Seanan McGuire - Ashes of Honor

“Really, October, am I worth this much fuss and bother?” asked Tybalt.

“I am going to murder you! ” I shouted. The car was mostly back under my control, but we were still straddling two lanes, and the drivers around us were still leaning on their horns so hard that it was hard to hear myself think.

“Now that’s definitely overreacting,” said Tybalt. The scent of pennyroyal and musk filled the cab. I felt the weight of an illusion settle over us. Most of the horns stopped, possibly because the other drivers could no longer see our car.

I got us back into one lane, hit the gas hard enough to send the car lurching forward, and risked looking away from the road long enough to glare at Tybalt in the rearview mirror. “What in the name of Oberon’s ass do you think you’re doing? ” I demanded. Something else occurred to me, and I added, “And how did you do that? We’re in a moving car. How did you get here?”

“Cars cast shadows,” said Tybalt. Then he sighed. It was a deep, exhausted sound, and it told me how much effort he had expended in shifting himself into his current position. “The Luidaeg may have provided some small measure of assistance,” he admitted. “I arrived at her domicile only a few minutes after your departure, and once I was able to impress the urgency of my errand upon her, she agreed to help me.”

“I realize I’m the last person in the world who should be saying this, but have you heard of this amazing new invention called ‘the telephone’?” I asked.

“As I have used them to contact you in the past, yes, I am familiar with the concept. This was too important to explain over a telephone line.” He paused. “It concerns my nephew.”

“Raj?” Quentin let go of the handle, twisting to stare into the back. Much as I wanted to do the same, I kept my eyes on the road. Tybalt only needed to be stared down by one of us at a time. “Is he okay?”

“That is yet to be seen.” Tybalt reached forward, placing a hand on my upper arm. “Can you pull over?”

The end of the bridge was in sight up ahead. “In a few minutes,” I agreed. “Tybalt—”

“I wouldn’t be here if this weren’t important enough to be worth the risk,” he said.

“I know,” I said, and I meant it. Now that my first mingled spike of surprise and anger was fading, it was being replaced by a deeper, slower emotion: fear. Tybalt was born before cars existed. He doesn’t like them under the best of circumstances. If he was willing to use the Shadow Roads to get into a car…

This couldn’t be good.

I pulled off the freeway in Emeryville and parked next to a polluted stretch of brackish swamp. A heron raised its head, looking at us without interest before it went back to poking among the cattails with its long orange beak, looking for something to eat. Shoving my phone into a pocket, I got out of the car, slamming the door to make my lingering displeasure clear as I turned to wait for Tybalt to emerge. Quentin did much the same.

Tybalt got out slowly, leaning on the car door as he got his feet under him. The last of my anger fled in an instant.

“Tybalt?” I whispered.

He managed a smile. “Now you see my urgency, little fish. Or at least, you see the shape of it.”

His clothes were torn and ash-blackened, and a bruise discolored the left side of his face. He couldn’t have been beaten that badly without being seriously injured, but—I breathed in deep, testing the air for traces of blood—he wasn’t hurt. I would have known in an instant if he’d appeared in the car while he was bleeding, but it was still a relief to taste the air and find nothing. I started to step forward and stopped myself.

“What happened?” I asked.

“A fair question.” He looked down at himself, then back up at me. “A fair answer is owed. And as to the question you’re so thoughtfully not asking, yes. I was hurt, and hurt dearly. A King of Cats can, and will, recover from a great deal more than one who is not a King of Cats, and I simply did not feel it would be appropriate for me to lie down and die with things in their current state. If you would come with me?”

“I can’t leave Quentin,” I said. I had to fight not to run around the car and fling my arms around Tybalt. That bruise…“Can you take us both?”

Tybalt hesitated, clearly trying to decide what his answer was going to be. “I can get myself to campus,” said Quentin. “If the Court of Cats needs you, you should go.”

“I’m your knight. I shouldn’t leave you on random street corners.”

“I’m your squire. That means sometimes I’m the one who gets to stable the horse.” Quentin smiled, the concern not leaving his eyes. “Or, you know, the Civic. I’m not a great driver, but I’ll stick to side streets, and I know where the faculty parking lot is. Walther can get me a pass.”

Or he could make the car vanish altogether. Either way, he had things covered. “The keys are in the ignition. Do you have cash for the cafeteria?” I asked. “You need to get some breakfast in you.”

“I have my emergency twenty,” said Quentin.

“I hereby decree this an official emergency,” I said, teasing a slightly bigger smile from him. “I’ll call you as soon as I get back to a place where I can use my phone.” I was already walking toward Tybalt, my feet seeming to operate without direct instruction from my brain. “Leave me a message if anything comes up. I’ll check them as soon as I get back.”

“Got it,” said Quentin. He turned his attention to Tybalt. “Don’t break my knight.”

“I haven’t done so yet,” said Tybalt, with odd solemnity. He cast a pained smile in my direction. “This is the point at which I ask you to take a deep breath.”

“I think I know the drill by now,” I said, and offered him my hands. He took them, and pulled me backward, into shadow.

The first time I used the Shadow Roads, I was terrified, cold, and confused. Since then, I’ve been dragged along them for miles, hauled onto them without my consent—and without enough warning to catch my breath—and even stranded alone in the dark, once, when it was throw me into the shadows or let me get shot with a potentially poisoned arrow. You’d think a place of absolute blackness where I got hypothermia would never manage to seem comforting. You’d be wrong.

Every time I was on the Shadow Roads, Tybalt had me, or Tybalt was coming to get me out of the dark. No matter how cold it was, no matter how dark it was, I always knew someone was going to come and bring me home. There’s power in that.

We fell through the dark for what felt like less than a minute—not even enough time for my lungs to really start aching—before we stepped back into the light. I took a breath, instinctively seeking oxygen after the airless passage along the Shadow Roads, and promptly started to cough as I got a lungful of smoke. Tybalt put a hand on my shoulder to steady me, producing a damp cloth from somewhere inside the tatters of his jacket with the same motion.

“Here,” he said. “Cover your nose and mouth.”

I took the cloth with a quick nod of gratitude, not even bothering to wonder how he’d been able to carry something wet through the Shadow Roads without it freezing solid. The ways of the Cait Sidhe are strange. Tybalt produced another cloth from his pocket and mirrored my motion. His eyes were watering. I chose to believe that this was due to the smoke, and not due to the damage around us. If I thought he was crying, I’d probably start doing the same thing.

Putting the cloth over my face helped with the smoke, and my coughing stopped almost immediately. What it didn’t help with was the smell of blood. It had been masked before, since it’s hard to pay attention to subtleties when you’re trying not to choke to death, but now…I am my mother’s daughter, whether I want to be or not, and blood is not a subtlety for me. Blood is a reality. As soon as the smoke was removed, the blood made itself known.