EIGHT

THE DOOR NONE OF US could see slammed shut as soon as we were through, leaving us standing stranded in the tunnel of roses. I jumped but didn’t turn toward the sound. Quentin started to. May grabbed the sides of his face, locking his head in place. He blinked at her, obviously confused.

“You can’t look back when you’re on the Rose Road,” she said. “If you do, you’ll be dropped off it, and you’ll wind up wherever the road is running right now. We don’t know where that is, and these roads are old enough to bypass some of Oberon’s closed doors. Plus, I don’t know how we’d get you back on the Rose Road. Luna’s unlikely to open it for us again.”

“You know, for someone who tried to put all his descendants under house arrest on his way out the door, he sure did leave a lot of loopholes,” said Quentin peevishly. “Am I allowed to look around?”

“Yes,” I said. “You just can’t look back, even if you drop something. You can’t—Spike!” The rose goblin had never come to join us in the greenhouse. I grimaced. “We left Spike behind. I hope Luna doesn’t prune it or anything.”

“She made the rose goblins, she’s not going to hurt one of them,” said May, who sounded about as confident of that as I felt.

“No, but she might clip back any new growth she doesn’t like,” I said. I sighed. “Maybe it can catch up with us. The first time I used a Rose Road, Spike led me to the Luidaeg’s place. We don’t know how much freedom of movement they have in here.”

“That’s true,” said May. “Let’s go.”

We started walking.

The roses forming the walls were from a hundred or more different cultivars, and their blended perfume was a dizzying mixture that made my already aching head hurt even more. I rubbed my temple with one hand as we walked, causing May to look at me with concern.

“It still hurts?” she asked.

“It always hurts when I change my own blood, and I’m barely human anymore,” I said. “I guess this is my human side giving me one last headache as a good-bye present.”

May frowned. “I know you don’t want to stop being a changeling . . .” she said, trailing awkwardly off.

“Even though it would make everything easier for everyone,” I finished. “I know. Tybalt brought it up while we were at dinner. He’s not going to try to force me to do anything, but he worries about me dying on him, even though I’m so fae at this point that it would take literal centuries for me to get old, and nothing else is going to kill me.”

“I’m pretty sure you can be killed,” said May. “Call it a feeling from someone who used to be your death omen. I think you can die and stay dead. It’s just not going to be easy.”

I shot her an amused look, despite the pain. “Gosh, you’re so optimistic, I should bring you on all my ridiculous quests. It’s easier to do the impossible when I have someone around to remind me that it could kill me.”

“Do you actually know where we’re going, or did we just let a woman who currently hates us all put us on a road to nowhere without a map?” asked Quentin. “Not that I’m questioning your judgment—it’s a little late for that—but I’d like to know if we’re going to wander the rest of eternity through a flower shop from hell.”

“I’m pretty sure starvation is one of the ways Toby can die, so I’ll be the only one of us wandering forever,” said May blithely.

Quentin gave her a horrified look. I snorted and was preparing to answer when something rattled ahead of us, loud as a maraca being shaken by an over-enthusiastic preschooler. I angled sharply toward the sound, and relaxed as I saw a small, roughly cat-shaped creature push through the wall of roses.

“Spike! There you are, my good goblin! I was afraid we’d left you in Shadowed Hills, but no, you followed us here, because you’re such a genius, aren’t you?” Spike shook itself the rest of the way free, chirped, and trotted toward me, spines rattling with every step. The rules about never turning back were clearly more flexible for the rose goblins. I knelt, letting it climb into my arms. It chirped again. “Hey, buddy,” I said, and scratched it under its thorny chin. Spike half-closed its eyes, as content as a cat.

May shot me an amused look as I straightened. “You’re such a pushover,” she said.

“Only for family, and that includes Spike.” I looked at the goblin in my arms. “Do you know where we are, buddy? We’re trying to find Simon. That means we need to go to the place Maeve unlocked for her daughter. The place where the bad woman is asleep. Can you help?”

