Rhys’ hand caught me across the face, slamming my head back down against whatever was beneath me. I choked on a mouth that was suddenly full of blood, hot and sweet and exactly what I’d been hoping for. A man who likes to tell you about his plans is a man who can be goaded into lashing out. Years of dealing with villains and misguided despots has taught me that.
“See what you made me do?” He sighed. There was nothing soft or sorry in that sound. “Now answer my question, Sir Daye. Why didn’t it work?”
I swallowed. My mouth was still bleeding, and I swallowed again, unwilling to let any of the precious blood escape. Finally, as my mouth healed enough to make speech possible, I said, “It didn’t work because it can’t work. She has no Siren blood to restore. I took it all away from her. It’s like I told you before. My magic can’t create—it can only manipulate what’s already there.”
“You’re lying!” The false Queen lunged for me, and only Rhys’ arms around her chest kept her from clawing my throat open. She struggled against him, face set in a mask of hatred that had nothing in common with her mild amusement of only a few minutes before. “You give back what you took from me! You give it back right now!”
“I can’t.” I didn’t take any pleasure in the words, strange as that might sound. She was clearly desperate, and I was starting to wonder whether I had made things that much worse for her. Sirens and Sea Wights were both descended from Maeve, while Banshee were descended from Titania. When she had been the daughter of three bloodlines, she might have been in a strange sort of internal truce, tilted so much farther toward Maeve than toward Titania that she had been able to remain relatively at peace. Now her bloodlines were equally weighted, and there was a good chance that they were tearing her apart.
I took a breath. “I can’t,” I repeated. “But I can take more away. I can make you purely Banshee, or purely Sea Wight. I know you’re hurting. Maeve and Titania . . . their bloodlines don’t blend. If you let me take one of them out of you—”
“You’ll touch me again over my dead body,” she snarled. She broke free of Rhys, and there was a knife in her hand, the silver clean and glinting in the light from overhead. She slammed it into my chest in a hard overhand arc, and I gasped, shock racing through my body only a few beats behind the pain, which was immense and unrelenting.
She must have hit a lung, I thought desperately. I couldn’t lift my arms to claw at the blade. I couldn’t do anything but close my eyes, and let the world drop away.
So I did.
TWENTY-ONE
THE WORLD CAME BACK like the fuzzy picture on a badly tuned television, gradually illuminating itself until I could see the room around me in washed out, under-defined color. It wasn’t the right room. This was my living room at the house, complete with thrift store sofa and dozing Cait Sidhe still gripping the remote control. Raj looked utterly at peace, and utterly unaware of my presence, which meant I was either dead or dreaming. There was no other way I would have been able to sneak up on him.
“Let’s go with dreaming,” I said, and my voice echoed like I’d been shouting down a long tunnel. My mouth still tasted like blood. I swallowed. The taste remained. Not dead, then. I couldn’t imagine that my death would be as bloody as my life had been.
Then again, when I died, I would go to the night-haunts. It didn’t get much bloodier than that.
“Dreaming is close enough,” said a voice behind me.
I turned. “May!”
My Fetch was standing behind me, wearing a long gray dress belted with a length of rope. Her hair was as long as mine, and the colored streaks were back, blue and green and lovely. She smiled at me, but not happily; she looked like her heart was breaking. “Sort of. Technically. Karen’s here, too. She’s just staying out of the way because it’s all she can do to shift me from my dreamscape into yours. Adding herself to the mix would complicate things too much, and she might lose her grip on the whole house of cards. She says hello, by the way.”
“Karen’s here?” Karen was the middle daughter of my friends Stacy and Mitch: sweet, friendly, fifteen years old, and an oneiromancer. She could move through dreams, manipulate them, and use them to communicate with others, even when those others were supposedly outside of her reach. No one knew where the gift had come from—according to the Luidaeg, there hadn’t been any oneiromancers in Faerie in centuries.
We’d first learned about Karen’s talent when she was taken by Blind Michael. There was nothing like being kidnapped by the monster under the bed to make you really embrace what you could do, no matter how strange it might seem.
May nodded. “She came as soon as I’d been elf-shot. I guess she keeps an eye on us.”
“That’s good to know.” I paused. “Wait—have I been elf-shot?”
“No.” May’s expression sobered, her heartbroken smile dying. “You’ve been stabbed in the heart. I know you think you’re immortal, Toby, but you’re not. Your body’s trying to fight through this. I’m not sure it can.”
“What?” The sucking feeling in my chest. I’d been assuming it was because the false Queen had hit my lung, but my heart . . . laughter rose unbidden to my lips. “Oh, man. I never thought this was how it was going to end. That’s almost stupid, it’s so predictable.”
May scowled and folded her arms. “Maybe you think this is funny, but I don’t. You think I want to wake up to a world where Tybalt is blaming me for letting you die, when you could have prevented it? That is not a fun world. That is a world full of bitterness and anger and dead mice in my shoes.”
“So what do you want me to do about it, May?” I demanded. “I’m not exactly in a position to negotiate, here. I’ve blacked out from shock, or I wouldn’t be talking to you, and there’s a knife in my heart.”
“You were starting to look for the keys to his spell when she stabbed you, weren’t you?” May’s question stopped me cold. She allowed herself the sliver of a smile. “See, I can be a smart girl sometimes. Marlis fed you some of your own blood, and you needed more, so you goaded him into hitting you. That way, you got what you needed, and you could start looking for a way out. It was a good plan. It’s not your fault she stabbed you before you could finish.”
“Still stabbed,” I said. “Still blacked out. What do you want me to do, May?”
“I want you to wake up,” she said. “Do what you were planning. You have a few seconds. Time’s different when you’re asleep.”
“I don’t know—”
“And tell Jazz I’m sorry, okay? I didn’t plan on this. I’ll see her when I wake up.” May’s smile grew, turning sad again. “Everything gets messed up sometimes. Now close your eyes, and live.”
I wanted to argue. I wanted to tell her that this was futile, that I couldn’t accomplish anything but looking foolish in my own dreamscape while my body was bleeding out back in the waking world.
I closed my eyes.
The world was replaced by blackness. There was still no pain, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything: if I was close enough to bleeding out, I might have reached the point where pain couldn’t reach me. There was something incredibly alluring about that thought. I could just stay where I was, and the pain would never touch me again.
But neither would the pleasure. I’d never see Quentin crowned; I’d miss my own wedding. I squinted my eyes tighter, blocking out all traces of light . . . until the light appeared in a glowing web of pale yellow strands, crossing and crisscrossing my body like a spider’s web. They covered parts of me that I couldn’t possibly have seen, but I saw them anyway. They were the logical extensions of each other, and once I knew what they were, I couldn’t have missed them if I’d tried.