Once that was done, I tapped the keys necessary to spell out the opening line of “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” pressed the pound sign, and raised the phone to my ear.

There was a distant ringing sound, like a bell tolling underwater, in submerged canyons no human eyes have ever seen. Its echoesreverberated as if from a million miles away, and I kept the phone where it was, refusing to be dissuaded. The bell stopped ringing, replaced by the sound of glass shattering against rocks, thrown up like so much chaff by a wave like the hand of an angry god. I barely breathed.

There was a click, and then the Luidaeg said, “You haven’t called for a while. What’s going on?”

“Simon kidnapped Quentin and is planning to use him as leverage to get the elf-shot cure in order to wake your sister up,” I said, going for “tell the truth as openly as you can and hope it doesn’t get you killed” as a solution to my current predicament.

The Luidaeg inhaled sharply enough that it sounded like chastisement before saying, flatly, “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Simon kidnapped—”

“No, I got that part. What I want to know is why you were in a position where he could do that. Did you go looking for him?”

I said nothing.

“Youdid,” she said, accurately interpreting my silence as an answer. “October. Why didn’t you call me first?”

“Because Karen saw me succeeding if I went with just May and Quentin, and there were enough prices I didn’t want to risk you naming that I thought it was better to do this on my own.”

There was a long pause before she said, in a softer voice, “I’m sorry you have to think of me that way.”

“Luidaeg, I—”

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