Page 34 of When Sorrows Come

The haunt with Gordan’s face scowled at me and kept scowling as more solid-looking haunts came to hover in the space around her. All of them looked like they had mass and heft, which was more than I could say for the members of the flock still hovering around the edges, their bodies translucent and foggy, like they might be tricks of light and shadow, only here until someone opened a window or turned on a light. Two of them had new faces.

One was Satyr. One was Daoine Sidhe. None of them were Candela, but I still glanced up to the corner where the Merry Dancers bobbed, staying well away from the flock around me.

“You’ll come to us soon enough,” said the Gordan-haunt. “You’ll come to us, and we’ll suck the marrow from your bones like sugar candy.” She smiled, baring suddenly sharp teeth, before she zipped upward with a single mighty flap of her wings, which should have been too frail to propel her at that kind of speed. The rest of the flock followed, even the ones verging on insubstantiality, and I was alone again.

Well. That could have gone worse. I ran my hands down my sides as if to check that I was still undevoured, and upon confirming that my too, too solid flesh had not begun to melt away, turned my attention back to the motionless Candela sprawled on the floor. I didn’t dare touch her, not without knowing the nature of the poison that had knocked her down, and without the benefit of blood, I couldn’t even start to figure out what was wrong.

It was sort of nice to be reminded that I had limits, even if the timing couldn’t have been worse.

The smell of musk and pennyroyal rose behind me, and I turnedto see Tybalt standing there, clutching the arm of a slight, brown-haired Ellyllon whose wings were beating so rapidly they had become a blur, casting translucent cascades of glittering, colorless dust into the air around the pair of them. That was fine. It would dissipate as soon as it touched literally anything, unless the Ellyllon was trying to make it stick. My crime scene, such as it was, wouldn’t be disrupted.

“I found your healer,” said Tybalt, pupils narrowing to slits as he took note of the absence of the Satyr’s body. I hadn’t turned to look yet; the night-haunts wouldn’t have bothered to craft a manikin to replace the corpse, not here, not inside the High King’s knowe where there was no need to pretend the dead man had been anything other than immortal. They would have left something behind to mark the fact that he had fallen if I hadn’t been here to see him taken and know that he was dead, but I knew the body was gone.

“She hasn’t moved or woken up,” I informed the Ellyllon, who was looking around the room with the short, sharp motions of someone truly terrified. “Her Merry Dancers haven’t dipped or even started to fall, so I’m assuming she’s stable, but there’s a very good chance she was dropped by some sort of poison, possibly contact.”

“I’m about ready to shed this skin anyway,” he assured me, and moved to kneel on the floor next to Caitir.

When his knee hit the carpet there was a small snapping sound, and a tiny arrow, no bigger than a matchstick, was released from somewhere against the wall. It zipped past, missing him completely due to his small stature and place on the floor, and embedded itself in the baseboard of the opposing wall. “Ah,” he said, utterly calm. “Elf-shot. Well, that explains a great deal.”

He rolled her onto her back, revealing the matchstick arrow protruding from her upper arm. She had landed on it when she fell, shattering the shaft. He gingerly touched the remains. “Fletched with hummingbird feathers, if I judge correctly,” he said. “You’re looking for someone with very small hands. Cornish Pixie, perhaps, or Piskie.”

Cornish Pixies are the size of humans, but they’re one of the only types of larger fae who can communicate easily with regular pixies, and frequently recruit their smaller cousins to help them with delicate matters. Knowing Poppy and the Aes Sidhe, Isometimes wondered if Cornish Pixies weren’t the result of Aes Sidhe crossbreeding with something else. Tylwyth Teg, perhaps, or Ellyllon. It was an interesting thought, if not strictly relevant to the task at hand.

Piskies, on the other hand, are definitely the result of the Aes Sidhe breeding with true pixies, as confirmed by the Luidaeg herself, making them one of the few fae races with no Firstborn. They’re size-changers. They can move through the world of the large fae and the world of the small fae with equal ease, and it would have been easy for a Piskie to make an arrow as small as the one in Caitir’s arm.

“Why, though?” I asked. “We have a treatment for elf-shot now. It’s not a good way to take someone out of commission on a long-term basis.”

“No, but it is a good way, if you’ve been discovered, to cause exactly the scene we saw unfold,” said Tybalt slowly. “Someone who can enter the room without disturbing the traps at the door goes in, and they fail to come back out, causing their companions to rush the door. The traps are triggered, your cover is blown, but you can still potentially question the first intruder, to learn how much they knew before they led their friends to slaughter.”

He sounded incredibly calm, given that if I had taken a step in the wrong direction, I could easily have been elf-shot. “Any idea what triggered the trap?” I asked the Ellyllon. “Did you feel something break or hear a click or anything like that?”

“No, sadly,” he said. “If it was a tripwire, it was a very thin one, and I didn’t notice breaking it. I can check for more, if you like?”

“I would appreciate that,” I said. Being able to treat elf-shot doesn’t make it a fun way to pass a morning, and if I got elf-shot before my wedding, May would never let me hear the end of it. People already thought I didn’t really want to be here.

“You may want to cover your noses,” said the Ellyllon apologetically, and ducked his head, arching his back in a feline way that would have looked much more natural on Tybalt. Then he began to beat his wings, frantically.

Ellyllon are somewhat unusual among the winged races of Faerie in that they can’t actually fly under their own power once they reach adulthood. Their magic focuses on other things. They can glide, but that’s about the extent of the time they spend in the air. That doesn’t mean their wings are useless. Much of Ellyllon magicmanifests through the dust they shed, commonly referred to as “pixie-sweat”; they’re rare in that their magic has no scent to it, only the glitter in the air. I put my hands over my nose and mouth as the Ellyllon filled the air with his magic, but some of it still got in my mouth.

It tasted sweet, like the powder that comes off a stick of wax-wrapped convenience store bubble gum, and I wondered whether Jin’s magic would taste the same, whether this was the element of Ellyllon magic that I had always been missing.

I swallowed, and watched as more and more dust filled the room, drifting lazily downward to collect on every level surface. Including, I saw, a web of thin strands, barely as thick as cobwebs, that crisscrossed the floor only an inch or so above the carpet, too fine to be seen by the naked eye, but present all the same.

Whoever had booby-trapped this room had wanted to be absolutely sure they took out anyone who entered. Looking down, I could see that our seemingly miraculous avoidance of the elf-shot was more a consequence of coming straight down the middle of the hall—what should have been an impassable danger—and hence stepping into the footprints of the person who’d lain the tripwires in the first place. The scale was such that while they might have had a Piskie involved in crafting the elf-shot, someone bigger had been involved in setting the actual traps.

“Charming,” said the Ellyllon, sitting up straight as his wings stilled. “I would recommend not moving if you don’t have to.”

“Wasn’t planning to,” I said. We were in a minefield all of a sudden, and I was glad I hadn’t tried the frosting trick here. These wires were thin enough that I would probably have broken a few with the weight of cheap canned frosting, and if there’s a more embarrassing way to get elf-shot, I certainly can’t think of it.

“October!”

I turned. May and Jazz were rushing down the hall, Quentin and Raj close behind them. Quentin, for one, looked like he was on the verge of panic. I guess the possible consequences of gambling his face on me surviving long enough to get married were finally hitting home.

“Stay there,” I said, pulling my hands away from my face and gesturing empathetically for them to keep their distance. “Donotcome past the door.”

“Why?” May pulled up short, putting out her arms to stop theothers before their momentum could carry them past the threshold. “What’s going on in there?”

“Massive boobytrap,” I said. “It’s not safe to move in here.”

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