Ashes of Honor

TWENTY-TWO

I WOKE WITH MY HANDS TIED behind my back and my ankles tied together, lying on my side in a tangled bed of fresh-cut bracken. That, and the sweet, clean smell of the air coming through the window in the stone wall behind me, told me plainly that we were no longer in Riordan’s knowe. We were no longer anywhere in the Summerlands at all. There was no light in the room.

“Tybalt?” I whispered. I didn’t move while I waited for my eyes to adjust. “Quentin?”

Silence. I squirmed in the bracken until I could lever myself into a sitting position, making as little noise as I could in the process. Once I was upright, I opened my mouth enough to “taste” the air, breathing deep and searching for signs of the Folletti. There were none. There were no signs of Cait Sidhe or Daoine Sidhe, either. For the moment at least, I was alone. The room was small and round, making me suspect that it was some sort of tower. The walls were made of rough, unfinished stone.

“Fairy tale cliché anyone?” I muttered, and looked down at myself, taking stock. I had my shoes, which was nice. Actually, I had all my clothes, including my leather jacket. At least I wasn’t going to freeze while I was tied up in Riordan’s stupid tower. I tugged my wrists apart, testing the cord that bound them. It was rough and scratchy against my skin, like twine. It wasn’t quite tight enough to cut off the circulation, but it came close. I could work with that.

If anyone had been watching what came next, I’m sure they wouldn’t have been able to observe what followed without laughing so hard they gave themselves away. I half-scooted, half-tumbled my way across the room, nearly landing on my face several times before I managed to reach the wall. Once I was there I twisted until my shoulders were pressed flat, with my hands pinned between my back and the stone. And then, gritting my teeth against the pain I knew was coming, I began scraping my wrists up and down the wall.

The thing about tying someone with rope or twine is that it’s an innately fragile sort of bondage. Rope can be cut. Twine can be frayed. But if you do it right, most people, won’t be able to achieve these things without hurting themselves—and most people aren’t interested in hurting themselves when they don’t have to. I’m not a fan of hurting myself. I’ve just learned that sometimes it’s the only way.

My skin started giving way before the rope did, the smell of my blood seeping into the air to mingle with the scent of the bracken. I hate the sight of blood, but the smell of it strengthens me, even when it’s my own. It’s just one more annoying side effect of my increasingly inhuman biology. Still gritting my teeth—against actual pain now, not the promise of pain that might be coming—I pressed my back into the stone and sawed harder. The hardest part was forcing myself to keep sawing when the stone finished wearing through the skin at the base of my wrists. I could feel my flesh shredding. I could also feel the twine shredding. I kept going.

The first strand of twine snapped just when I was starting to think I’d have to stop and throw up from the pain. I tugged experimentally, and the remaining twine drew tight, giving me something new to saw against. I took a shaky breath, bit my lip, and went back to work.

The fact that I can bounce back from almost any injury that doesn’t kill me is usually an asset. At times like this, when I would have once needed to worry about permanently damaging my hands, it’s a godsend. There’s just one problem: I heal supernaturally fast, but pain still hurts. Normally, if you hurt yourself enough, and keep hurting yourself, your nerves will give you up as a lost cause, and you’ll stop hurting. Not optimal, but better than the alternative.

I, on the other hand, was already starting to heal. There was an itching underneath the agony that meant the cuts I’d made were beginning to knit themselves closed, flesh and muscle regenerating. And I was still sawing, which meant I was reopening those wounds faster than they could close, and the pain never got any duller. Blacking out was starting to sound like a great idea when the twine finally snapped.

I yanked my hands apart, ignoring the way the remains of the twine dug into my wounds, and bent forward to brace my palms against the floor, lean to the side, and puke. I stayed in that position for a while, dry-heaving and waiting for the pain to subside enough to let me sit up.

Eventually, my head cleared, and I pushed myself upright. The worst of the damage to my wrists was gone, although my hands were sticky with blood. I peeled away the last loops of twine with shaking fingers, wadding it up and throwing it into the bracken. The room was dark enough that the blood on my hands was just blackness, like spilled ink.

It’s just ink, I told myself firmly and wiped my fingers on what was soon to be yet another ruined pair of jeans.

It says something about Faerie’s sense of humor that the daughter of the best blood-worker in Faerie can’t stand the sight of her own blood. At least the effort of wiping the blood off distracted me from the vague itch of my wrists healing themselves.

