SIXTEEN

DANNY MET ME in front of the museum, seated in his car with the window down and a worried look on his face. “What’s going on?” he asked, not bothering to say hello. “Why’d you call sounding so upset?”

“We need to go to the Norton house right now.” I ran around the car and flung myself into the passenger seat, managing not to recoil from the smell of Barghest that rushed out when I opened the door. “Fast as you can. Break some laws.”

“Cops won’t see me,” Danny promised, tapping the bundle of herbs hanging from his rearview mirror with one massive gray hand. I blinked. Until that moment, I hadn’t realized he wasn’t wearing any illusions to make him seem human. He smirked, catching the look on my face. “Upgraded the aversion charms,” he said. “Clover thought I was takin’ too many risks when I took the kids out for their nightly drive.”

Clover was his mechanic, a Gremlin woman I’d never met, but whose work came highly recommended, mostly by Danny himself. The “kids” were his pet Barghests. “What kind of risks?” I asked, as he hit the gas and threw the car into a tight, tire-squealing turn. Humans tended to either overlook the Barghests completely or see them as some weird new breed of designer dog. Like the pixies, they had their own simple magic that hid them from mortal eyes when necessary.

“Sometimes they get outta the car and I have to crank the windows down, and they don’t like the makeup,” he said, waving a hand vaguely in front of his face. Just in case I’d missed what he meant, he added, “You’re not wearing any. S’a nice change, seeing your face the way it’s supposed to be. I don’t like the way you change it, but unlike the Barghests, I don’t bite.” He laughed uproariously, stopping only when he saw that I wasn’t smiling. “Tobes? What is it? Kitty-boy get himself hurt again?”

“Not so far as I know, although I guess that’s something I should add to the list of things I’m worried about,” I said. Danny was mashing the pedal all the way to the floor, sending us careening along the road at a speed that seemed likely to end with at least one corpse, and probably a lot of insurance companies getting involved. Since he wasn’t going to get pulled over no matter what he did, and had been driving professionally for years, I wasn’t as worried about it as I maybe should have been.

The drive between Goldengreen and Half Moon Bay, where the Norton house is located, normally takes about forty-five minutes. Simon had at least that much of a head start, and unlike many purebloods, knew how to drive. He could easily have stolen a car and made it most, if not all the way, there already.

But he didn’t necessarily know that most of the Nortons had been permanently bonded with their skins, giving up their place as Selkies in exchange for becoming a much rarer and more permanent part of Faerie. The Roane were back, and even if he’d seen them in the memories echoed by my blood, he was still walking into a situation he didn’t fully understand.

I touched my pocket, where I had tucked the stub of a hastily shaped candle pulled together from things the Luidaeg had scavenged in Marcia’s kitchen. Walking into situations we don’t fully understand is virtually the family business, after all.

“Simon’s back,” I said tightly. “He’s kidnapped Quentin. He went to Goldengreen, and when he didn’t find what he was looking for there, he turned everyone in the knowe into trees and left, we presume for the Norton house, because he’s trying to reach Saltmist. He’s armed, he’s dangerous, and I’m going to stop him. Any more questions?”

“Yeah, where’s Tybalt? I don’t normally see you rushing into danger without the cat standing by to make sure you get out of danger on the other end.”

It was a fair question, and no matter how fast he drove, he couldn’t entirely eliminate the distance we had to travel. I sighed. “I told him to stay home before I knew how dangerous this was going to be, and I haven’t quite worked myself around to calling and telling him I was wrong.” Or that May was injured and elf-shot and maybe not waking up, or that I’d lost Quentin, or that I was about to do something monumentally stupid for the sake of potentially saving Simon.

Simon Torquill. The man I’d once considered to be my greatest enemy. The man I was now willingly risking everything I had for the opportunity to save. Faerie isn’t fair, and the world doesn’t make sense.

“You sound scared.”

“I am.”

