Ashes of Honor

TWENTY-THREE

THERE WAS BLOOD ON OFFICER THORNTON’S forehead and caked under his nose, but he was alive, and he was awake. He turned toward the open door, snarling, “You are interfering with an officer of the law. Take off this blindfold, take off those stupid masks, and release me at once.”

I only had a moment to make a decision. Close this door and leave him behind, or try to get him to see reason and work with us. I wanted to close the door. Faerie was in danger, Chelsea was in danger, and a human police officer was one more distraction we didn’t need. That’s why I stepped into the room.

My humanity has always been a tenuous thing, and I’d been able to feel it slipping since Amandine shifted the balance of my blood. If I was sawing through my hands without hesitation and letting myself be ripped open because it was the most logical route, that meant I was losing my grip on what it meant to be human. A human—a good one, the kind I’d always tried to be—wouldn’t leave another human behind. Until I was certain I wanted to lose that part of myself, I couldn’t leave another human behind, either.

“Officer Thornton?” I kept my voice level as I walked toward him, the bracken muffling my footsteps. I motioned for Etienne to release the don’t-look-here. The smell of cedar smoke and limes washed through the room, almost obscuring the pennyroyal and musk smell of Tybalt resuming his human form. “Are you all right?”

The officer’s brow furrowed above his blindfold, matching the frown creasing his lips. Finally, he said, “Ms. Daye? Is that you?”

“Yeah.” Pointed ears and all. “Are you all right?”

“Are you aware that abducting an officer of the law is a felony, Ms. Daye?”

“I am, but I’m not particularly worried about it, since my friends and I didn’t abduct you.” I knelt next to him, reaching for his wrists. My fingers brushed his skin. He jerked away. “Hey. I’m trying to help.”

“I was trying to find you when this happened.”

“Maybe you should have given up on that a little sooner.” Luckily for me, Riordan’s people hadn’t viewed Officer Thornton as enough of a risk to break out the iron; he was bound with twine. I started picking at the knots on his wrists. “Why were you after me, anyway? It doesn’t make sense.”

“I don’t…I don’t know.” Officer Thornton looked briefly, utterly lost. Then his expression hardened, and he said, “There’s a teenage girl missing, and you have a history of being around missing teenage girls.”

Tybalt took his meaning before I did; I heard the quiet growl from behind me, like the sound a cat makes when confronted with a dog on its territory. I paused, my hands going still. “Are you implying what I think you’re implying?” I asked, in a soft voice.

Officer Thornton was smart enough to realize that maybe he didn’t want to continue down this road. He was also clearly strait-laced enough to feel that he had to. “You must admit, there has been a high incidence of crossover.”

“I’m a private detective. It’s what I do. And you followed me to Fremont.”

“I felt I had to,” said Officer Thornton. The confusion was back in his voice.

“Chelsea Ames is my daughter,” added Etienne, not to be left out of what was becoming an increasingly awkward conversation. “I retained Si—Ms. Daye to find her.”

Etienne’s hastily swallowed “sir” didn’t slip by Officer Thornton, whose frown deepened. “Who are you people?” he demanded. “Are you involved with some kind of a cult?”

“Something like that.” I went back to untying the twine around his wrists, being less careful about pulling it tight against his skin. “We’re the good guys here, believe it or not. As exhibit A, I want to present the fact that we’re not the ones who kidnapped and drugged you.”

“Drugged me?” said Officer Thornton, a note of suspicion creeping into his voice.

When all else fails, lie. That’s practically the first rule of life in Faerie. “Hallucinogens in the air supply. I was seeing flying pigs when I woke up. We’re in a warehouse somewhere—I suspect San Jose, but I’m not sure—and it’s hard to tell up from down. So the first thing I need to ask you to do is not to freak out when I take your blindfold away.”

I glanced over my shoulder to see whether Etienne and Tybalt could see where I was going with this. Etienne frowned. Tybalt smirked, curling one lip up to show the inhumanly sharp points of his incisors. Hallucinations could never be this vivid. It was still the best shot we had at convincing Officer Thornton that he hadn’t completely lost his mind.