Spike chirped, louder this time, an obvious affirmative, and leapt out of my arms. It trotted a few feet ahead of us, waving its tail in invitation. It didn’t look back. It knew the rules of this place well enough not to look back for us, even if those rules were a little malleable where it was concerned.

“Come on,” I said, and hurried after it, gesturing for May and Quentin to follow. Not a second too soon: it transitioned from trotting to a flat-out run, racing along the thorny ground. I didn’t hesitate, but ran after it, the roses around us blurring into an undifferentiated wall of red, white, and pink, broken occasionally by streaks of yellow or orange. Spike didn’t vary its pace, just kept on racing.

The smell of roses somehow grew even stronger. I would have considered that an impossibility, since we were already surrounded by the things, but the harder we ran, the more cloying the scent became, until I couldn’t breathe through my nose without gagging.

Suddenly, and without warning, there was a gap in the wall ahead of us, a black slash among the colorful flowers, opening onto apparent nothingness. Spike chirped, still running hard, and leapt through the gap, into the darkness.

Hesitation wasn’t going to help us, and I had the genuine feeling that whatever this was, it was a limited-time offer. I fumbled behind me until I found May’s hand and gripped it fast. Then I leapt after Spike into the darkness, and fell, both of us plummeting into nothingness.

Someone screamed. It might have been me. May was laughing, sounding astonished and delighted at the same time. I guess knowing you’re genuinely impossible to kill makes falling an unknowable distance toward an equally unknowable landing a lot less terrifying. I wasn’t too terribly worried about hitting the ground—I’ve survived deadly falls before—but Quentin isn’t as resilient. I could hear him screaming, and he wasn’t far away.

“Quentin!” I shouted, letting go of May and feeling around helplessly in the black. “Quentin, try to find my hand!”

“It’s dark!” he yelled back, sounding more than a little freaked out. It made sense; we’d been falling for a long time, and purebloods aren’t used to being unable to see. Their night vision is so good that anything short of a closed cave is usually navigable for them.

“Follow my voice!” I kept feeling around, until my fingers brushed against something soft. I grabbed it, hooking the fingers of both hands into the fabric of Quentin’s shirt and yanking him toward me. He responded by wrapping his arms around me. I did the same with him, trying to shield his body with my own as much as I could. He clung tightly, clearly aware of what I was doing.

It would be traumatic for him if we hit the ground and I splashed all over him, but not as traumatic as dying would be.

There was a soft crashing sound below us. I didn’t have time to react to it before we hit what felt like the crown of a mature willow tree, broad and soft and cushioning. It was so much less violent than I’d expected that I relaxed, allowing my grip on Quentin to slacken.

Which is when we fell out of the tree.

I tightened my hold immediately. We fell the rest of the way to the ground—less than fifteen feet, all told—Quentin landing solidly in the middle of my chest and knocking the breath out of me. Also breaking at least one of my ribs, based on the snapping sound and the stabbing pain that lanced through my left lung. I wheezed, tasting blood, and pushed him away.

“I’m sorry!” squawked Quentin, rolling away and stopping himself before he could get too far. Everything around us was still pitch-black, and it would be far too easy for us to lose each other. “Are you hurt?”

Of course I was hurt. I just took a teenage Daoine Sidhe to the sternum. I breathed as deeply as I could, swallowing blood and spit, and tried to focus on something other than the pain. It wasn’t easy, since there was nothing to look at except for endless darkness, but the pain was already fading, whisked away by my body’s ludicrous gift for putting itself back together. I could feel my broken rib bending back into its original position, giving my lung room to heal. Not the most comfortable sensation ever. I swallowed again, catching my breath, and managed to croak, “I’m fine. Are you hurt?”

Because that was the real question. May didn’t heal as quickly as I did, but she could walk off almost anything, thanks to her nigh-indestructible status. I’d be back to fighting strength in a few more seconds. If Quentin had a broken leg, we’d be carrying him.