“If this is somethin’ that scares you . . . I know it’s not my place to pry, Tobes, but maybe this would be a good time for you to go ahead and make that phone call.” Danny shot across a four-way intersection against the light and barely ahead of a truck that could have crushed us without so much as breaking a headlight. “If not for your sake, or for his sake, for my sake. You really think your cat won’t gut me like a fish if he finds out I let you do something that scared you without involving him? Think about me if you can’t think about yourself. Think about my kids. Who’s going to feed them if your boyfriend kills me for the crime of helping you kill yourself?”

“If I call him, he’ll come, Danny.” My phone was a heavy weight in my pocket, impossible to ignore. Sometimes I miss the days where people were out of touch if they weren’t at home, where we’d have to go hunting for a payphone to reach out. It’s a human way of thinking. No matter how fae I become, I figure I’ll always have a few of those. “I don’t want him here. Not for what I’m about to do.”

Danny slanted an alarmed glance across the car at me, keeping most of his attention on the road. “I didn’t mean it about helping you kill yourself. You know that, right? If that’s what you’re planning, I’m out. I’m happy to be your personal chauffeur—I smile every time you think to call me, even when you’re screaming, or covered in blood, or a fucking fish—but I’m not going to sit by while you do something that can’t be taken back.”

Oh, no. What I was planning could absolutely be taken back, either by passing around a curse like some sort of evil hot potato, or by finding Oberon and bringing him home to the children he’d chosen to abandon. No big deal. But either way, there were more people who cared enough about me to try than Simon had, and I would be better off than he was.

I thought. Probably. At least Evening and I had never been close enough for me to make waking her up my new life’s mission—even when I’d considered her an ally, I wouldn’t have gone that far. Again, probably.

“I’m not planning to do anything that can’t be taken back, but I’m planning to do something that could save a lot of people, Quentin among them,” I said. “It’s worth it. I’ve made up my mind. I can do this.” And if I forgot I was supposed to be planning a wedding, maybe people would stop nagging me about when it was actually going to happen. That would be a nice change.

That’s me, looking for the upside of everything, even the things that have no upsides.

“I worry about you, October,” said Danny, passing two cars that were going too slow, at only fifteen miles over the speed limit, for his current tastes. “Sacrificing yourself isn’t the only answer to every problem you come across. It would be nice for the rest of us if you realized that someday. I don’t want to have to bury you.”

“I don’t want to be buried,” I assured him. “I’m doing the best I can. I want to get married. I want to see Quentin grow up, and what kind of king Raj is going to be. I want to meet my own kids. Me and Tybalt . . . we’re going to have incredible children. And all those things mean I need to stay alive long enough to get there.” They were ridiculous dreams for someone like me to have. I was never going to get a happy ending. Heroes never do. Just look at Sylvester; he found the woman of his dreams, married her, settled down, had a daughter, and lost it all because of all the secrets that he and the people around him had been keeping for years.

Camelot never endures. No matter how shining the castle on the hill seems, it’s still capable of falling. Falling is what every shining city seems designed and destined to do.

Danny gave me another worried look before returning his attention to the road. I hated the thought that we might be driving into another aftermath, but Etienne hadn’t answered the phone when I tried to call him, and the Luidaeg and I agreed that this wasn’t a favor to ask of Arden. She had a kingdom to care for. As her pet hero, protecting it was my job. Playing taxi for me all over the Bay Area wasn’t hers.

As for calling Tybalt . . . that would only hurt us both, and I wasn’t entirely sure he’d be willing to take me where I needed to go once he realized what I was planning. Faced with a choice between my safety and the safety of the Mists, I couldn’t promise he wouldn’t choose me. He loved me, and he wasn’t a hero.

The road ran by outside the window, lights blending and blurring together until they were nothing but a sparkling stream. To Danny’s credit, while he was clearly unhappy about what he saw as driving me to my doom, he didn’t slow down or veer off our chosen course, and in less than twenty-five minutes, we were pulling off the freeway into Half Moon Bay.