“Ma’am—”

“My daughter’s life is in danger,” said Etienne. His voice was calm, reasonable, and without compassion. “If you cannot promise to remain in control of your faculties, you will be no use to us, and may endanger her further. I’m very sorry, and I’m sure you’re a very nice man in your own element, but I will not have Chelsea harmed for the sake of your pride. Do I make myself clear?”

Officer Thornton’s frown, which had been starting to fade, returned in force. “I don’t believe I caught your name.”

“That would be because I did not release it.” Etienne turned to look at me. “October. I understand why you feel the need to free this man. I ask you, as a friend and as a father, are you sure this is the right course of action?”

“I’m not leaving him here for Riordan’s goons to beat on when they realize we’re gone. Besides, it’s too late to change my mind. He’s loose.” I peeled the last of the twine away from Thornton’s wrists and scooted down to start working on his ankles. “You can remove the blindfold now, Officer. It’s pretty dark in here.”

True to form, Officer Thornton ripped his blindfold off, glaring into the darkness. “Pretty dark?” he said. “This is pitch black! How am I supposed to see my hand in front of my face without some lights?”

Etienne and I exchanged a startled glance, and I bit back a gust of relieved, semi-hysterical laughter. Human eyes were made for a daylight world. Fae eyes weren’t, and even changelings see in the dark better than any mortal. Etienne and Tybalt were purebloods, and I was fae enough that I hadn’t really realized how little light was coming in the room’s single window. It was even darker in the hall, with just the arrow slits in the walls letting moonlight in. We might actually be able to pull this off without needing to ask the Luidaeg to melt the mind of a San Francisco policeman.

“Your eyes will adjust,” said Tybalt, with almost believable sincerity.

“In the meanwhile, we need to get moving.” I pulled the twine off Thornton’s ankles. “Are you hurt?”

“I’ve felt better,” said Officer Thornton, and levered himself to his feet. He was moving slowly, but he wasn’t visibly favoring either leg. Maybe they’d been gentler with him, assuming that since he was only human, he wouldn’t be much of a threat. He touched his belt and scowled. “My weapon is missing.”

“Our captors weren’t dumb enough to leave us armed.” I offered my elbow. “Here, hold onto me. We’re going to need to be really, really quiet while we make our way down to ground level. Can you keep your mouth shut?” With a human in our party, asking Etienne for another don’t-look-here was out of the question. He could cast it, sure. We’d never be able to make Officer Thornton understand why he had to walk the way we told him to walk—not without a lot of explanations that we really didn’t have the time for.

The look Officer Thornton shot in my direction was withering. Pity it was directed at the wall to the left of my head. “If it gets me out of here, I can be as quiet as you need me to be. But I’m going to be very interested in your statements—all of you. Don’t think that you’re absolved of involvement just because you’re helping me escape.”

“You’re not the only one who’s here against his will, and my…nephew…is missing somewhere in this place,” I said. Looking chagrined, Officer Thornton took hold of my arm. “Good. Now come on.”

We crept out of the room and into the dark, Folletti-free hallway. I paused long enough to taste the air, finding no traces of Daoine Sidhe nearby, and waved the others toward the stairs. Officer Thornton clung to me the whole while, staring into the shadows with blind, intent eyes, as if he could somehow force the world to become bright enough to let him see.

Considering the fact that we were creeping along in a medieval hallway with windows that looked out on a night that was nothing like Earth, it was probably for the best that he couldn’t see a damn thing, even if it did make descending the stairs a little more dangerous. Tybalt stayed in human form all the way down, leaning heavily on the rail. I shot him a grateful look. Explaining his disappearance—or where the cat had come from—would just be one more thing to tax Officer Thornton’s grasp on the situation. Although, at the moment, what Officer Thornton was grasping was mostly the banister.