“No. I landed on you.”

Thank Oberon for small favors. I wiped my eyes, more out of habit than anything else, and pushed myself into a seated position, squinting into the blackness. Nothing. Oh, this was going to be fun. “I can’t believe you followed us into that hole.”

“I can’t believe you jumped.” There was a weariness in his tone that told me clear as the missing daylight that he was lying. Of course, he believed I would jump. There was nothing else I could have done, and everything we’d been through together supported that.

“Yeah, you can.”

He sighed. “Yes, I can.”

There was a rattling sound somewhere nearby, more subdued than normal, followed by a tiny chirp.

“Hey, Spike,” I said. “I know it’s dark, buddy. It’s okay. Sounds like this isn’t where you meant to be, huh? Just follow the sound of my voice, and we’ll take care of you.”

The rattle came again, closer this time, and something spiny rubbed against my leg, moving with the grain of the thorns, so as not to stab me. I only know one rose goblin who’s that careful with people.

“Hey, bud,” I said, and ran a hand along its back. It was trembling. “Okay, we need to find some light, and we need to get out of wherever this is. Hopefully, we haven’t lost the Rose Road completely with this detour.”

“My phone doesn’t work.” Quentin sounded miserable, and a little scared. “I have a flashlight app, but the screen won’t even turn on. I had a full battery when we got to Shadowed Hills. There’s no reason for my phone not to work.”

No reason, apart from “we were in a dark pit somewhere unknowably deep inside Faerie, having fallen from an ancient road that cut through boundaries set by Oberon himself.” April’s good, and her upgrades to our personal technology have been amazing, but she’s still only a Dryad. She’s not playing on the same field as the Firstborn, or worse yet, the Three, and I had asked Spike to follow a trail originally opened by Maeve in order for us to make it this far. We were in a hell of a lot deeper than our consumer electronics were intended to go.

“Breathe,” I said. “Just breathe. Okay. We’re looking for the place where that woman is sleeping.” Purebloods put a lot of stock in names, and sometimes even saying the name of a powerful enough pureblood can attract their attention. Eira was elf-shot and helpless, but she’d been able to reach out through her dreams to harass Karen. I didn’t know how close we were to her now, and I didn’t want to find out by breaking some magical rule and having her decide to possess one of us.

I also didn’t want to find out that Karen was having dreams about me solely because of the threat Eira posed to her family. If I was the only thing standing between the Daoine Sidhe Firstborn and the Browns, this was not going to go well.

“Yeah,” said Quentin.

“Well, we’re also looking for the places Simon has been, and hopefully for Simon himself. We know that when he kidnapped Luna and Rayseline, he placed them in a formless void of utter darkness. A bubble of space he’d created and suspended between the worlds. And we know he must have been able to access it somehow, and he’s a magic-borrower. He could have used their blood to open a Rose Road.” His void had to have been anchored somewhere. This seemed like as good a place as any.

“But this isn’t formless,” said Quentin, sounding horrified. He was doubtless remembering that Luna and Raysel had been trapped there for fourteen years, despite all the tricks they’d had at their disposal to try making an escape.

“No. But it’s dark. And maybe Raysel was speaking hyperbolically when she said it was formless—there doesn’t seem to be much around here, and it’s not really safe to go feeling around for more. Which reminds me.” I sat up straighter, taking a deep breath, and was pleased to feel both lungs expand to their usual limits. Take that, blunt force trauma. “Yo, May! We want to get the hell out of here! Where’s my Fetch at?”

There was no echo from my shout, which told me more about our surroundings. Wherever we were, it wasn’t the bottom of a gulch or gully. See? We were learning things even as we sat on our asses and hoped the dark wasn’t full of hungry monsters!

The pause was longer than I liked before May rasped weakly, “Up in the tree. I, um. I landed badly.”