We had to slow down once we reached the residential streets, if only because they were narrower and twistier, winding past homes and businesses. The sidewalks were mostly deserted this late at night, although some people were out walking their dogs. One of them stepped obliviously in front of us, unable to see our enchanted car. Danny swore, hauling the wheel to the side and hitting the brakes at the same time, sending us into a stomach-wrenching spin. I grabbed the handle above the door, hanging on for dear life, suddenly grateful that I hadn’t eaten anything since Walther’s pizza.

The screech of the brakes split the night like the crack of thunder, Danny grimacing as he pulled the wheel, the car shuddering to a stop against the far curb. Miraculously, we’d managed to avoid hitting anything, including the woman and her dog. She was looking around in confusion, probably trying to figure out where that noise had come from. Her dog, on the other hand, was looking directly at us, front paws braced in a defensive stance. He was ready to challenge the car for the sake of his mistress, which would have been more impressive if he hadn’t been a Corgi.

I’ve never seen a Corgi fight a car and come out the victor, but this one was clearly ready to try. The woman leaned down and patted his head, trying to calm him. He cast her a look full of heartbreaking adoration, and she said something I couldn’t hear through the closed windows or over the sound of Danny’s labored, stress-laced breathing. The woman laughed and continued across the street, dog by her side.

A kelpie stepped out of the shadows of an alley right where she’d been standing. Like the dog, it looked directly at us. Unlike the dog, it knew what it was looking at. We locked eyes across the road, and it began to trot daintily forward, probably assuming we were in more distress than we were.

“Danny, you need to drive,” I said. The woman was in no danger—kelpies will stalk humans, but they almost never attack them, and I’ve never heard of one attacking a human with a dog; they’re cowardly creatures at heart, and they don’t want to go up against anything that might fight back. A kelpie vs. a Corgi wouldn’t end well for the dog, but the kelpie wasn’t going to push the issue if it thought there was easier prey around.

For all that they have big appetites and the teeth to match, kelpies usually content themselves with fish and garbage scavenged from human dumpsters. I’d say they were no better than seagulls, if that wouldn’t be such a massive insult to seagulls.

“I almost hit her,” Danny moaned, hands shaking where they gripped the wheel. “She never woulda seen us coming. How could she?”

“Danny . . .” The kelpie was getting closer, head down and ears up, scenting the wind for signs we were as helpless as we appeared. Rolling down the windows to release the smell of Barghest might have dissuaded it, but even a kelpie could tell the small predators weren’t in the car. I didn’t want to start gambling on the problem-solving capacity of kelpies. “How much actual steel is left in this car?”

“Huh? None. I had it stripped and replaced with spelled wood years ago. It’s perfectly safe. How have you been drivin’ with me this long, and you don’t know that?”

“Then you need to drive, because there is a kelpie coming toward the car,” I snapped.

Danny sat up, hands still clutching the wheel, and turned in the direction I was facing. “Huh,” he said. “Wouldya look at that. I’d figure the Selkies would do a better job of keepin’ the kelpies off their front porch, but I guess they don’t mind murderous water horses as much as the rest of us. That lady and her dog clear? We’re not going to be handing them over to the kelpie if we leave?”

“She’s gone,” I said. “Come on, drive.”

“Tobes, I’m made of stone, and every time I ask you to be more careful, you take great joy in reminding me that you’re basically indestructible. What’s that kelpie gonna do, break its teeth on us?”

“I’m indestructible, but pain hurts.” No one likes kelpies. They’re dangerous predators, invisible to humans, which makes them even worse. But they only come out at night, when the streets are close enough to empty that there’s not a lot of damage they can do, and killing them for following their natures has never seemed entirely fair. Plus, every time there’s been a major cull, the kelpies that inevitably escape react by going on a murderous rampage through the surrounding cities. Fewer humans die when we just leave them alone.