Etienne and I took the lead as we moved downward. Etienne stepped in close enough to murmur in my ear, saying, “This is a terrible idea, Sir Daye.”

“Maybe,” I agreed. “But there was no way I was going to leave him there. Even if I was sure the Folletti weren’t going to come back, I don’t know how many shots we’re going to have at the exit. We’re not supposed to be in here.”

What I could see of Etienne’s face through the blackness of the stairwell was grim. “Yes,” he said. “I know.”

The stairwell grew lighter as we approached the end of the stairs, and we stepped out into a wide hall filled with more of those globes of floating witchlight from Duchess Riordan’s knowe. “She’s really moving in,” I murmured. There was no one in sight, but I couldn’t count on that situation lasting. I glanced around, finally spotting a dark recess in the wall across from us, and beckoned for the others to follow me.

It might have worked…but Officer Thornton didn’t move. Instead, he stopped where he was, staring out the nearest window. Unlike the windows upstairs, these were wide and high, giving an excellent view of the star-speckled sky and the wide, unearthly moor stretching outward to the sea. “What is this place?” he asked.

“Hey! Hush!” I rushed back over to him, gesturing for him to keep his voice down. “It’s a bad place, okay? It’s a place we’re going to get you out of as fast as we can. But you have to keep quiet, or else—”

“You might find yourself in a bit of a pickle.” Samson’s voice was self-assured enough to make my teeth crawl. He stepped out of the shadows in front of me, a smile on his face that showed the points of all his teeth. To add insult to injury, he had my knife tucked into his belt. “Then again, you might find yourself in a bit of a pickle no matter what your human pet chooses to do. Really, Sire?” He looked past me to Tybalt. “This is the woman you would betray your people for? The sort of sentimental fool who can’t even make an escape without saddling herself with invalids and idiots? I thought better of you, once.”

“My first mistake was in letting you stand beside your son, Samson,” said Tybalt. His voice betrayed nothing of his injuries. “Run, and I may let you live.”

“That gift is no longer yours to give.” Cait Sidhe can move almost impossibly fast when they want to. I didn’t see Samson preparing to lunge; I barely saw him moving. Officer Thornton fell to the side, shouting in dismay, and then Samson was behind me, my hair knotted in one hand, the claws of the other hand pressed against my throat. “It seems to me, Sire, that the right to dispense life lies elsewhere.”

I swallowed, feeling the points of Samson’s claws prickling against my skin. “Uh…”

“Got something to say, slattern? Wishing you hadn’t interfered with the Court of Cats?” Samson leaned close, his breath hot against my cheek as he murmured, “I’ve seen the way you heal. I may have to dig all the way to your spine before you stop breathing. It should be one of the more interesting deaths I’ve granted in years.”

“Samson…” There was a warning in Tybalt’s voice that would have made my blood run cold if it had been directed at me. “Release her.”

“Surrender,” Samson countered. “Give me your word as both cat and King that you will put your throat into my son’s hands, and then, perhaps, I’ll let your little bitch walk free.”

The smell of cedar smoke and limes drifted through the air. I stiffened. Samson, oddly, didn’t. Maybe he didn’t know the smell of Etienne’s magic, or maybe he just thought there was nothing anyone could do to interfere with his plans—not at this stage, not when he had me in his hands. Whatever the reason, he didn’t slacken his grip until he went stiff, claws digging into my skin. I yelped, feeling blood start to run down my neck toward my collarbone. Then Samson’s hand fell, and I ducked away from him before he could get any more bright ideas.

Samson wasn’t getting any ideas about anything. He was just standing there. I turned to look back at him and saw him staring down at his own side in amazement. Etienne was right behind him, his hand grasping the hilt of my knife. The dark stain spreading through Samson’s shirt told me the rest of the story.

Tybalt’s hand closed on my shoulder, stopping me from stumbling any further backward. I leaned into it, clamping my own hands over the punctures in my throat. Etienne pulled the knife out and stabbed Samson again, and again.