Once the pain was gone and my hands weren’t quite so sticky, I bent forward and untied the twine around my ankles. The knots were tight, but not so tight I couldn’t unpick them with my fingers. Carefully avoiding the puddle of puke to my side, I braced one hand against the blood-dampened wall, and stood. My head spun one last time as I adjusted to being upright. Then everything settled, and I was loose, relatively uninjured…and entirely unarmed.

“Crap,” I said, and scrubbed at my eyes with the back of my hands. The movement caused my jacket to shift, and something in my pocket went “clink.”

I dropped my hands.

When Duchess Riordan’s guards knocked me out and took me away, they’d confiscated my knife, but they hadn’t searched my pockets for less obvious dangers. I still had the Luidaeg’s Chelsea-chaser, which was currently glowing neutral starlight pale. And I had both the power dampener and its counteragent tucked into their respective pockets. Which meant that Quentin and Tybalt, wherever they were, probably also had theirs. Things were looking up.

Speaking of looking up…I crossed to the window, leaning onto my toes as I looked out on the moon-washed moor. I was definitely in Annwn, and I just as definitely wasn’t looking up: the waves of heather and broom that stretched out around the tower where I was imprisoned were way, way down. Far enough down, in fact, that I couldn’t even consider jumping a viable means of escape. If it had been only fifty feet, I would probably have broken the bones in both my legs, but I would have recovered. This was more like two hundred feet, and no matter how quickly I heal, a drop like that would kill me.

When all else fails, try the direct route. I dropped back to the floor and walked to the door, a heavy oak monstrosity barred with magic-dampening rowan wood. This must be the humane dungeon. They didn’t want prisoners using magic to open the door, but they hadn’t resorted to barring it with iron. Thank Oberon for that. The last thing I needed to add to my day was a bad case of iron poisoning.

The door was locked. That was no surprise; I would have been more surprised, and substantially more concerned, if it hadn’t been. I bent to peer through the keyhole, making sure there was nothing unexpected in there. Then I went back to the pile of bracken, selected a particularly green piece of woody stem, and set to work.

My old mentor, Devin, fancied himself a cross between Fagin and Peter Pan—a thief and con man with an army of eternal children to do his bidding. Most of the lessons I learned while I was with him were the sort of things I’ve spent the years since then trying to forget. Some of them, on the other hand, have proved to be surprisingly useful. Like how to pick a lock with improvised tools when I couldn’t use magic to make the process any easier.

It probably says something about my life that I’ve been in a position to use this particular lesson more than once. And I bet not even Devin imagined I’d one day be using his techniques to pick a tower lock in Annwn. That’s me. Always doing my best to surpass expectations.

Something inside the lock clicked. I twisted my bit of bracken hard upward, and was rewarded with a second, louder click. Moving cautiously, in case there was some sort of secondary lock spell on the door that I hadn’t noticed before, I tried the latch.

The door opened smoothly. The hinges didn’t even creak—probably, I realized as I straightened up, because they were made of hand-carved oak. This was a realm where humans had never been common. Given a choice between metal and wood, humans almost always choose metal, and fae almost always choose wood. That probably says something deep and profound about our two species. At the moment, I was just relieved to know I wasn’t going to need an oilcan if I wanted to move quietly through the building.

I opened the door a little wider and peered into the hall. I didn’t see anyone. That didn’t necessarily mean anything; not with Riordan using Folletti for bodyguards. I breathed in, searching the air for signs of other fae. All I found was the smell of blood, and the unmistakable traces of Dóchas Sidhe. I already knew I was there. That meant that, for the moment, I was alone.

Stepping back from the door, I gathered my magic—something that was easier than I expected, thanks to all the blood in the room—and spun a don’t-look-here over myself. It wouldn’t keep me safe forever, but it might be enough to keep me safe until I could find myself some backup. I shook the last clinging bits of magic off my hand before grabbing a few more pieces of bracken and tucking them behind my ear. There’s no telling what might turn out to be useful, and I was probably going to be picking a few more locks before I was finished.

There was nothing else in the tower room for me. I wiped my hands on my jeans one last time, trying to get off a little bit more of the blood, and stepped out into the hall.

