“Why not?” Tybalt gave the false Queen a shake. She moaned, the sound garbled and distorted by the pressure of his hand against her throat. “She earned this. She paid for every scrap of it. She hurt you.”
“I got better.” I let go of Marlis’ arm in order to touch his, trying to keep my hands gentle. It was hard—I had so little balance, and the world was still so unsteady—but for Tybalt, I would try. “I always get better. You’re better than she is. Don’t do this. Don’t break the Law.”
“No one would ever know,” he snarled. He shook her again. This time, she didn’t waste air on moaning, although her hands continued to scrabble against his grip.
“You would know,” I said softly.
“I have an alternative,” said Marlis.
We both turned to look at her, Tybalt holding the false Queen off the floor and me covered in my own blood. We must have made a pretty pair, because she flushed red, taking a small step backward before straightening her shoulders and holding her ground.
“I have an alternative,” she repeated. She dipped her hand into one pocket of her butcher’s apron, producing a small, leather-wrapped bundle. The Queen began kicking and squirming even harder, her eyes almost bugging out of her head. Marlis ignored her. Instead, she calmly unwrapped the leather, producing a short, stone-tipped arrow fletched in the colors of Silences. She held it out to me. “Let her sleep.”
“I would rather let her bleed,” said Tybalt.
“But the Law says you can let her sleep.” Marlis looked to the false Queen, and there was no softness in her eyes. “Believe me, this isn’t any better.”
“Mercy rarely is.” I reached out and took the elf-shot gingerly by the shaft, careful to avoid the point as much as possible. I looked to Tybalt. “Please.”
“She has hurt you too many times.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “Don’t let her hurt me by taking you away.”
He stared at me for a moment, instinct and intellect warring in his eyes. Then he lowered her to the floor, hand still clamped around her throat, and looked away.
The false Queen glared hatred and fury at me as I pressed the arrow’s tip against the skin of her collarbone. “Sweet dreams,” I said, and drove it home.
The tension went out of her instantly as the magic of the elf-shot washed through her body, driving her down into sleep. Tybalt dropped her a heartbeat later, letting her fall to the floor like so much trash. Then he turned to me, took a single step forward, and wrapped his arms around me, crushing me against his chest. He was shaking. The vibrations seemed to radiate out from his center, making them impossible to ignore, and so I didn’t try. I just put my arms around him, and let him hold me until the shaking slowed to something more manageable.
He made a small, unhappy noise when I began to pull away, but he didn’t stop me. He knew better. I left my hand on his arm, unwilling to fully break the contact between us. I needed him as much as he needed me.
“Where’s Quentin?” I asked.
“In the Court of Cats,” said Tybalt. “Jolgeir handed him a stack of graphic novels and told him not to touch anything. We may never get him back.”
“Good. That means he’s safe. Where’s Walther?”
“Still working,” said Marlis.
“That means we only have two loose ends.” I looked at the false Queen, sleeping on the floor, and at the room, where I had been intended to spend the rest of my life bleeding for the King’s pleasure. Then I turned back to Marlis. “Rhys ran. Where did he go? We need to find him, and then we need to find Tia. She betrayed us.” She betrayed all of Silences.
They both needed to pay.
“Why?” Marlis asked. “You’re free.”
“Yeah, but he’s not.” I smiled thinly. “I have diplomatic immunity from being cut up by assholes. He broke it, even if he wants to claim that finding me in the vault was proof of treason. The High King isn’t going to let him keep his throne, and I intend to deliver the fucker to Toronto myself. As for Tia, she’s a bad dog, and bad dogs get punished. Now let’s go.”
The room where I’d been destined to be sliced and diced was connected to a hallway that connected, in turn, to the main hall. Marlis led the way. We didn’t see anyone as we walked the halls like something out of a horror story, me drenched in blood, Tybalt still more cat than man, and Marlis in her butcher’s apron, which she had refused to remove before we left the surgery room. “I’m done hiding what he made us do in his name,” she’d said, and now she stalked ahead of us, a scalpel in her hand and murder in her eyes. If she found Rhys first, there might be a violation of the Law after all—and I couldn’t say it wasn’t earned. After what the bastard had done to her family, I would have been happy holding him down while she killed him.
But I didn’t have that luxury. I’d see him deposed, elf-shot, and shunned by pureblood society before I’d see him dead. He didn’t deserve to turn me, or anyone else, into a killer.
“That blow to the head should have broken the skin,” I said. “If he’s bleeding, I’ll find him.”
Something touched my shoulder. I turned just enough to see that it was Tybalt’s hand. His eyes were still fixed straight ahead, his pupils narrow slits of black amongst the green. There was a tremble in his fingers that worried me, but this wasn’t the time to ask him about it, or to do anything but keep on walking. We had to find the King of Silences. We couldn’t fall apart now.
“So I’m thinking this isn’t where we’re going to go for our honeymoon,” I said quietly.
Tybalt almost jumped, turning to stare at me like he had just noticed my presence—even though his hand was still resting against my shoulder, even though he hadn’t been more than a few feet away since we’d been reunited. “I would prefer something drier, and less filled with intrigue,” he said.
“That means Disney World’s out, too,” I said. I offered him a smile. He didn’t return it. “I’m okay, Tybalt. It’s almost over.” He didn’t know how close I’d come to bleeding out. Sure, I was covered in the stuff, but that didn’t mean anything—I’d been covered in blood before, lots of times. It wasn’t always life-threatening. Not to me. As long as May didn’t tell him the false Queen’s knife had actually pierced my heart, he never needed to know.
Sometimes silence is a greater form of mercy than the truth.
“Is it?” he asked, and I didn’t have an answer for him.
Marlis stopped at a blank stretch of wall. I almost expected her to walk straight through it, like she had before, but instead she reached out and touched a patch of wood, her fingers tracing the grain. “There used to be a gold yarrow branch here,” she said. “He had it removed. He had everything but the fountain removed, and he would have taken that, too, if it hadn’t been connected to the foundation of the castle.”
“Home décor is not currently our priority,” I said.
She shook her head. “It should be,” she said, and pushed inward.
The wall swung open, revealing, not a hidden passageway, but an entire hidden room. It was empty, and smelled of dust and long, lonely days, hours where no one walked within it, or even remembered its existence. Marlis stepped inside. Tybalt and I followed her, his hand remaining on my shoulder right up to the moment when I stiffened, sniffing the air, and turned to point at a narrow doorway on the room’s far wall.
“That way,” I said. “He went that way.” The smell of blood hung in the air, faintly tinged with wine vinegar and meadowsweet. That could have been the residue of his magic: if he’d teleported here, the smell would naturally have lingered.
This time, I took the lead, crossing the room and heading down the narrow hall with Tybalt so close at my heels that if I stopped, we were going to have a collision. I didn’t let it slow me down. The smell of blood and magic might be lingering now, but it wouldn’t last forever; it never did. If we were going to find Rhys, we needed to do it soon.