And Samson raised his head, pupils narrowing to hairline slits. “This isn’t over,” he spat, and pulled away from Etienne, moving shakily, but still moving. He grabbed something from his pocket, throwing it into the shadows, and dove after it. The smell of apples and snowdrops rose, overlaying the more distant smell of Chelsea’s magic, and he was gone.

“Oh, goody,” I said faintly. “This is the best day.”

“Sir Daye, you’re wounded.” Etienne vanished, reappearing next to me in another wafting gust of smoke and limes. “Let me see.”

“It’s nothing. Really. It’s already starting to heal.” I didn’t actually know that, but recent experience told me the odds were on my side. I kept my hands where they were, feeling them turning sticky with blood. “Did you get my knife?”

“I did.” Etienne held it out to me, hilt first. “I am afraid you may need to clean it.”

I took a hand away from my neck and reached for the knife, relaxing as the weight of it settled into my hands. Then the weight of Etienne’s words hit me. Clean it. I needed to clean it.

The knife was covered in Samson’s blood, a thick coating of the stuff that looked almost black in the moonlight. Samson was working with Riordan. Samson knew enough to know where we’d be, and to be the one who had my knife. The thought was enough to turn my stomach. That didn’t mean I could just ignore it.

“What—what are you people?”

The panicked note in Officer Thornton’s voice was enough to make me set all other thoughts aside as I raised my head and looked at him. He was backed up against the wall next to the window, staring at us with wide, terrified eyes. The blood had drained from his face, leaving him as pale as the moonlight washing over him.

“This isn’t a cult,” he said. “This isn’t hallucinogenic drugs. You’re not human.” Then he turned and ran, heading for the end of the hall.

I groaned. “Etienne—”

“Of course.” The smell of cedar smoke and limes rose again, and Etienne was gone. He would intercept Officer Thornton, and if he couldn’t calm him down, he could knock him out. That might be enough to buy us the time we needed. I hoped.

Tybalt’s hand tightened on my shoulder. “You don’t have to do this.”

“Got a better idea?” He didn’t say anything. I sighed. “Didn’t think so. Come on.” I pulled away from him, heading for the dark alcove that had been my initial destination on this floor. With Samson running wounded, presumably for Riordan, and the Folletti somewhere in the hall with us, we didn’t have much time.

Tybalt walked with me, frowning. “October—”

“Just watch my back, okay?” I raised my knife before he could say anything else, and ran my tongue along the flat of the blade.

Samson’s memories slammed into me, a thick cloud of resentment, jealousy, and unresolved hatreds. They were a tangled mass of images, hard to sort through or comprehend. I staggered, trying to figure out why it was hitting me so hard, and felt Tybalt’s hands catch me. Then the world dropped away, taking reassuring hands and the Annwn night with it, and everything was the red haze, and the weight of Samson’s bitter memory.

Bastard. He gets everything he wants—he always has, Prince of Londinium, King of San Francisco, and how much of it has he worked for? How much of it has he earned? Not a bit, and yet there he sits, and here I stand, hoping he’ll exploit my son enough to grant me the power to pull us away from this cursed place, these cursed people who walk and talk and call themselves our equals.

I’d always known that Samson was a cruel, resentful man, but I’d never understood how angry he was until that moment. Angry about his place in Cait Sidhe society, angry at the accident of birth that made Tybalt a King and him a subject, angry at the fact that his only living child would eventually have that same level of power and privilege. He resented Raj, even as he viewed his son as the one opportunity he’d ever have to achieve the status he thought he deserved.

I was dimly aware that I was on my knees on the cold stone floor of the hall; I could feel a hand gripping my shoulder, fingers clutching hard enough that I could feel them despite the leather of my jacket and the distance imposed by the heavy veil of blood between us. I clung to that sensation—to the knowledge of self, and the even better knowledge that there was someone ready and waiting to call me back—as I forced myself deeper into the spell.

“So you can get me the girl?”