I didn’t have any way of relocking my door, so I just pulled it as tightly closed as I could and hoped no one would come to check on me until I was safely away. Pulling the Chelsea-chaser out of my pocket, I held it close to my body to keep the light from possibly shining outside the boundaries of my spell, and started making my way cautiously down the hall.

The irony of the situation was that nothing about it was new to me. I’d been a captive in Blind Michael’s lands, and while they weren’t as deep as Annwn—nothing we can access normally is as deep as Annwn—they were still disconnected from Earth and the Summerlands. And while I was there, I used the light of a magic candle created by the Luidaeg to find the children that he’d stolen.

Back then, I’d been trying to deny I was a hero. These days, no matter how unhappy I may sometimes be about it, I know I’m a hero. Oddly, knowing that made it easier to walk down the hall, keeping my back to the stone wall and watching for Folletti. There was none of the old urge to run and tell them to get someone else to deal with things; this was mine to deal with. My friends were somewhere in this hall. I was going to find them, and together, we were going to find a lost little girl who deserved better from Faerie than she’d ever gotten.

The Luidaeg’s charm flickered when I was halfway down the hall. Then it flared, turning not its customary red, but a dark, almost puzzled-seeming shade of purple. I paused. There was only one door nearby. It was plain oak, with no convenient little window to let me see what was on the other side. Hollywood castles always get the little windows.

“Stupid Hollywood castles,” I muttered, tucking the charm back into my pocket. I pulled a piece of bracken from my hair and knelt, getting to work on the lock. This one was easier, maybe because I was getting warmed up, and maybe because I’d had a little more time for the feeling to come back into my hands. The lock clicked open, and I cautiously opened the door.

This room was the mirror of the one where I’d been held: the same round stone walls, the same heap of fresh-cut broom and heather on the floor. Etienne was propped against the wall under the window, a blindfold tied across his eyes. I stepped into the room, tugging the door shut behind me.

His chin came up. “Who’s there?” he demanded. “If you can’t fight me fairly, at least stop creeping around like cowards in the dark.”

“Shh,” I said, crossing the distance between us before releasing my don’t-look-here. It wisped away into the smell of cut grass and copper. “Etienne, it’s me. Keep your voice down. I don’t know where Riordan’s Folletti are, and I’d rather not find out the painful way.”

“October?” he said, lowering his voice to something just above a whisper. “Is that you?”

“I just said it was, didn’t I?” I reached behind his head, untying his blindfold. He blinked at me as it fell away. I offered a small smile, adding wryly, “I don’t know whether to be relieved or insulted that they felt the need to blindfold you when they didn’t bother with me.”

“They didn’t want me to see where I was being taken.”

“I guess that’s more of an issue with a teleporter, huh?” I was trying to keep my voice light. It wasn’t the easiest thing I’d ever done. Etienne had clearly been beaten. One of his eyes was swollen, and there was a heavy bruise on the right side of his jaw. He’d arrived at Dreamer’s Glass on his own. Tybalt and Quentin…

I set the thought aside. I would find them. For the moment, I needed to get Etienne loose. Having a teleporter with me would be more use than any amount of brooding.

“I cannot travel if I cannot see,” he said.

“Well, at least we’ve fixed that,” I said. “Hang on. I’m going to get you untied.”

His wrists and ankles were tied the same way mine had been. Etienne had struggled against his bonds, but had stopped before he could really hurt himself. That made him smarter than me. It took several minutes before I could pick the knots holding his wrists loose. Etienne hissed with pain as the twine fell away. Livid red marks ringed his wrists where it had been.

“These are friendly people,” I said, bending to begin work on his ankles. “Remind me to hit them a lot if I get the chance.”

“I assure you, I am unlikely to forget.” Etienne rubbed his wrist with one hand, watching me work. Finally, awkwardly, he said, “October…”

“We all got caught, Etienne. Not just you.”

“I was the one foolish enough to go by myself. Perhaps if I had waited…”

“Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.” I worked a thumbnail into the knot holding the twine in place. “Let’s just find Tybalt and Quentin. Then we can find Chelsea, kick Riordan’s arrogant ass all the way back to the Summerlands, and get the hell out of here. How does that sound?”

“Excellent, if improbable.”

“Improbable is sort of my specialty.” I peeled the twine away, sitting back on my knees. “All done. You’re free to go. Do you think you can stand?”