But oh, it stung sometimes. It stung even now, as Danny restarted the car and began driving, much more slowly and cautiously, down the street. There was a rattle in the engine that hadn’t been there before. Danny grimaced as the kelpie dwindled in his rearview mirror.

“Clover’s gonna yell,” he said. “She always yells when I do somethin’ stupid to the car.”

“Not hitting a woman and her dog wasn’t stupid,” I said. “If anything, it was smart, since a hit-and-run with no vehicle would have attracted attention.”

Danny brightened. “You really think so?”

“Yeah.” We were passing out of the city limits, onto the even more twisty, winding residential streets that led to the beachfront homes. Those houses came in one of two varieties: either so nice that no one outside of tech millionaires and celebrities could afford them, or old, somewhat rundown, and in the same family for generations. About a mile outside of town, we came to the curling driveway leading to one of the latter houses.

It was massive, almost large enough to compete with some smaller knowes, and had the distinct appearance of having been built up over the course of several decades, with each new architect ignoring whatever blueprints the former might have left behind. Porches and cupolas sprouted almost at random, and windows bristled on every possible surface.

But the shutters were all painted the same cheery shade of blue, and the white paint covering the house itself was fresh and new. The roof was freshly shingled, and none of the many porches sagged. About half the windows were lit up from inside, although there was no porch light. The fae wouldn’t need one. A variety of cars were parked out front, filling what would otherwise have been the yard and clogging the drive. I waved for Danny to stop the car, rolling down my window and sniffing the air as I listened for the sound of screams.

Instead, I heard someone playing the violin, distant and sweet and drifting through the night air like some sort of promise. I smelled saltwater and seagrass and all the freshest parts of the ocean. And clam chowder, coming from the open kitchen window. I didn’t smell smoke or oranges.

Maybe we’d been wrong. Maybe this wasn’t Simon’s destination after all.

“Stay here,” I said, unfastening my belt. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“What, you’re gonna make the strong guy made of living rock sit in the car ’cause you think it’s too dangerous?” Danny demanded.

No sense in lying. “Yes,” I said.

Danny scowled at me. “I hate you sometimes.”

“I hate me sometimes, too,” I said, and opened the car door, sliding out into the cool night air. I didn’t look back as I started toward the house.

The smell of smoke and rotten oranges had yet to put in an appearance by the time I reached the porch and rang the doorbell. Someone shouted inside; someone else shouted back. There was a brief scuffle before Diva, daughter of the former Selkie clan leader, opened the door. Her hair was disheveled, hanging mostly over her strikingly green eyes and also—more importantly—hiding the points of her ears. She blinked at the sight of me, in all my own uncovered glory, and shoved her hair back with one hand.

“It’s Toby!” she yelled over her shoulder. “Told you no one human would be ringing the bell after midnight!” Laughter and some good-natured grumbling answered her pronouncement. She lunged over the threshold and caught me in a tight hug.

“Oof,” I said, and patted her back with one hand.

I like Diva. She’s about Gillian’s age, but unlike my daughter, she grew up within Faerie, aware her parents weren’t human and that that meant she wasn’t either, not entirely. Because her mother had been a Selkie when Diva was born, she’d technically been a changeling until we’d sat down together after the Duchy of Ships, to have me shift her Roane heritage into dominance. Now, she’s as fae as they come, and has a much better grasp of what it means to be Roane than most of her cousins, who didn’t have the advantage of being halfway there before the Duchy.

Diva let go, stepping back and beaming. “I told Mom you’d be coming by,” she said, voice bright, betraying no sign she thought anything was wrong. “She said you had better things to do with your time, but I said that boy was your squire, and there was no way you wouldn’t come to pick him up.”

My blood ran cold. “That boy?” I asked carefully. It said something about how tense I was that I didn’t even point out that she and Quentin were practically the same age—calling him “that boy” made about as much sense as me talking about Danny that way. “Is he here?”