That didn’t sound good. I pushed myself to my feet, academically relieved when I didn’t bash my head on anything. “Keep talking. I’ll follow the sound of your voice.”

“Are you sure that’s,” a pause to cough, “a good idea?” I really didn’t like the bubbling undertone to her words. I had the sinking suspicion that we were about to test just how far her indestructability went, and neither of us was going to be thrilled with the results.

“Nope,” I said, with forced cheerfulness, and held my hands in front of me as I began inching forward into the darkness.

I didn’t have to go far before something even more helpful than her voice reached me: the smell of blood. It was hot and thick, but not enough to become overwhelming—there was still blood inside her body, it wasn’t all out here with me. The phantom scents of cotton candy and ashes were wrapped around it, ghosts of the magic May carried in her blood.

If she was bleeding magic, she was hurt even worse than I’d been afraid she was.

“Toby?” Quentin sounded worried.

“Shh,” I replied, and kept walking forward, letting the smell of the blood guide me. The ground was fairly level; I didn’t trip or shove my foot into an unexpected hole. That was good, except for the part where it meant we still had no landmarks apart from the tree that had broken our fall.

The fingers of my left hand hit wood. I immediately grabbed hold, feeling around until I was certain it was a tree, smooth, with a fragile, papery bark that dissolved under my fingertips, turning into motes of dust too small for me to catch as they fell away. May was very close now. I could smell it.

Even so: “May? Where are you?”

“Right here,” she replied. Her voice was on roughly the level of mine. She might be in the tree, but she wasn’t that high off the ground. That was a relief. It would be easier to get her down if I didn’t have to climb in the dark.

I kept inching forward, feeling in front of me with both hands, and stopped when I hit the soft, yielding flesh of May’s hip. The fabric of her jeans was drenched with blood. It squelched between my fingers like unpleasantly warm jelly, but I couldn’t feel a wound. That wasn’t great.

From the angle of her body, it felt like she was hanging draped over something, but I couldn’t feel anything for her to be draped on. It was a terrible mystery that I didn’t like at all. I ran my hands higher and froze when they hit wood. As in, the side of the huge, jagged branch that was sticking out of my sister’s stomach.

“May,” I said, fighting to keep my voice level and not alarming, “are you impaled right now?”

“I think so,” she said, with a weak laugh. “I can’t move much, but it feels like that branch went right through me. I can feel my toes, so I guess it missed my spine. That’s good, right? That it missed my spine?”

“Yes, since we don’t know whether your nerves would regenerate from that sort of trauma, that’s a very good thing. Hold still.”

“I wasn’t planning on doing anything else right now,” said May dryly.

I kept feeling around the branch, trying to establish the diameter of the wound. It was at least a foot around, occupying most of the space that should have been her abdomen. Not great. Even worse, I didn’t know how we were going to get it out of her. I had a single silver knife, and even though the blade had been magically hardened to allow me to slice through most things short of metal or stone, it didn’t have a serrated edge; if I tried to saw through this branch, we’d be here long after Quentin had died of hunger. May didn’t have any weapons.

That left . . . “Quentin! Do you have your short sword with you?”

“You came to get me while I was on a date. Do you normally bring weapons on your dates?”

“I bring weapons everywhere. Tybalt wouldn’t know what to do with me if I didn’t.”

Quentin made a soft scoffing noise that I could only interpret as “adults are weird.” “No, I don’t have my short sword with me. Or any other kind of sword. I am sword-free. Why? What’s going on?” His tone turned suspicious on the last question, thus proving that he was a smart kid.

“Nothing you need to worry about,” I shot back. “May, I need you to keep breathing while I take care of things, all right? There’s nothing for you to worry about, either.”

“I have a branch sticking out of where I’m pretty sure my liver is supposed to be,” she said. “This is really more your kind of thing, and you didn’t do this before I was created, so I don’t have any memory of how to handle this kind of bullshit.”

“A branch sticking out of her where?” demanded Quentin.

