Seanan McGuire - Ashes of Honor

“Is she…is she hurt?” asked Etienne.

“She’s scared, and she’s running, but she wasn’t injured that I could see. She’s definitely teleporting without any problems.” Teleporting, and tearing her way through doors that were supposed to have been locked centuries ago. “She brought us back by way of Annwn. I think she’s starting to wear some seriously thin patches in the walls of the world.”

“What?” asked Jin. She looked from me to Etienne, her wings beginning to vibrate rapidly again. “What are you two talking about?”

“A Tuatha changeling—” began Etienne, then stopped when he saw my glare. He took a breath, and started again: “My daughter, Chelsea, is missing. Her human mother reported her disappearance to me, and I retained October to locate her. Unfortunately, there have been complications.”

“You involved Toby. Of course there have been complications. If you don’t want complications, you buy her a bus ticket and send her to Vancouver to buy those coffee-flavored candy bars they have in Canada.” Jin said this in an almost distant tone, as if her mouth were keeping itself busy while her brain tried to process what it had just heard. “What do you mean, your daughter ?”

“Bridget,” said Etienne.

Jin’s eyes widened. “You got the folklore professor pregnant? Are you an idiot? ”

“See, that’s what I said.” I blinked, leaning back against the table as a wave of dizziness hit me. “Whoa. Why is the room spinning?”

“Probably because you lost enough blood to count as exsanguination in a mortal hospital, and your body’s going crazy trying to rebuild itself,” said Jin. Her gaze turned accusingly toward the slashes in my shirt. “Did you decide to test just how indestructible you really are?”

“Yup,” I said, as lightly as I could. “It turns out that I’m pretty damn indestructible. Me and cockroaches.”

April appeared next to me in a haze of ozone and sparks. She had a bottle of orange juice in one hand and a pack of Twinkies in the other. “These will improve your current condition.”

“Awesome,” I said, taking my snack from her. My fingers were so bloody that it was impossible to avoid getting at least a little bit on my Twinkies. I did my best to ignore that as I crammed the first one into my mouth.

“While my dear October is preoccupied with restoring herself to a semblance of normalcy, if I may: Chelsea has been to Annwn at least twice. She opened a gateway into the Court of Cats. Her jaunts are becoming no less impossible with repetition.”

“And the shallowing is becoming unstable,” added Li Qin. “We’ve had at least five microquakes today that weren’t mirrored in the mortal world.”

“Seven, to be more precise,” said April. “I do not know how much longer I can maintain structural integrity of the grounds. We may need to evacuate for the sake of our own safety.”

I blinked, swallowing my mouthful of Twinkie before I asked, “How can you evacuate? Isn’t your main server inside the shallowing?”

“It is,” confirmed April. “I can survive on backup power for up to nine days before I encounter permanent systems failure. I am more concerned about our data storage and the employees in the basement, who cannot be moved into a mortal environ without raising questions we will be unprepared to address.”

“Employees in the…oh.” I stopped talking, turning my attention to my orange juice instead. It seemed safer, or at least a little less macabre.

The murders at Tamed Lightning two years ago weren’t the normal kind of killings. All the victims were purebloods, and they were killed in a way that meant the night-haunts wouldn’t come for their bodies. Faerie flesh doesn’t decay. The last time I’d been to Tamed Lightning, all the victims save one—January, who hadn’t been killed like the others, and whose body had been burned—were still in the basement, waiting for April to put together the necessary pieces and find a way to bring them back.

“Um, ew,” said Quentin, clearly following the same train of thought as I was.

“It would cause complications with the mortal authorities if we were to remove them,” said April, seemingly oblivious to the fact that other people might find a basement full of dead people creepy. “This is aside from the fact that they are presently unable to conceal their fae natures, you understand.”

“Right,” I said, and stuffed the second Twinkie into my mouth to save myself from needing to come up with anything else to say.

“Now that Toby isn’t on the verge of collapsing, can someone please tell me how Etienne’s daughter was able to open a door to Annwn? Does Sylvester know about this?” Jin paused and answered her own question: “Of course Sylvester doesn’t know. If he knew, he’d be here making sure you idiots didn’t get yourselves killed. Good job on that, by the way.”

I swallowed without chewing, grateful for the spongy nature of Hostess products. “Etienne said he was going to tell him.”

“I am,” said Etienne. “I just found out Chelsea existed. I wanted to have her safely recovered before I went to His Grace with the news.”

“This is a whole new level of ‘better to beg forgiveness,’” said Jin. “Annwn? Really?”

“Turns out Chelsea didn’t inherit the blocks that keep most Tuatha from using too much power and blowing themselves up,” I said grimly, digging the Luidaeg’s Chelsea-chaser out of my pocket. It was glowing a serene white, caught in its neutral state. “Quentin and I each have one of these. The Luidaeg gave us these to track Chelsea down. So far, we’ve managed to get to where she’s been a few times, but we only wound up where she was once, when Li bent our luck to bring us all together.”

“An endeavor for which I am very grateful, as it no doubt saved both our lives.” Tybalt took the hand I had left resting on his shoulder, lacing his fingers with mine as he stood. “The fact remains that she is loose, somewhere, she is afraid, and she is doing a great deal of damage.”

“I think we’re all on board with the idea that we need to find Chelsea and get her to stop punching holes in things,” I said. “We’re not covering enough ground.”

Etienne frowned, sudden resolve washing over his face. “I will stay,” he said.

I blinked. “Excuse me?”

“I will remain with you. I can’t ask you to do this for me and not be willing to help—or do you think having another teleporter won’t be an asset? You have a mechanism for tracking my daughter. I am a mechanism for following her if she opens a door while you’re in pursuit.” Etienne’s frown deepened. “If you’re concerned about getting paid—”

“If you finish that sentence, I’ll have to hit you, so how about you don’t?” I shook my head. “We’re glad to have you. We need all the help we can get, especially since Riordan—”

I was interrupted as the shadows behind the nearest vending machine rippled like a black muslin curtain, and Raj stepped into the room, a revolver in his hands. He leveled it on Tybalt before any of us had a chance to react. “Hello, Uncle,” he said. “I’m here to kill you now.”

Oh, this day just got better and better.

I STARED. SO DID QUENTIN, Jin, and Li Qin. April frowned, irritation evident.

“I did not consent to your presence,” she said peevishly. “Please depart, and attempt your political assassination on someone else’s property.”

Tybalt just smiled. He took my hand off his shoulder and stood. Then he raised my hand to his lips, pressing a light kiss against my fingers, before letting me go and walking, with the utmost calm, toward Raj.