Diva nodded vigorously. “He’s in the kitchen,” she said. “Having chowder with Elsa and Nathan and where are you going? Don’t you want to talk to me?” I’d pushed past her as soon as the word “kitchen” left her lips, barreling across the front room—packed with Roane, many of them holding musical instruments, none of them wearing human disguises—toward the kitchen door.

I hit it with my shoulder, one hand going to the knife at my hip while I was still moving. The three people sitting around the kitchen table looked up from their chowder, blinking in varying degrees of confused surprise. Two of them were Roane, familiar in the vague way that all Roane are familiar to me now, whether or not we’ve been introduced. My magic went into the rebirthing of them. They’re not my descendants, with the exception of Gillian, but my blood knows them all the same, and sings to their presence.

The third was Quentin.

He was wearing a fresh shirt, one without any blood on it, but he looked unharmed—and untroubled, as he dismissed me with a glance and went back to eating his chowder, reaching for the bread bowl at the center of the table and extracting a yeast roll to start dipping in the broth. I stepped fully into the kitchen, letting the door swing shut behind me.

“Quentin,” I said, in as loud and carrying a voice as I could manage without shouting, “what the fuck?”

The two Roane pushed their chairs back and got to their feet, looking at me with obvious alarm. “Is something wrong?” asked one, a girl with hair the color of sun-bleached driftwood and eyes even greener than Diva’s.

“Yeah, my squire’s sitting here eating soup when I’ve been running all over the Bay Area looking for him.” I knew from talking to Marcia that he’d been at Goldengreen; how could he be this calm when Dean had been transformed into a tree?

Easy: magic. Sometimes that’s the only answer anyone’s going to offer you. I took a deep breath, forcing myself to calm down, and walked toward him.

“Was there a man with him when he got here?” I asked. “A red-haired man with yellow eyes, and a big-ass bow?”

“Yes,” said the other Roane. He looked a little older than Quentin, dark-haired and dark-skinned, and as baffled as his counterpart. “He went down to the shore, but he said Quentin was hungry, and he was right.”

“He’s had six bowls of chowder so far,” said the girl, glancing at Quentin, who was back to eating like he was afraid his food was going to be taken away. Which wasn’t an unreasonable concern, under the circumstances. “Is something wrong?”

“Yes,” I said curtly. “Quentin, I want you to leave the bowl behind and stand up.”

His only response was to pull the bowl closer to himself and start shoveling chowder into his mouth even faster than before, like a starving dog who knew with absolute certainty that once this food went away he was never going to get more, ever, for as long as he lived. I scowled and moved toward the table, sniffing the air.

There, under the smell of chowder and fresh-baked rolls, was a ribbon of smoke. It was subtle; if I hadn’t been looking for it, I would have missed it, and Simon would have gotten away with this.

“He’s under a compulsion,” I said, for the benefit of the two Roane who’d been keeping an eye on him, however unintentionally. “Is Liz home?”

“She’s upstairs, um,” said Elsa.

“Drinking,” said Nathan, more baldly.

Elsa smacked him in the arm. “We’re not supposed to tell outsiders that,” she snapped.

“This is October. She’s beloved of the sea witch,” he said. “She can’t be an outsider anywhere in the presence of the ocean. It doesn’t work that way.”

I sort of wanted to ask him how it did work, if I had been somehow adopted by the sea because I spent too much time around the Luidaeg. Was there a membership card or something that I was supposed to flash? But for the moment, Quentin was more important.

“Can you please go tell her I’m here?” I asked, fighting to keep my voice both level and pleasant. The two of them looked unsure. I ground my teeth together, forcing a smile. “Please? I haven’t seen her in a while.”

Casting uneasy glances at Quentin all the while, the two teenage Roane stood and left the kitchen, leaving me alone with my squire. I didn’t have time to do this subtly, not with Simon down at the shore and working on a way to get himself to Saltmist. I drew the knife from my belt, eyes on Quentin the whole time to be sure that he wasn’t about to bolt or throw his chowder at me or something equally stupid.