I swallowed a sigh. “I’m handling it! Just stay where you are and let me work, okay?”

“Okay,” said Quentin, sounding uncertain.

I reached further up, finding May’s shoulder, and gave her what I hoped was a reassuring pat. “It’s going to be fine. I promise you, it’s going to be fine.”

“I don’t think you get to make promises right now,” she said.

“Like that’s ever stopped me.”

All my magic centers on blood. Well, there was plenty of blood around, and I had my knife if I needed some of it to be mine for whatever I was going to achieve. There was no way this little pocket of nothingness happened naturally—or even what passes for naturally in Faerie, where the rules are sometimes more flexible than they would be in the human world. I could tell even without exerting myself that we were standing in something created.

What I couldn’t tell just yet was whether it was the bubble Simon had created to contain Luna and Raysel or something else. I wasn’t sure that part mattered. If this was his handiwork, it would mean Spike had opened the door for a reason, I supposed. But it was so hard to say.

One of the other gifts of the Dóchas Sidhe is breaking things. I don’t do it nearly as often as my reputation implies and it’s not like I’ve had any real training, since that would require my mother to acknowledge that I understand my own magic well enough to use it, but I can do it. Give me a spell I don’t like, and I can probably pick it apart, given sufficient time.

The tree was a part of the black void around us, which, if it had been magically created as I suspected, meant it was part of a large, complicated spell. When Simon had described making something like this, he’d called it forcing magic into the membrane between worlds. If I unraveled too much and popped the bubble, we could wind up exposed and unprotected in that membrane.

Given how hostile the roads that travel through the membrane can be, I was pretty sure we didn’t want to be standing in it by ourselves. I was going to have to be more careful than I’d ever been before. More careful than came naturally if I was being honest. I drew my knife.

The whisper-soft sound of it leaving the sheath was enough to make May tense under my other hand and demand, “What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to help,” I said, taking my hand off her shoulder and bringing it around to the edge of my blade. Carefully, carefully, I drew the knife along the tip of my index finger, splitting the skin in a single sharp line of pain. It was already dark. I closed my eyes anyway, sticking my finger into my mouth. This was something that didn’t require vision and would go easier if I wasn’t being confused by the signals I was—or wasn’t—getting from my eyes.

Everyone has a distinct scent to their magic, something they’re born with, and that matures and changes with them as they get older. Sometimes it can transform entirely, as with Raysel after I changed her blood, or with Simon as he’d shrugged off Evening’s influence. His magic had shifted back to its corrupted state as soon as the Luidaeg had taken his way home. But what I didn’t realize until fairly recently is that magic also has an appearance.

It makes sense—I have to see something if I want to take it apart in the most efficient way I can—but it was still a shock the first time I saw a spell. I held onto that memory as blood filled my mouth and the coppery taste of it settled on my molars. I needed to see this one.

Like a ripple spreading from a stone dropped into a still pond, the unseen space around me began lighting up with gray-and-orange lines, twisted and knotted together like the most ambitious macramé project anyone had ever undertaken. Orange and gray. I breathed in through my nose, looking for the scent of the spell. Smoke and rotten oranges. I was right. This was Simon’s handiwork, and if it wasn’t where he’d been keeping Luna and Rayseline, it was a trial run for the same spell.

Good. I was at least familiar with his magic. I turned my head, eyes still closed, until the spell-strands spreading out in front of me included the jagged, broken-off shape of a massive tree limb. May must have hit the willow precisely wrong when she fell, snapping it off in the impact and then tumbling to land on top of it before she could hit the ground.

Its strands were connected to the landscape around us in places but were closer to standing on their own than many of the others. This was a decorative feature, not a part of the foundation. That was good. It was a start. As gingerly as I could, I reached out and hooked my fingers into the surface tangle of the spell.

It was malleable enough that I could work my way inside. I kept breathing, kept reaching, even as the scent of smoke and rotten oranges began wafting through the air. Bit by bit, I yanked the threads out of the branch holding my Fetch in place, unmaking the magic that comprised it.