“I can.” I do not brag—cats do not brag—but I still speak the truth. Riordan came to me with rumors, and I proved them to be reality. An untrained, unwatched Tuatha changeling. She could have amounted to nothing. Instead, she came to be so much more.

“How?”

“She walks the same route every day. I can take her into the shadows and bring her to you before she musters her senses enough to run.”

“If you fail me…” She does not complete the sentence. She doesn’t need to. I know the price of failure better than she does, because I understand what this is. She thinks it’s an escape from the eyes on her borders. I know it for something more.

This is a coup.

“I will not fail.”

Riordan says nothing. She simply nods, and I think again that power is the one thing the Divided Courts got right. They understand that power should belong to the strongest—if you can take a thing and hold it, it should be yours. She would have made a fine cat. A pity, then, that she must belong to the lesser Courts. Unlike some, I will never dirty myself.

But still, she’s lovely in the moonlight.

Seen through Samson’s assessing eyes, Duchess Riordan was a beautiful tool, as clueless and malleable as the rest of the Divided Courts but with a strength of character that he found himself compelled to admire. The taste of his admiration was alien in my mind, so cold and calculating that I would have mistaken it for another flavor of hatred if I hadn’t been wound so deeply in his memories.

Too deeply; I was seeing Riordan in her own territory, and not in the moonlight of Annwn. I forced myself to move forward through Samson’s memory, clawing my way through the blood-soaked veils of recollection until the red shattered and re-formed into something more familiar. The cliff at the edge of the moor, overlooking the sea.

The mongrel girl is flagging. I thought she would collapse long before this, but fear, it seems, is a grand motivator; a few threats to the mother she loves and the father she’s never known, and she was so much more willing to work with us. Still, holding a portal this size open for so long is doubtless…draining. I doubt she will live. Through his eyes, I watched Chelsea struggling to keep a passageway large enough to drive a car through open. I could see Riordan’s garage on the other side—and they were driving a car through, of a sort. A footman in Riordan’s livery was steering a cart through the opening, drawn by fae steeds and laden with farming equipment. From the tracks crushed into the bracken, it wasn’t the first, either.

“How much longer?”

Riordan turns her back on the supply train as she looks toward me. Behind her, that mongrel bitch’s spoiled little squire is bound and gagged in a wicker chair, watching helplessly as the wagons roll through. “Why in such a hurry, my friend?” she asks. “We’re both getting what we want. Shouldn’t you savor your victory?”

“I’ll savor it when that door is closed, and I never need to see your face again,” I snap. “How much longer?”

She sighs, looking disappointed. “You never did have a sense of humor, Sammy. Most of the supplies and livestock are through, and all my people. Why don’t you make yourself useful? Go check on our prisoners. Make sure they’re not getting into any mischief.”

Her laughter follows me out as I use her blood charm to access the Shadow Roads that would otherwise be locked to me in this place, the cold and the dark numbing the sting of being mocked by a member of her debauched Court. And then the light, and sweet Titania, what a gift—they’re here, and this time, no one will stop me from doing what needs to be done—

I jerked myself free of the blood when my/Samson’s eyes fixed on the four of us standing in the darkened hall. There was nothing he could tell me after that, except for maybe what it felt like to get stabbed with my own knife. It probably wasn’t going to be that different from getting stabbed with anything else, and none of those stabbings were much fun. Pass.

“That’s why she was willing to kidnap a police officer,” I muttered, half-gasping. “I knew she wasn’t planning on going back, but this…this…”

“October?” Tybalt’s hand tightened on my shoulder.

“We need to get back to the cliff.” I spat on the floor, trying to get the taste of Samson’s blood—of Samson’s life—out of my mouth. “Riordan’s there, she’s got some sort of supply train going. This was never just a kidnapping.”

“What is it, then?”

I managed to lift my head, twisting around to look at him. “It’s a colonization,” I said. “Riordan is recolonizing Annwn, and she’s using Chelsea to do it.”