He didn’t move. When Simon had enchanted him, he’d done so with no functional knowledge of what a Dóchas Sidhe was capable of. He’d forgotten August entirely, and he didn’t remember being my ally or almost-friend, so why would he know the tricks of my bloodline? This spell had been constructed under the assumption that it would be taken down in the normal manner, assuming it was taken down at all.

I ran the edge of the knife along the pad of my thumb, splitting the skin, and waited to start bleeding before sticking my thumb in my mouth, sucking greedily. I wanted as much blood as possible, but I wanted to avoid cutting myself a second time if I could manage it. The smell of copper and cut grass began gathering around me. Quentin didn’t look alarmed; far from it. Quentin didn’t look like he necessarily realized I was still there. All his attention was focused on his chowder.

It seemed odd for Simon to have hit him with such a strong compulsion and given it such a narrow focus, instead of building something more useful and complex. Then again, if Simon was still using Evening’s blood to boost and modify his magic, he might not have meant to hit Quentin that hard. Controlling strength borrowed from a Firstborn isn’t exactly easy, and the few times I’d done it, I’d been working with the blood of a Firstborn who actively wished me no ill will. I couldn’t say the same of Evening.

The wound in my thumb had already healed. I pulled it out of my mouth and swallowed, taking another step toward Quentin as I raised my hand and hooked my fingers, like I was preparing to jerk away a net. In a way, that was exactly what I was doing.

The kitchen door slammed open as Elsa and Nathan returned, now with a clearly inebriated Elizabeth Ryan in tow. Diva’s mother was a tall, blonde-haired woman whose face had already started to youthen, courtesy of her transformation from part-time fae to actual pureblood. Unlike most Selkies with children of her own, Liz hadn’t needed to give her skin away if she wanted her child to be immortal. Diva got Faerie from her father’s side of the family.

Hopefully, she’d inherited more than that from him, and would dodge her mother’s alcoholism. Liz was holding a tumbler of amber liquid in one hand, a baffled look on her face that only deepened when she saw me.

“October,” she said. “You’re really—they said, but I thought—I didn’t think you’d come here so soon. Show your face here so soon. What’re you doing here?”

Sometimes I envy people whose metabolisms are slow enough to let them drink. Other times I wonder if I looked that ridiculous back when alcohol was an option for me, and I’m privately grateful for my limited options. This was one of the second times. “You have my squire,” I said, swallowing my mouthful of blood and trying to hold fast to the magic I had raised in the kitchen. “I wanted him back, and that meant I had to go where he’d been taken.”

“Oh.” Liz blinked, bewildered. “Well, what’s your squire doing here? He doesn’t live . . . he’s not . . . he shouldn’t be here.”

“I didn’t ask you to go get her,” I said, glaring at the two young Roane who flanked her. “I asked you to tell her I was here. Not the same thing.”

“You said you hadn’t seen her in a while,” said Nathan. “That made it sound like you wanted her to come. We were trying to help.”

I resisted the urge to put my hand over my face. “Good job, kids,” I said. “All right, Liz, Quentin is under a compulsion spell, and I don’t have a lot of time before the man who cast it causes some pretty serious problems between us and the Undersea. Can you take your teenagers and give us a moment’s privacy so I can take the spell down?”

“No.” Liz crossed her arms, nearly spilling her drink in the process. “I can’t do that. I’m not leaving you alone to hurt this boy.”

Elizabeth Ryan has never particularly cared for me. First, I was the changeling of no particular status or bloodline who was trying to have a relationship with one of her Selkies—my old boyfriend, Connor O’Dell. Then, after we’d been safely dissuaded from getting involved and Connor had been married off to Rayseline Torquill, I had been the semi-disgraced knight responsible for the loss of a Selkie skin when it was caught, along with myself and Quentin, in an exploding car in Tamed Lightning. As if that wasn’t enough, I had been dating Connor again after his marriage ended, and I was with him when he died. Elizabeth Ryan had plenty of reasons to dislike me.

