“You don’t trust me,” he said.
I blinked. “Okay, that’s getting straight to the heart of the matter. You’re right, Simon: I don’t trust you. You turned me into a fish. You broke Rayseline. You’ve done nothing to make me trust you, and a hell of a lot to make me hate you. Your point?”
“I did not . . .” He faltered before trying again: “It was not my intention to alienate you. I would have had nothing to do with you until I was free of my . . . commitments . . . so that I might become a part of your life that was welcomed. Wanted, even.”
“But Evening had other ideas,” I said slowly. “She told you to get involved with me, didn’t she?”
He tried to speak, only to pause as no sound passed his lips. Looking frustrated, he took a deep breath and tried again: “I have chosen very few of my actions since I was foolish enough to give myself to . . . to the one who holds me. It’s harder than I can express. I have struggled so long with the need to keep you safe and the need to obey my orders.”
“And now here we are,” I said. “What can you do for me, Simon? You’re still bound, you’re still hers, for all I know, you’re leading her here—so what can you do for me?”
He stopped stroking Spike, but left his hand where it was, resting on the rose goblin’s thorny back. “I can bleed,” he said quietly. “I can let you see.”
“Oh,” I said, feeling my eyes go wide and round with surprise. “Yeah. I guess that is something you can do.”
And here I’d been so pleased to be wearing something that wasn’t covered in blood.
NINETEEN
MOST MAGIC FALLS into one of three schools. Flower magic—illusions and wards—is inherited primarily through Titania. Water magic—transformation and healing—comes from Maeve. Blood magic, the magic of memory and theft, comes from Oberon. There’s crossover, but as a rule, no race will be strong in a school that isn’t somehow connected to their First. As a descendant of Titania and Oberon, Simon had access to flower and blood magic. As a descendant of Oberon, and Oberon alone, all I had was blood . . . but I was very, very good at using it.
“Are you sure?” I hated to ask. I wanted to grab him and bleed him dry, drinking any scrap of information he might have—but the line between me and the monsters was thin enough as it was. If I started taking instead of waiting for things to be freely given, I would cross that line. I needed his consent to be absolute. “Once this starts, I don’t know if I’ll be able to pull back. I’ve never drunk directly from a living person for the purpose of riding their blood. It could go anywhere.”
Simon nodded. “Yes. I understand what you can do, perhaps better than you do at this stage in your development. I give my full permission, and I will not stop you from learning the things you need to know. It’s not like I could stop you anyway, once we’ve started. Words can lie. People can lie. Blood never can.”
That was about as good as it could possibly get. I cast a nervous glance toward Tybalt as I walked across the living room and sat down on the couch next to Simon. Spike raised its head, making an inquiring chirping noise. I stroked its thorny ears. “It’s probably going to hurt.”
To my surprise, Simon smiled. “No, it won’t. There’s nothing in my blood for you to change; I am Daoine Sidhe to the core. My blood won’t fight you.”
That was new information. “Good to know,” I said faintly, and drew my knife. “Give me your hand.”
“No need.” He pressed his palm flat against Spike’s back, not hard enough to hurt the rose goblin, but hard enough to break Simon’s skin in half a dozen places. The smell of blood flooded the room, and saliva flooded my mouth in a Pavlovian response that I really didn’t want to think about. The sight of blood still freaked me out, but the smell of it promised answers: something I almost always needed.
Simon held his palm out toward me. The blood from the scratches was leaking out onto his skin, turning it an enticing red. I glanced to Tybalt. He nodded once, not moving from his position by the wall. Whatever came next, he would be here for it.
That helped a little. I reached out and took Simon’s bleeding hand in both of mine, trying to ignore the way my stomach lurched.
“This may take me a moment,” I cautioned.
“Take all the time you need,” he said.
There was nothing I could say at this point to change what was about to happen, and so I brought my lips to his palm, and closed my eyes, and drank.
—believe she’s really willing—
—looks so much like her mother—
—doesn’t look like her mother at all—
Simon’s thoughts slammed into me with the force of a hammer hitting a wall. I gasped, not opening my eyes, and tried to force my way through that top layer of active thought. I hadn’t been expecting that, although I suppose I should have been; blood holds thoughts and memories, and Simon’s blood was still a part of him, still connected to the rest of his body through the open wounds and the hot skin beneath it. Of course it was carrying more than I was used to.
Down, down, down, I thought, willing my magic to take me there. Like Alice and the rabbit hole, come on, down . . .
The thoughts faded into blurry unintelligibility, replaced by the veil of red that I was more accustomed to when I was working blood magic. I took a breath, only dimly aware of my body—of the fact that I had lungs I could breathe with—and pushed harder, until I broke through the blood, into—
She is so beautiful. She owns this room: all others might as well not be here, because no eyes are on them, not when Amandine walks in beauty. My brother loves her. He thinks I don’t know, because he thinks I am foolish, but I am not foolish; I have seen the way he looks at her, the brave hero assessing the next tower he intends to climb. He won’t have her. She deserves much more than Sylvester Torquill, and so much more than his younger brother, whose eyes follow her like all the rest. I have no chance with her. I have no choice but to look. She is so beautiful.
Seeing Amandine through his eyes was almost shocking enough to throw me out of the memory. She was wearing a long purple gown in a style that had been outdated for centuries but probably hadn’t been outdated yet, not in that moment, and she was . . . there are people who say I look like her. Most of the time I’ll just shrug and let them think that if they want to; it’s not worth fighting over. But seeing her reflected in Simon’s memory was enough to hammer home the fact that no, I don’t look like her. No one with a drop of human blood could ever look like her, and that’s a good thing, because her kind of beauty stopped hearts.
She was tall, with the kind of curves that would have made her a star if she’d ever cared to try her hand in Hollywood, and a face that looked like it had been refined by a hundred great artists before it was given to anyone to wear. Her white-gold hair was held away from her face with a simple circlet, and fell otherwise loose down her back, like a river of molten metal. I looked at her through his eyes, and wondered if the false Queen of the Mists had gotten her fondness for long, pale hair from my mother, who made it look like the only style worth wearing.
I hadn’t seen her since I’d learned that she was Firstborn. Looking at the memory image of her, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it from the very beginning. She looked nothing like the Daoine Sidhe. She looked only and entirely like herself.
Amandine looked around the room (ballroom in the great palace of Londinium, and not a jewel in the Queen’s crown could shine any brighter than her smile) until her eyes settled on me/Simon. She started toward me/Simon, her smile broadening.