Seanan McGuire - Ashes of Honor

“We don’t?” asked Quentin and I, in relieved unison.

The Luidaeg snorted. “Not this time. Once in a while, I make things you don’t need to ingest.” She pulled a wooden spoon from the jar next to the stove, beginning to stir the increasingly vile-looking paste. “Besides, it would probably kill you if you put it in your mouth.”

“You never lose sight of how important it is to be reassuring, do you?” I raked my hair back with one hand, eyeing the gunk. “If we don’t drink it, what do we do with it?”

“You carry it.” The Luidaeg gave the paste one last stir before holding her hand out toward me and saying, imperiously, “Give me your arm.”

Long experience has taught me that when the Luidaeg demands part of my anatomy, I’m going to be bleeding soon after. Still. It’s not like I wasn’t going to wind up bleeding anyway, given the way my life usually goes, and Chelsea was in trouble. If the Luidaeg needed some of my blood before we could find her, she could have it. I stuck out my right arm.

The Luidaeg grasped my wrist, gently turning my arm until my palm was facing toward the ceiling. Still gentle, she pushed up the sleeve of my leather jacket, revealing the skin. I grimaced. She glanced up at me.

“Still don’t like the sight of blood, do you?”

“Not really.”

“You know, there are times when I could slap Amy for what she did to your head.” The comment was made without malice. For the Luidaeg, slapping my mother just made sense. Then she bent her head, pressed her lips against my wrist, and bit down. Hard. Her teeth had looked entirely human when she was talking, but now, feeling them break my skin, I would have been willing to swear that she had a mouthful of shark’s teeth. I grimaced, fighting the urge to start swearing.

“Toby?” Quentin sounded concerned. “You okay?”

“I’m good, I’m cool, I love it when people chew holes in me.” I glared at the top of the Luidaeg’s head. “Haven’t you drawn blood yet ? It feels like you’re about to start leaving tooth marks on the bone.”

The Luidaeg chuckled—an unnerving noise in and of itself—before lifting her head, smiling at me with bloody lips, and turning to spit a mouthful of blood into her bowl. I slapped my left hand over the wound before I could accidentally catch a glimpse of the damage. It would heal. These days, all my wounds heal. That didn’t mean I wanted to see it.

“This should just about do it,” she said, seemingly unconcerned by the fact that my blood was dripping down her chin. She stirred the paste again. The herbs-and-slime mixture changed from green to a deep, almost-black shade of red. “Quentin, go to my room and look in the top drawer of my bedside table. There should be a purple velvet box. Bring it here.”

“Okay,” said Quentin. Turning, he left the kitchen.

The Luidaeg tensed, waiting to hear his footsteps fade. Then she turned to me, speaking quickly and quietly as she said, “This is bad, Toby. You got that, right? This is very, very bad.”

“I thought you made that pretty clear.”

“No. Not clear enough.” She shook her head. “If you don’t find her soon, she’s going to start opening doors, and she’s not going to be able to stop. Those doors want to be open, and they’ll force her to keep on going. Killing her won’t undo the damage she has the potential to cause. If she opens a door all the way to the Heart of Faerie, it won’t close. The Heart wants people. It’s lonely. And that means it’s going to try to pull her toward it.”

I frowned. “I’m guessing that would be bad?”

She gave me an indulgent look, the kind adults give to children who think they’re smarter than they are. “Purebloods make knowes, Firstborn make worlds…what did you think my parents made?”

“They made Faerie,” I said.

“They did. And Faerie misses us.” She shook her head. “If Chelsea’s powers get all the way out of her control, she’ll punch a hole straight through to where Faerie was born, and then Dad help us all. You have to stop her.”

“And if I can’t?”

“Only blood will close a hole that deep—more blood than a body has to spare. Even yours, October. Someone will have to die. Stop her before things go that far.”

“I’ll do my best.” This wasn’t my first kidnapping case, not by a long shot. It was the first one where I’d been told that I would have to kill the kid if I couldn’t retrieve her safely.

“Good.” The Luidaeg straightened a little, smiling toward the kitchen door. “That’s the box I meant! Bring it over here, kiddo, and we’ll see about getting you two back on the road.”

Quentin looked quizzically at us as he walked over to put the velvet box down on the counter next to the bowl of gunk. “What were you two talking about?”

“ How we were going to get back on the road,” I said quickly. The Luidaeg can’t lie. Thankfully, I don’t share her limits. “The car’s been crushed, and Etienne’s with Sylvester.”

“We can call Danny,” Quentin suggested.

“We may have to.”

The Luidaeg opened the box, pulling out two small glass spheres. They looked solid until she tapped them with the tip of her index finger. Then they opened like four-petaled flowers, becoming unusually shaped bowls. The Luidaeg spoke as she worked, saying, “I know stupidity comes naturally to you, but this isn’t the time for it. You can take my car.”

I blinked. “You have a car?”

“Yes, I have a car. I don’t drive much, but how did you think I got out to Half Moon Bay before I met you? I sure as shit didn’t fly. I don’t have the figure for it.” She scooped about a half-teaspoon of gunk into each of the glass bowls, checking to be sure the amounts matched. Then she tapped the “petals” again, and they closed seamlessly. “The car’s parked at the back of the alley, under a don’t-look-here. Keys are next to the front door. Don’t scratch the paint.”

Considering what the Luidaeg did when she liked us, I didn’t want to think about what she’d do if we managed to damage her property. “If you’re sure…” I said.

“I don’t make offers when I’m not sure.” She lifted the glass spheres to eye level and blew on each one, just once, gently. The gunk inside dissolved, replaced by tiny piles of gleaming red sand, flecked with flakes of gold and black. “Here.”

She held the spheres out toward us. I let go of my wrist to reach for mine. My skin was still bloody—no surprise there—but the wound made by the Luidaeg’s teeth was gone. That was never going to stop being creepy.

Quentin squinted at his sphere and asked, “What does it do?”

“It finds Chelsea. You need to take it somewhere she’s been. That will let it attune to the scent of her magic—just don’t get it near any other recent Tuatha portals. After that, it will start pulling you in the direction of her most recent door. If you’re lucky, she’ll still be there when you arrive.”

“So it’s like the candle?” The Luidaeg made me a magic candle when I went into Blind Michael’s lands for the first time. It helped me find the children he’d stolen. It also got wax everywhere , but that was a necessary evil.

“Same principle, different execution,” said the Luidaeg. “If you find Chelsea—when you find Chelsea—hand her the spheres. That’ll break the connection and keep you from getting hit with any backlash. If she dies before you can get her to take them…”

“It’ll hurt. Gotcha.” I tucked the sphere into my pocket. Quentin did the same with his. “If that’s all, then we should probably—”

My phone rang.

The Luidaeg’s expression went blank. “You should answer that,” she said.