And that was all before she had become de facto guardian of my teenage daughter, a formerly mortal girl who had abruptly hopscotched over dozens of patiently waiting Selkie kinfolk to find herself draped in one of their lost skins, granted admission to the waters by none other than the Luidaeg herself—Elizabeth’s former lover. And then I’d accompanied the Luidaeg to the Duchy of Ships to help her call in the bargain that originally created the Selkies.

It was no wonder that I wasn’t Elizabeth’s favorite person. It was something of a miracle that she didn’t have standing orders for me to be shot on sight.

“Fine,” I snapped, and drew my knife again. “Just don’t get in the way. I need my squire back.”

Quentin was still eating his chowder, not appearing to notice any of the drama unfolding around him. It was a well-crafted compulsion, if a bit more brute force than I tended to prefer. I could almost admire it, and probably would have, if it hadn’t been cast on my squire.

The two Roane teens flinched, looking worried, as I ran the blade of the knife across the ball of my thumb again. I winced at the pain. The original wound was healed, but it sometimes feels like my body remembers and resents it when I cut myself in the same place more than once in a short period of time. Blood welled to the surface of the skin, and once again I stuck my thumb in my mouth, calling my magic back out of the air.

A bolt of pain shot through my temples. The strain I’d placed on my magic when I’d involuntarily changed the balance of my own blood was still there, ready and eager to make things difficult for me. I swallowed anyway, trying to coax more blood out of the already-healing wound. It didn’t want to come, and I didn’t want to cut myself a third time, so I abandoned the attempt, pulling my thumb out of my mouth and taking a long step toward Quentin.

The air around me was practically crackling with my magic. It was hard to say whether Liz and the teens could smell it—the capabilities of the Roane are still a little unclear to me, and the Luidaeg hasn’t exactly been forthcoming about the strengths and weaknesses of her reborn descendants—but I knew Quentin should have been able to. And yet he ignored the swelling static in the air in favor of reaching for another roll, still eating like he thought he was never going to have another opportunity.

I stopped a foot or so away, close enough that I could have reached out and touched him if I’d wanted to, and allowed my eyes to unfocus until a sickly web of gray-and-orange lines appeared around him. They were more tightly woven than the spell in the shard realm had been, maybe because the spell was smaller and simpler and didn’t need to stand up to as much strain, or maybe all spells had the same number of strands and I just hadn’t looked at enough of them to know what I was seeing. I hated using Quentin as a test subject. I didn’t see any other option.

Reaching out, I hooked my fingers through the top layer of the web and yanked it apart as hard as I could, wrenching and ripping until the strands began to fray and snap, releasing the smell of smoke and rotten oranges into the air. I gagged but refused to let go. I was only going to get one shot at this; I might be able to attempt tackling the spell again, despite my growing headache, but Quentin might know what I was doing, and I couldn’t imagine the spell wouldn’t at least attempt to protect itself from me if it was aware that it was being broken.

It’s safest when working with magic to assume that everything is at least a little bit alive. I kept yanking and ripping, until a new sound appeared—one that would normally have been unwelcome, but which was, under the circumstances, proof that I was doing something right.

Quentin started screaming.

The spell wasn’t visibly harming him, not transforming him or wrenching out chunks of his magic. It was just fighting back, trying to work its hooks more deeply into the tender parts of his psyche. I continued pulling, hard and unmerciful, until it came apart under my hands. Quentin stopped screaming and stared at me, cheeks pale, eyes wide and glossy and filled with unshed tears. He glanced at the bowl in front of him and his pallor turned greenish as he shoved it away and lurched to his feet.

I couldn’t see any fragments of the spell left in the air around him, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. I allowed my eyes to focus properly again. “Hey, kiddo,” I said cautiously. “How are you feeling?”

Quentin responded by sprinting past me to the kitchen sink, where he was loudly and vigorously sick. I turned to watch him go, raising an eyebrow. “Guess you had a little too much chowder, huh?”