I couldn’t see her with my eyes closed, since she wasn’t a spell, and so it was a bit of a surprise when there was a thump and a yelp. I opened my eyes. The lines winked out, leaving me back in absolute darkness. “May? May, are you all right?”

“I’m right here,” she said, from ground-level. “You sort of took my chair away.” There was a pained laugh in her voice. She was still trying to see the bright side.

And I was still trying to see her. I blinked and realized I could make out a faint outline through the darkness, which was impossible; I hadn’t been able to see my own hand in front of my face only seconds before. It was like being in a cave so deep that your brain started playing tricks.

Only this wasn’t a trick. I blinked again, and she became even clearer. I turned and looked over my shoulder; Quentin was about eight feet behind me. No details yet, but I could see the outline of his body clearly enough to know where he was.

“Is it just me, or is it getting lighter in here?” I asked, doing my best to keep my voice from shaking.

“It’s getting lighter,” said Quentin. “I can see you. What did you do?”

“Okay,” I said. “That’s maybe not such a good thing. I broke part of the spell making this place in order to get May free, but if I broke too much of it, it might all fall apart, and we could be left floating in the space between the mortal world and the Summerlands.”

“Oh,” said Quentin, with dawning horror. “Oh, I don’t like the sound of that. I don’t like the sound of that at all.”

“Neither do I, so let’s hope that’s not what I just did.” I turned back to May, who hadn’t moved since she hit the ground.

Now that I could see her, I was glad I hadn’t been able to see her before. Her abdomen was a ruin, a hole punched through skin and muscle alike and most of her organs either shredded or missing. Her eyes were closed, but her chest rose and fell in shallow jerks, even though she should by all rights have been dead at this point. I would have been dead by this point. Still healing, sure, but absolutely dead.

“May, hey.” I knelt next to her, reaching down to smooth her blood-matted hair away from her face. “Honey, I need you to wake up for me now. Things are getting sort of complicated, and we need to leave.”

Now that the lights were coming up, I could see more and more of our surroundings, and Raysel’s description of the place as formless void was beginning to make sense. The only landmark I could see was the willow tree, which we had landed on through pure dumb luck.

Despite the damage it had done to May, I was grateful for the willow. Quentin could have died if we’d hit the ground without something to break our fall. Even as the thought formed, the willow shimmered, dancing in soap bubble rainbows, and popped just as abruptly, vanishing from the landscape like it had never been there. I blinked.

Quentin stepped up behind me, Spike cradled in his arms. “Did you do that?” he asked, a note of strained terror in his voice.

“I did not, no,” I said, as calmly as I could.

“So the spell is continuing to unravel?”

“I don’t think so, actually. I think that was a part of the spell.” Luna and Raysel had survived in here for years without seeing another soul—not even Simon. But they were both ordinary fae, and they could be killed. Something must have kept them alive. “Hold on. I want to check something.”

I closed my eyes and bit the inside of my cheek hard enough to draw blood, only wincing a little from the jagged grind of molars against flesh. Then I swallowed, letting the blood light up the space behind my eyes where my magic lived. My head throbbed again, still angry from the earlier shift in my humanity. I did my best to set the pain aside. If May could stay conscious and talking with a branch sticking out of her gut, I could handle a headache.

The spell blossomed back into view, a web of gray-and-orange lines that somehow tasted of rotten oranges. The place where I’d unraveled the branch was a scar in the otherwise relatively even weave, but none of the strands looked torn, and nothing seemed to be unraveling; I’d turned the lights on, but I hadn’t broken reality. I didn’t think. We’d find out soon enough if we didn’t get moving.

This was all surface level. I sank deeper into the spell, treating it like a blood memory, something to be ridden, studied, and learned from. Below the surface, the lines grew tighter, more closely interwoven; if the branch had been down here, it would have been impossible to remove it without shattering the spell itself. That was useful to know—or to assume, anyway. I really had no idea what I was doing.