“My daughter is in danger. I think I can do whatever is required of me.” Bold words aside, Etienne stumbled when he pulled himself up to his feet. I moved to catch him, and he waved me off, grimacing as he leaned against the wall. “I can walk unassisted.”

“Are you sure about that?” I asked, standing.

Etienne lowered his chin, dark eyes blazing. “Somewhere in this place that we should not be, my daughter is being held by a woman who is using her to no good ends. Yes, I am sure. I would be sure if doing it meant my death. This will not stand.”

“Okay. Just trying to make sure you’re all right.” I pulled the Luidaeg’s charm out of my pocket. It was still glowing purple. The color intensified when I moved it closer to Etienne. “You’re Chelsea’s father, so this thing is picking up on your presence. We need to fix that if we want to use it to find her.”

“How—”

“Hang on.” I’d attuned the first charm by touching it to a place where Chelsea’s magic had been used, and I attuned the second charm by touching it to the first. Feeling only slightly foolish, I leaned forward and tapped the charm against Etienne’s shoulder.

The purple flared, and turned back to the familiar neutral shade of frozen starlight.

“It knows who you are now,” I said. “That means we can keep using it to look for Chelsea and not worry about you throwing it off.”

Etienne eyed the charm. “Do you understand how it works?”

“Nope,” I said, with more cheer than necessary. “I usually don’t know how magic works. I use it anyway. Are you feeling up to casting a don’t-look-here over the both of us? I lost a lot of blood getting out of my room, and I’m not sure how many of those I can cast.”

That wasn’t strictly true: losing the blood slowed me down for a few minutes, but it didn’t seem to be doing anything to slow me down now. At the same time, if I was going to be the one picking every lock we came to, I couldn’t also be the one putting up and taking down the don’t-look-here spells. I would exhaust myself before we accomplished anything useful, and then I wouldn’t be able to do anything for anyone. Not Chelsea, not Quentin, and not Tybalt.

Assuming Tybalt was even alive. Samson could never be King. He could still kill the man who held the throne.

Etienne paused, apparently seeing the change in my expression. “October? Are you all right?”

No. “I’m just worried about the others. Can you cast the spell or not?”

“I believe so.” Etienne took a breath before raising his hand and sketching a quick series of motions in the air. The smell of limes and cedar smoke rose, and the spell settled down on my shoulders like a veil. Etienne lowered his hand. “That should hold.”

“Good. Come on.” I turned to head back toward the door. Etienne followed, and I did my best to match my pace to his. Don’t-look-here spells are a form of illusion. This one would work best if we stayed close to one another. Besides, I didn’t trust him yet not to fall.

His clothing hid most of the evidence of the beating he’d received at the hands of Riordan’s guards, but I could see the signs of it in the stiffness when he moved and the way he was favoring his left leg. I was just glad they’d satisfied themselves with blindfolding him, rather than putting his eyes out entirely. That probably meant Riordan thought he might be useful later and wanted him intact when later came. Maybe that was an upside to dealing with sane people. They’d kill you just as dead, but they understood how to conserve their resources until they didn’t need them anymore.

Etienne’s pace was slow enough that we moved through the rest of the floor at about half-speed. The Luidaeg’s charm continued to glow a neutral white the whole time. Eventually, we came to a flight of stairs, spiraling both upward and downward from where we stood.

I paused at the doorway to the stairs, and then motioned for Etienne to remain where he was. He nodded, stepping back. I went six steps up toward the next floor, breathed in, and retreated. I did the same with the floor beneath us. Then I returned to Etienne, stepping close as I murmured, “Definitely Folletti on the floor below us. None I can spot on the floor above, although that doesn’t mean they’re not there.”

“Then we go up,” he murmured back. I nodded, and together, we began making our way up the stairs.

Nothing stopped us as we climbed to the next landing, where another floor like the one we’d been kept on was waiting. Again, I motioned for Etienne to remain where he was while I stepped forward and checked for Folletti; again, if they were present, they weren’t close enough for me to detect them. I waved Etienne forward, and together, we made our way down the hall, looking for doors.

What we found was an empty room above the one where I’d been kept, and a locked one above where Etienne had been. I pulled a piece of bracken from my hair and dropped to my knees, getting to work. This lock went even faster than the prior two. Practice was definitely making perfect. I tucked the half-bent piece of bracken back behind my ear, and pushed the door open gingerly.

