Page 63 of A Killing Frost

“Simon, if you hurt him, I will kill you, and Oberon’s Law be damned,” I snapped. The Law was full of loopholes anyway. If Simon shot Quentin with elf-shot so powerful that it overwhelmed his system and he died in his sleep, he wouldn’t be considered guilty of Quentin’s murder. There were always ways to argue around the consequences of your actions in Faerie, if you could make yourself stop caring about who got hurt in the process. And if Simon hurt Quentin again, I was going to be way, way past the point of caring.

Simon blinked, a look of brief consternation on his face. “You really mean that,” he said.

“I don’t understand why you’re so surprised. You were with Oleander de Merelands for years, and I don’t think anyone will ever be able to accurately verify her kill count.”

Simon shook his head. “She never killed as many people as she was given credit for. I think Faerie just wanted another monster, and she was the best candidate we could find.”

“She killed King Gilad, and she killed the mother of his children, and she killed Lily,” I said. “That’s at least three corpses I can place at her feet, and she already had a reputation as a killer when she killed Gilad and his lover.”

Simon shook his head again, harder this time. “I never said she was a good person. Just that she wasn’t as much of a monster as they accused her of—uh-uh, boy.” He shifted the angle of his bow, keeping the arrow trained on Quentin. “You don’t move. I’d rather not die today, so I’m holding my fire. You’ll excuse me if I don’t trust you to do the same.”

“I won’t excuse you foranything,” spat Quentin. “You hurt Dean. You say you’re looking for Patrick because you care about him, but you hurt his son, and he won’t ever forgive you for that. I won’t forgive you for that either. I love him, and you hurt him, and you made me stand there and watch. I hate you.”

Simon frowned and switched his gaze back to me, clearly tryingto dismiss Quentin as unimportant—and just as clearly failing. “Patrick will come home. He always comes home.”

“Patrick is happy in Saltmist. He’s not going to come here just because you decided to stand on the beach and chuck rocks at his roof. And you’re lucky you didn’t find and steal a Selkie skin. Not only would the Luidaeg have hunted you to the ends of the earth for interfering with her plans for them, you wouldn’t have been Daoine Sidhe anymore. A Selkie transformation is permanent.” Rayseline had dodged that change only because she had never actually used the skin she’d stolen, choosing instead to wear it as a simple disguise. She might never know how close she’d come to becoming the Luidaeg’s charge instead of Titania’s.

“I don’t rememberanyof this,” snapped Simon. “You’ve been lying to me since we met.”

“I’ve never lied to you at all,” I said. “It’s your patroness who lied to you, and who’s still lying to you, because you’re in her service and you shouldn’t be. She never meant you well. All she ever did was help you get lost.”

To my surprise, Simon sighed. “I know that,” he said, in a soft voice. “You think I don’t know that?”

I blinked. “Um, yes. I thought you didn’t know that. If you know she’s lying to you, why are you breaking things to try and wake her up?”

“Because I have nothing else. I can’t find Oleander, my parents are dead, Sylvester rejected me when he found his Luna, Patrick—Patrick let me think he was dead. I’m alone in the world except for my lady, and if she wants to lie to me, then let her lie. At least I know I’m useful to her. At least I know she’s not going to leave me.”

The thought of Evening Winterrose as the last dependable person in Simon’s life ached. I took a step forward. “It doesn’t have to be that way. Let me take you back to the Luidaeg. She can help you find your way home.”

“Does that require someone to find Oberon?” asked Quentin.

“If that’s what has to happen, that’s what has to happen,” I said, keeping my eyes on Simon. “Come on, Simon. Let me bring you back to your family. They miss you.” August did, anyway. I couldn’t be so confident about Mom. Mom rarely seemed to miss anyone, and she’d left Simon when he’d demonstrated that he cared more about August than he did about her.

My family sort of sucks sometimes.

Simon looked, for a moment, like he was considering my request. Then he raised his bow again, aiming squarely for the center of my chest. “No,” he said. “I don’t think so.”

Things began to happen very quickly after that. Quentin lunged forward, shouting. Danny’s own shout echoed a second later, the massive man running down the beach with a wide, ground-eating stride. For a second, it looked like he was going to reach us on time, like this was all going to have a very different ending.

Then Simon let the arrow go.

It flew swift and true and faster than any of us could move. I looked numbly down at the arrow protruding from the left side of my chest. It had missed the heart, although it was probably embedded in my lung. Well, that wouldn’t be the first time. Not by a long shot. I started to reach up and pull it out, but midway through the gesture, my arms stopped obeying me.

I was unconscious before I hit the beach. I never even felt myself fall.

EIGHTEEN

IOPENED MY EYESon a world wreathed in fog, the sort of thick, gray, all-consuming fog that hasn’t been common in the Bay Area since I was a little girl. I sat up, pleased to find I still had arms I could use to lever myself, and a body that could do the sitting, then pushed myself to my feet. So far, so good. Everything seemed to be working normally.

There was a faint ache in the left side of my chest, like there was something lodged there that didn’t belong, but I tried not to dwell on it. If Quentin and Danny wanted to leave the arrow where it was until they could get me to someone who could help, that was their choice. I didn’t have many choices left to me right now.

I felt surprisingly good, for someone who’d just been flung into a chemically induced dream state by an asshole with a bow and arrow. That could probably be partially attributed to how little humanity I had left. Elf-shot puts purebloods to sleep. It kills humans and changelings. I was still human enough that it would kill me eventually, if it didn’t start shutting down my body’s autonomic functions before it had the chance to poison me. Really, life in Faerie is an endless string of delights.

But I was almost a pureblood now. I had so little humanity for the elf-shot to attack that I might as well have had none at all. I held tightly to that thought as I stepped forward into the fog, trying to make out literally anything that could tell me where I was.

When I wind up in these weird dreamscapes, there’s usually areason for it. And yeah, the reason is frequently either “you’re dying” or “you’re attempting some act of blood magic that isn’t just beyond you, it’s literally impossible, and yet you’ve decided you can do it anyway,” but those are still reasons. Since I’d just been elf-shot, I was willing to bet “dying” was the answer here.

I took another step into the mist that swirled and eddied around me like a flag. The smell of roses drifted through the chill, and I recoiled, trying to move away from it. Not fast enough; not well enough. My shoulder bumped into something solid that couldn’t possibly have been behind me, and I turned, glacially slow, to gaze upon the face of the woman I was increasingly convinced had been my enemy since long before I existed.

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