Liz belatedly seemed to realize my squire was throwing up on her household dishes. “Hey!” she objected. “Use the toilet like a normal person!”

“I think it was either the sink or the kitchen floor,” I said. “He made the right choice.”

Liz frowned. “He’s doing those dishes.”

“No, he’s not,” I corrected. “As soon as he’s done throwing up, we’re leaving.”

For a moment, I thought she was going to argue and force me to play the Luidaeg card. The fact that I was here on semi-official business for the sea witch had to count for something, even if I’d been the one to get her involved. Fortunately, I didn’t have to say anything. Liz’s shoulders sagged, and she took a swig from her tumbler—probably a larger one than was a good idea with what looked and smelled like reasonably decent whiskey.

“Fine,” she said sullenly. “Just get him out of my house before he vomits on a couch.” She turned and strode out of the kitchen, shoulders back and head high, like she thought she was somehow making a dramatic exit.

I guess enough alcohol can turn anything dramatic. Quentin was still throwing up. I walked over to him, rubbing his back with one hand.

“Hey, buddy,” I said. “I’m sorry you got grabbed. Are you okay?”

“He said he’d be back for me, and that until he came, I should sit quietly and have something to eat,” he said, turning to look reproachfully at me. “He said I didn’t need to worry about a thing until he came back for me. I knew I knew you. I knew you were important, but I couldn’t worry about that. I needed to eat, and I needed to wait, and I needed not to think about anything that could possibly be upsetting.”

“That sounds like a very carefully considered compulsion,” I said. “Did you notice anything strange about it?”

“You mean apart from the fact that it was heavier than it should have been?” He clutched his stomach, still green around the edges. “I think I would have kept eating until I literally burst, because I couldn’t stop. Normally, compulsion spells can’t make you hurt yourself unless that’s all they’re designed to do. They certainly can’t make you do it as a side effect.” The loathing in his voice was thick as heavy cream. He wasn’t going to be forgiving Simon for a while, if he ever did.

“He’s using Evening’s magic to supercharge his own.” Her name should be safe enough here, this close to the ocean, where Maeve’s magic overwhelmed Titania’s. “It’s going to hurt him soon, if it hasn’t already. But we can’t count on him running out of her blood, not when he had so long to collect it. Did he say anything about where he was going?”

“Just that he wouldn’t need me as a bargaining chip.” Quentin paled further, eyes getting even wider. “Dean,” he gasped. “He . . . he hurt . . . we went to Goldengreen before he brought me here, and he hurt Dean. And all the others. I don’t think . . . I don’t think anyone’s alive in Goldengreen.”

I’d been halfway hoping he wouldn’t remember that until we were done dealing with Simon himself. “They’re not dead, Quentin,” I said. “He turned them into trees and toadstools, but those are living things, and the Luidaeg is working on bringing them back right now.”

“Really?” he asked, voice small and hurt and hopeful. It was painful to hear.

“Really-really,” I said. “She’d be here if she didn’t need to wake them up. And he didn’t get everyone. Marcia got away.”

Quentin frowned. “No, she didn’t,” he said. “I saw her in the courtyard. I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t do anything but watch what he was doing to them. I wanted to kill him. I still want to kill him.” He blinked, expression guileless. “Please may I kill him?”

“I’d really prefer you didn’t kill him until he knows who he is and where he’s supposed to be going. Remember that he’s doing all this while under the influence of the Luidaeg’s spell.”

“Which he took on himself voluntarily.”

“Only to save his daughter,” I said. “If this is anyone’s fault, it’s hers. She’s the one who decided she knew better than anyone else, and that she could be the one to bring Oberon back. Simon didn’t do this to himself because he wanted power. He just wanted to bring August home. Now come on.”

“Where are we going?” asked Quentin, still clutching his stomach.

“To do the same for him,” I said grimly, and led him out the kitchen door, into the cool air of the coastal night.