Then I yelped, only remembering to swallow the sound at the last moment, and ran to where Tybalt lay motionless on his side in the heaped-up brush. He’d been beaten as badly as Etienne, if not worse; he was stripped to his trousers, barefoot and shirtless, as if to guarantee that he had no hidden weapons. His wrists and ankles were bound. Our captors must have seen him as more of a risk, because unlike us, they hadn’t used twine.

Tybalt’s wrists and ankles were bound with iron.

I dropped to my knees next to him, the bracken barely cushioning my fall, and grabbed his shoulder, trying to ignore the way the heat off the iron baked into my skin. “Tybalt? Tybalt, can you hear me?”

He didn’t respond. That didn’t strike me as a good sign.

Iron isn’t just a way of hurting the fae: it’s a way of torturing us, distorting reality and cutting off access to the magic that normally permeates our days. The stink of it rose from him, iron death and poisoned blood. I shuddered, pulling away enough to shove my hands into the bracken and search for something sturdier than my little makeshift lock picks. I didn’t even hear Etienne’s approach until he spoke from behind me, saying, “We shouldn’t linger. The iron—”

“Go without me if you can’t handle it,” I said, yanking a piece of broom from the pile. I stripped the leaves and smaller twigs from it with quick, businesslike motions, forcing my hands to stay steady. “I can’t leave him here.”

“October—”

“I can’t!” We both froze as we realized I’d yelled. I turned to look over my shoulder at Etienne, who was staring at me, wide-eyed and stunned.

Then he nodded stiffly. “I understand,” he said, and turned away. My heart sank a little, even though I’d been half expecting it. He was looking for his daughter, after all, and Tybalt, while an ally, had never been a friend of his.

Etienne closed the door, sealing us inside the room with Tybalt, and the iron.

“Work quickly, if you would be so kind,” he said. “I don’t know how long it will remain safe for us to be here.”

“Watch the door,” I said. Gritting my teeth against what was about to come, I bent over Tybalt, grasping his wrist just below the iron cuff, and touched the twig of broom to the lock.

Most of the dangers in Faerie are worse for changelings than they are for purebloods. Changelings are the ones with less magic, less physical resilience, and less to protect them from whatever’s decided to eat them for lunch. The one time this really falls down is when iron gets involved. Iron doesn’t hurt humans, and so the more human a changeling is, the less it hurts them. There was a time when I could handle iron with relative ease, even going so far as to carry an iron knife on a regular basis. That time has passed. I’m a lot less human than I used to be.

When my fingers brushed the cuff around Tybalt’s wrist, the metal burned and froze at the same time, an impossible contradiction of sensations that my nerves had no way of processing. Since they couldn’t translate it into anything else, they turned it into searing pain, bad enough that I bit down on my lip until I tasted blood.

That helped steady me, and I forced my hands to keep moving despite the pain, twisting the sprig of broom inside the lock. I was about to let go and step back to recover when something deep in the mechanism clicked over, and the first cuff snapped open. I repeated the process with the second. When the lock released I yelped, more out of shock than anything else, and jerked away, letting the cuffs fall to the floor. They landed in the bracken with a soft thump, and lay there, gleaming dully in the thin light. My temporary lock pick stuck out of the open keyhole. I left it there.

“October…”

“I’m almost there, Etienne.” My fingertips were charred, and it was harder to bend my fingers than it should have been. I shook my hands, trying to get some of the feeling back, before I started digging through the bracken again, looking for a fresh lock pick.

Tybalt groaned. I froze.

“Tybalt?”

The sound wasn’t repeated. I swallowed, hard, and dug down into the brush until I found a sprig of broom that suited my needs. Then I scooted down, bending to begin fiddling with the locks holding his ankles together.

Some pains get better with exposure, familiarity breeding a sort of physical contempt. The pain of flesh touching iron isn’t one of them. You’ll eventually go numb from all the poison being pumped into your system, but that isn’t the same thing. Gripping the cuffs on Tybalt’s ankles was just as bad as gripping the cuffs on his wrists had been. At least this time I knew that I’d eventually be able to get the locks open. I bit my lip harder still, and somehow got the first of the ankle cuffs unlocked. I kept working.