That’s never stopped me before. I bit the inside of my cheek again and used the fresh burst of blood to sink even deeper into the spell. And there, cradled inside the nest of snarls and lines and twisted threads, I found the thing I’d been looking for. It was delicate even when compared to everything around it; I couldn’t have touched it without breaking it. So I didn’t.

I kept my distance as I studied the sphere, which looked like blown glass or sugar when compared to the threads around it. It had an orange sheen to it, but it smelled faintly of mulled cider and sweet smoke. Simon’s uncorrupted magic, the way it had been before Evening granted him power and twisted him to her own ends.

I took a breath and let myself rise up out of the spell. “The bubble is designed to keep the people inside it alive as long as it possibly can,” I said. “May, I’m assuming it left the branch you broke in place because pulling it out of a normal person would have killed them. But if we stayed here long enough, it would give us food, water, whatever we needed to survive. The idea is to drive us to despair and suffering, not to starvation. So we got a tree to keep us from splitting our skulls on impact with the ground.”

“That’s . . .” Quentin paused. “I can’t decide whether that’s really evil or really sweet.”

“Kid, I’m marrying a literal cat. He thinks playing with your food before you kill it is a totally normal thing to do. I think you stab it until it stops moving, you don’t prolong its suffering. Maybe don’t make me your moral compass.”

“Too late,” he said simply. “You’re my knight.”

I rubbed my face with one hand. “Okay, look, my head already hurts. Please do me a favor and don’t make it worse.”

Quentin beamed.

Now that I was reasonably sure the bubble was stable, even if I’d managed to turn on the lights, I returned my attention to May. “Are you awake, or did you pass out from the shock of not having a liver anymore?”

May cracked open an eye. “Am I not allowed to pass out from shock?”

“You’re allowed, but then I’ll have to carry you, and you know something’s going to try to kill me and I’m going to drop you on your head. Did you want to add a broken neck to all those missing organs?”

“I did not,” said May, and pushed herself laboriously into a sitting position, grunting with effort. When she was done, she looked down at the ruin of her stomach, grimaced, and asked, “Do you have any duct tape?”

“Not with me. I wasn’t planning to let the Luidaeg do my hair today.” The bubble had continued to grow lighter around us, until it was lit almost as well as a downtown 7-11 at three o’clock in the morning. The light had a similar artificial quality, although at least it wasn’t flickering like some fluorescents. Look as I might, there were no doors or openings, not even above my eye level.

There was also no ground to speak of. Now that the tree was gone, there was nothing. We had found Raysel’s featureless void. If the dark came back, we’d be able to experience exactly what she had for almost fourteen years of her life.

It was enough to make me sick to my stomach. We needed to get out of here. “Right.” I turned to pet Spike. “Hey, buddy. I know you can’t open a Rose Road on your own, but Luna opened this one using the key I took from Goldengreen, and Maeve may have been paying attention. Can you take us back to the Rose Road we were on before?”

Spike rattled its thorns uncertainly.

“Look, I’m asking a lot of you. I get that. But I can’t open doors to anywhere, and if I collapse this place to escape it, we could wind up someplace much worse. So it’s in everyone’s best interests for you to at least try. Can you try for me, buddy? Is that something you can do?”

Spike stood up in Quentin’s arms, looking more feline than ever in the moment before it leapt down and trotted away from us. It wasn’t heading for the wall or for the horizon; neither of those things existed. It was moving toward something. The three of us stayed where we were, Quentin and I on our feet, May on the invisible ground, poking gingerly at the edges of her wounded stomach with one finger.

She’s a Fetch and I’m Dóchas Sidhe. We’re sisters in every way that counts, but blood doesn’t make that list. She has neither my talent with blood magic nor my healing, although she still heals faster than someone who isn’t indestructible. It would probably take her months to regrow her missing organs. She would regrow them, which put her well ahead of most people.

