Page 62 of Night and Silence

Her fist caught me square in the face, snapping my head back and bringing a hot gush of blood flowing down my lip. I straightened, staring at her, and she punched me again. There was more blood this time, May’s cupped hands under my chin to catch it. When the blood slowed, she took her hands away and ran them down the front of her shirt, leaving gory handprints behind. She looked at them and beamed.

“Now we’re twinsies,” she said.

“Oh, root and branch, what is wrong with you people?” moaned Quentin.

“More than we have time for,” I replied. “My sword’s in the trunk if you wanted to take it, May. For show.” My own swordsmanship lessons had reached the point where I mostly didn’t stab myself—mostly. The weapon was too big and too unwieldy for me after a lifetime of smaller tools, and the majority of problems in the mortal world can’t be solved with a sword. That’s the sort of thing that gets the cops called.

“Got it,” she said. She grabbed a handful of air. Her human disguise shimmered, becoming identical to mine. “Quentin, you’re with me.”

“So I heard,” he muttered, and gave me one last, anxious glance before following her out of the car.

Tybalt and I stayed where we were as May retrieved my sword from the trunk, belting it to her waist. She and Quentin hurried away down the street, toward the cave-side entrance to the false Queen’s knowe. That was the one anchor point she had shored up herself. If any of them was still holding fast, it would be that one.

Tybalt touched the bare skin of my arm. I glanced at him.

“I am loath to admit this, but I’m afraid,” he said. “What if I can’t keep you safe?”

“Then you let me keep you safe for a change,” I said. I pulled my keys out of the ignition and pocketed them, offering him my best hopeful smile. “I’ve had some practice. Now let’s go bring my daughter home.”

“Indeed,” he said.

We got out of the car, one of us on either side, and met on the sidewalk. Tybalt took my hand, leading me to the narrow alley between two shops. We stepped into the shadows together, fingers tangled in a lover’s knot. The darkness parted like a heavy curtain, allowing us to pass through into the freezing dark beyond.

The Shadow Roads are always cold and airless for me, but this time, when Tybalt ran, I ran with him, my feet pounding against ground I could neither see nor fully identify. It was too yielding to be stone and too firm to be wood, some unknown substance that existed only in the deepest dark. Trying to figure out what it could be was a distraction, something to keep me from focusing on the fact that I was running blind as my lungs began to ache, warning me of the lack of oxygen.

Tybalt could breathe here, somehow, if not as well as he could in the real world. That was part and parcel of the Cait Sidhe connection to the Shadow Roads. Knowing that helped me keep running. If I ran out of air, he would pick me up and carry me the rest of the way to the exit. Dignified? No. But when has survival ever been about dignity? He would never let me die in here. He would never let me go. As long as I held onto his hand—

Something slammed into me from behind, furious and screaming through the infinite dark of the shadows. I fell, my hand wrenched out of Tybalt’s. Whatever the ground was made of, it was rough enough to scrape my cheek as I slid across it, half the remaining air knocked out of me on impact.

I rolled onto my back, instinctively covering my face with my forearms. Just in time, too: my attacker glanced off them, what felt like talons biting into my flesh. The Baobhan Sith. Tybalt had been wrong when he said she had made her escape by now. She’d been here the whole time, lurking in the shadows, waiting to attack whoever happened across her.

Lucky me, it had been us. I could feel the ice forming on my eyelashes and in my hair as the tips of my ears and fingers started going numb. I didn’t know how the Baobhan Sith had been able to survive in here for as long as she had, but I knew I couldn’t pull off the same stunt. If I didn’t get pulled back into the real world soon, I was either going to suffocate or freeze. Maybe both.

The speed with which I heal means that most forms of death are somewhat impermanent for me. Break my bones, slit my throat, drown me, I’ll get back up again as soon as I’ve had a chance to knit myself back together. Kill me in the Shadow Roads, though . . .

If I suffocated and froze to death at the same time, would I recover? Would I want to? I could be lost here forever, freezing and choking, only to wake up and do it all over again. Maybe dying here would mean dying for good. And then Gillian would be lost forever, and Tybalt would . . .

Tybalt would break. After what Mom had done to him, if he lost me in a place that should have been his to control, he would break. I couldn’t let that happen. I needed to survive for so many reasons, and only a few of them were me.

The Baobhan Sith shrieked, the sound thin and reedy in the attenuated atmosphere. That was all the warning I got before she charged again. This is a bad idea, I thought, and held my ground, waiting for the sound of screaming to draw close. When I judged that she was only a few feet away I dropped my arms, giving her free access to my throat and chest.

She slammed into me with all the force of a cannonball, her fangs clamping down on my shoulder, ripping me open like it was of no consequence. Unlike her, I bore the assault in silence. I couldn’t scream without air.

But I could bleed.

Ice formed on the blood trickling down my chest and arm, turning the hot liquid sharp and painfully cold. I closed my eyes. It changed nothing, but I was counting on that blood, and I needed to offer no resistance. The Baobhan Sith drank, and I bled, and the edges of my awareness started to get fuzzy, like the world was slipping away.

Tybalt roared in the distant dark, furious and desperate. That was all the warning either I or the Baobhan Sith had before he ploughed into her, ripping her teeth out of my shoulder and freeing another hot gout of blood.

So much for the Luidaeg’s sandwich, I thought, among the blank spots that were starting to colonize my mind. Freezing to death isn’t supposed to hurt much. Neither is bleeding to death, or suffocation. If I was shooting for “painless,” I had managed to find the trifecta.

Arms slid under my butt and shoulders, scooping me up and cradling me close. I was still bleeding heavily enough that Tybalt’s shirt was going to be ruined. I was willing to bet he wouldn’t mind, under the circumstances.

“Hold on, October, for the love of Maeve, hold on,” he said, and broke into a run.

I tried to count the seconds, but they slipped away like eels, darting off into the dark. I settled for struggling to remember not to breathe. There was nothing here for me. If I exhaled, all I would be doing was losing the last of the air in my lungs, and the freeze would follow. I couldn’t let that happen. So I held my breath, and Tybalt ran, and then we were breaking into the light, into the bright and burning light. I cracked my eyes open, dislodging the ice on my lashes. We were in a deserted ballroom with cloth over the furniture and cobwebs covering the ceiling.

Tybalt ran for the nearest sheet-draped couch, an overstuffed thing like something out of a Regency romance, and all but threw me onto it, his hands fluttering from my face to my frozen hair to the wound on my shoulder. He didn’t quite touch it, but pulled back, looking even more anxious. I took a shallow breath. It was good.