“Almost…there…” The last lock let go. The cuffs fell away. I scooted back in the bracken, clutching my burned fingers to my chest and trying to figure out what I was supposed to do now.

And Tybalt opened his eyes.

Cait Sidhe can see through don’t-look-here spells. I don’t know why; maybe it’s something to do with that whole “a cat can look at a King” thing. “Tybalt?” The question was half-whisper, half-plea, as if I didn’t know whether I wanted to hear the answer. I bit my lip, scooting a little closer, careful to avoid the fallen cuffs. “Are you okay?”

He didn’t answer. Instead, he sat up slowly, touching the burned places on his wrists with shaking hands before raising his head and looking at me. His pupils were so wide they all but devoured his irises, making his eyes inhuman and strange.

I could hear Etienne moving in the room behind me, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was Tybalt, looking at me like he didn’t know me at all. “Tybalt, it’s me, October…”

Tybalt moved almost too fast for my eyes to follow, closing the distance between us in less than a second. His hands caught my shoulders as he crushed his lips against mine, tasting of sweat and crushed broom as well as the more customary pennyroyal and musk. I returned the kiss without thought or hesitation, molding myself into him, trying to express my relief without words. We didn’t need any words. Not anymore.

His teeth cut my lip. I welcomed the taste of my own blood, letting myself draw strength from it. The wound had healed by the time he pulled away from me, and the burning sensation in my fingers was fading, replaced by a numbness I knew couldn’t last. My body could recover from almost anything. Iron poisoning isn’t “almost anything.” The pain would come soon.

And that didn’t matter, because Tybalt was looking at me, eyes returning to normal as his breathing evened out. “October,” he whispered, and the sound of his voice was the sweetest thing I’d ever heard. “I was afraid…”

“So was I.” I put my hand against his cheek. “Don’t scare me like that.”

“I assure you, it wasn’t my intent.” He looked past me, pupils narrowing, and offered a small nod. “Sir Etienne.”

“Tybalt.” There was a scuff of boots against the floor as Etienne stepped up behind me. “Loath as I am to disrupt this reunion—almost as loath as I am to ask any questions about it—we must move. Chelsea is somewhere in this place, and we need to find her.”

“Yeah, we do,” I said, and pulled my hand away from Tybalt’s cheek. “Can you stand?”

“For you, little fish, I would do anything.” Tybalt paused before adding, regretfully, “But desire does not mean ability. I’m not sure I can walk right now.”

“Can you change shapes?”

Tybalt blinked. Then he nodded. “I believe so.”

“Try,” I said, and leaned forward to press another kiss against his forehead.

A smile tugged at the corners of Tybalt’s lips. Then the smell of pennyroyal and musk rose in the air between us, and he was gone, replaced by a striped tabby. The beating he had received was more evident in this form, without clothing to hide his wounds; the fur above his paws was worn away, and there were several gouges in his side. His breathing was labored—something I hadn’t noticed when he’d been in human form, but I hadn’t been looking for it, either. I’d been too relieved to see him awake.

Looking up at me, Tybalt meowed.

“We need to get out of here.” I stood, scooping him into my arms. He settled against my chest, offering a single rusty purr before going perfectly silent, perfectly still. I zipped my jacket to hold him there and turned to Etienne. “Now we just need to find Chelsea and Quentin.”

“Assuming they’re being held in this same location,” he said grimly.

“Let’s at least try to look on the bright side, okay?” I walked toward him. “So far, we’re not too hurt to keep moving, and that’s more than I was hoping for. Now let’s go find our kids.”

“I was waiting for you,” said Etienne, and opened the door.

His don’t-look-here spell was still holding, hanging around the three of us like a shroud as we stepped back out into the hall. I paused to breathe in, testing the air. Then I froze, the smell of Folletti hitting me like an icepick to the temple. There was nowhere for us to run, and no time to explain. I yanked the door shut and clapped a hand over Etienne’s mouth, hoping he’d get the message.

Years of training served us both well. Etienne’s eyes briefly widened before he offered me a short, sharp nod, acknowledging my unspoken request. Together, we waited in silence for what was coming next.

We didn’t wait long. Three Folletti came drifting down the hall, their semi-transparent bodies gliding about two feet above the floor. All of them had their swords drawn, and were looking around suspiciously. I didn’t need to see their faces to know they were on edge.