Spike stopped and looked over its shoulder, chirping an invitation. “Guess the prohibition against looking back doesn’t apply here,” I said, and turned to offer May my hands. “Come on. The rose goblin says it’s time to go.”

“I’m not sure I can walk,” she said, but pushed off against the ground before reaching for me, clinging to my forearms for leverage as she levered herself to her feet. The motion caused another sheet of blood to fall from her wounds, mostly clotted but dislodged by gravity. Something red and meaty fell out along with it, hitting the ground at our feet with a soft plop. We both looked at it. Quentin spoke first.

“Ew,” he said.

“Agreed,” said May. She took an experimental step, slow and unsteady. Her legs held her, and she breathed a sigh of relief. “I’m not sure how this is working, and I’m not going to question it too deeply,” she said. “As long as I can stand on my own, I’m going to be okay.”

“As long as we don’t have to run,” I said. “We’ll get you bandaged up as soon as we have the opportunity.” I don’t carry much in the way of first aid supplies. With the way I heal, I’d never have time to use them. Not that it would have made much of a difference if I’d been carrying an emergency kit; given the size of her wounds, she could have used all the gauze in an emergency room and still gone looking for more.

She leaned heavily on my arm as we moved toward Spike, Quentin following anxiously along behind us, ready to catch her if she fell.

“I’m hurt, not fragile,” she snapped, and promptly winced, adding, “I’m sorry. That wasn’t fair. You’re not the one who hurt me.”

“No, Toby’s the one who dragged you into a hole in the fabric of the universe,” he muttered. When I shot him a sharp look, he shrugged, and said, “It’s the truth!”

“Way to have my back, squire,” I said.

Spike rattled its thorns impatiently at us. We kept walking, May’s blood unpleasantly warm against my hands. Was this how my friends usually felt about me? If so, I had some apologizing to do, because I didn’t like it. Not at all.

When we finally reached the place where Spike waited, it rattled its thorns for a final time before leaping into the empty air and disappearing. There was no hole or visible opening; the rose goblin was simply gone, winking out of view like it had never been there at all.

“Well, if I tore the spell enough to turn the lights on, it’s not so hard to believe that I could also have activated the emergency exit,” I said. “Simon must have gotten in and out at least once, and that means he’d need a door to do it.”

Still bracing May against my side, I took a big step forward, into the exact spot where Spike had jumped. The white empty space immediately disappeared, like we’d crossed the threshold of some unseen room, and we were back on the Rose Road, surrounded by walls of thorns and flowers, the scent of roses in full bloom spreading everywhere.

This wasn’t where we’d left the Road; the roses here were darker, deeper in color, the red trending toward black, and the scent of them was older and wilder, like something that had never seen the inside of a garden. I tried to turn and call to Quentin that it was safe and found myself confronted by an unbroken wall of thorns. He’d have to follow on his own if he was going to follow at all.

Spike trotted a few feet down the Road, then sat and began grooming one of its forepaws, as smug as any cat has ever been since the beginning of the relationship between humans and domesticated felines. Maybe since before that. It’s difficult to say.

There was no sound or rip in the air or anything else to herald Quentin’s appearance. He was just suddenly staggering out of the air and into the rose-scented warmth of the Rose Road, a startled expression on his face. As I’ve taught him, intentionally or no, he immediately turned it into anger, rounding on me.

“You left me!” he shouted. “You were there and then you weren’t there and—and I didn’t know where you were, and you left me!”

“I left you and you followed,” I said. “That was all you had to do. Right now, you have as much information about the situation as we do.”

“What is the situation?” asked May. She sagged a little but didn’t sit down. I guess a butt full of thorns wouldn’t have improved her situation any.

“We keep going,” I said. “But now we know we’re on the right track.”

At least I hoped that was what we knew. All I was sure of was that we had to keep going. We were in deep enough that the only way out was through.