My experience with the Cloud Kingdoms—and hence the Folletti—is limited enough to verge on nonexistent. Since they were made of air, and illusions are technically bent air and light, they might see right through Etienne’s don’t-look-here. On the other hand, being made of air might make the illusion work even better on them. It was a gamble. As their searching eyes found our side of the hall, I tensed, ready to throw myself at them in order to buy Etienne time to open us a portal.

The Folletti looked right through us and drifted on their way. I kept my hand over Etienne’s mouth and began slowly, silently counting, refusing to let either of us move until I was certain we were alone. When I had reached a hundred without the Folletti returning I pulled my hand away, jerking my chin toward the end of the hall. Etienne nodded. Still holding Tybalt to my chest, I pushed away from the wall and started walking toward the doorway to the stairs.

If Riordan thought we were safely confined in our individual rooms, she wasn’t likely to have multiple squads of Folletti checking up on us. That would be a waste of resources, and whatever she was planning was big enough that I didn’t expect her to have resources to waste. Holding that thought in mind, I put my free hand on the bannister and began descending the stairs. Etienne was close behind me.

That’s what saved us. When the second group of Folletti floated up through the open central column of the spiral stairway, Etienne yanked me backward against him, covering my mouth the way I’d covered his only a few minutes before. The Folletti drifted by without noticing us. Once they were past, Etienne let me go, and we resumed our downward trek.

With the Folletti above us now, we were able to continue down past the floor where Etienne and I had been held. There was another floor below it, identical to the two above. I stopped at the landing, pulling the Luidaeg’s Chelsea-chaser out of my pocket. It was still glowing the color of pale starlight. Chelsea wasn’t here. But that didn’t mean Quentin wasn’t.

Bringing my mouth close to Tybalt’s ear, I whispered, “Are you feeling strong enough to check the hall for prisoners? I don’t need you to get into their rooms. Just find out if there’s anyone here for us to save.”

Tybalt opened his mouth in a silent meow—the secret weapon of cats everywhere—and squirmed to tell me that I should put him down. I bent to set him gingerly on the cold stone floor, and watched uneasily as he slunk out of sight down the hall.

Etienne put his hand on my shoulder. I looked back to him, forcing myself to smile. He glanced down the hall after Tybalt before raising an eyebrow in silent question. I hesitated, considering my answer…and then, finally, I nodded. Yes. I was worried about Tybalt, and yes, I was worried for reasons beyond simple friendship. Oak and ash. If I was going to fall in love with the man, couldn’t I have picked a more reasonable time to do it?

Then again, when do I get a reasonable time to do anything anymore? There’s always something going wrong. If I put my life on hold until everything was calm, I’d be waiting forever for the chance to start living.

Tybalt came slinking back along the hall and wound himself around my ankles in a complicated figure-eight pattern before starting back the way he’d come. I followed, catching his intent, and Etienne followed me. The three of us made an odd procession as we continued along the hallway to another of those damn locked doors. I dropped to my knees, pulling a sprig of bracken from my hair. By the time this night was over—if nights in Annwn ever really ended—I was going to be well practiced in the arts of breaking and entering.

Tybalt sat next to me and Etienne stood guard as I picked the lock. If it was Quentin on the other side, we’d be back together; we could hunt for Chelsea in earnest. I wouldn’t need to worry that my squire was in Riordan’s boudoir, waiting for her to come along and make him an offer he’d really want to refuse. If it was Quentin…the lock let go. I pushed the door open.

It wasn’t Quentin.

Officer Thornton of the San Francisco Police was lying bound in a heap of bracken like the ones we’d found in each of the other rooms. Like Etienne, he was blindfolded; like both Etienne and Tybalt, he’d clearly been beaten. Unlike either of them, he was human. I stood slowly, too startled to know what to say.

Much to my surprise, it was Etienne who found the words I couldn’t: “Oh, Oberon’s honor,” he said.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “That.”

Riordan was kidnapping humans. That wasn’t technically against any fae laws—Faerie has always had a generous definition of “acceptable” when it comes to messing with the human world. As long as you don’t get caught or leave witnesses, no one cares. But she had a mortal life, too, and that meant that Officer Thornton’s presence signaled one very big, very bad thing.

She wasn’t planning to go back to a world where she might be in trouble for kidnapping a police officer.

If we didn’t find Chelsea soon, we were going to be stuck in Annwn.