Seanan McGuire - Rosemary and Rue

He froze, expression faltering as my words sunk in. I was right and he knew it: it wasn’t fair to blame them for my stupidity. He settled for folding his arms and glaring, saying, “You should be more careful.”

“How?” I asked. “Stop talking to people? Don’t leave the house—or what, better yet, just stay here forever? I can’t find out what happened to Evening if I do that, and if I don’t find out who killed her, you don’t get paid.” If I don’t find out what happened, paying you is going to be the least of my worries.

Devin sighed, reaching out to lay the back of his hand against my cheek. “I’d rather have you alive than get paid, Toby. There’s still time to walk away. If you don’t want this in the hands of the Courts, just tell me what you have so far, and I’ll make it someone else’s problem. You can let it be, and know that you did what you could.”

“I can’t,” I said, shaking my head. “I gave her my word.”

That was a lie: I didn’t give my word, Evening took it. Devin didn’t know that. There’s nothing shameful or embarrassing about getting caught in a binding, especially one thrown by someone as powerful as Evening, and I’d been planning to come Home to tell him everything. I opened my mouth to tell him and stopped. Something wasn’t right. The idea of telling him just seemed wrong.

“Toby . . .” he sighed.

“I know.”

We sat there looking at each other for a few minutes, Dare and Manuel watching from their seats. The poor kids must have felt like they were sitting on a nuclear testing site. Which of us was scarier—him or me?

I was almost ready to start apologizing for being dumb enough to get myself cursed when Devin shook his head, turning his face away. “If anything happens to you . . .”

“We’ll just run on past experience and assume I’ll be back in fourteen years. You can yell at me then.”

He didn’t look at me. Apparently, this was one of those situations that humor couldn’t defuse. I’ve never been very good at spotting those. “That’s not funny.”

The pain hadn’t returned; except for the couch springs poking me in the small of the back, I felt fine. That worried me. It might mean I was finally too broken to fix. “Can I walk?”

Turning back to me, Devin smiled, eyes still sad. “Would I be trying to keep you here if you couldn’t walk?” he asked, and offered his hands. “Get up. There’s a mirror in the bathroom.”

Getting up was easier said than done, even with his help. Once I was upright, I kept hold of his hands, waiting for the world to stop swimming in and out of focus. At least my legs were doing what I told them to.

“I got it,” I said, letting go and turning to stumble toward the door.

Going from the well-lit office to the dark hall was disorienting. My toes caught on the doorframe, and I tripped, catching myself against the wall with my left arm. I froze, staring at my outflung arm. Nothing hurt. Not my leg, not my shoulder, nothing.

Another unpleasant thought hit me as I pushed myself away from the wall as slowly as I could manage without overbalancing. What time was it? I’d promised Sylvester that I’d call if I needed help, and that was before I went and got myself shot. He had to be frantic with worry.

I could call once I knew how bad the damage was. Opening the door to the women’s bathroom, I stepped inside.

The only difference between the bathrooms at Home is that the men’s room gets better graffiti and the women’s room is quieter. The men’s room also has a working urinal—the one in the women’s room was spray-painted purple and filled with cement before I came to live there. I don’t know why, but I’m sure that there was a lot of beer involved. A Gwragen half-blood was slouching against the sink, a cigarette dangling from her candy-apple red lips. The color was definitely not lipstick. She straightened as I entered, dropping her cigarette to the tile floor and making a hasty exit. I watched her go, blinking. Root and branch, was I that frightening?

Steeling myself, I turned to risk a glance in the mirror. I was ready for anything, except what I actually saw.

“What the . . . ?”

The change Toby’s clothes while she’s asleep trend had continued: my bloody bathrobe was gone, replaced by a gauzy purple nightgown probably purchased from the sort of catalog that came wrapped in brown paper. It was ankle-length, but left my shoulders—more than just my shoulders—bare. That might have bothered me, but I was too busy taking in the view to care.

My hair was tied in a ponytail, uncovering my face and neck. The dark circles under my eyes were gone, and my skin was smooth, not even bruised. I still looked like death warmed over, but it wasn’t an immediate death anymore; more like something found in a ditch.

A knot of scar tissue marked my left shoulder, exactly where I expected the gunshot wound to be. There was no pain. Slowly, I pulled up the nightgown and bared my right leg to the hip. The bullet hole through my thigh had been healed the same way. No wonder I could walk: as far as my legs knew, they were fine. Devin somehow managed to patch me up all the way while I was out.

Of course there were scars. There’s no magic in the world that can heal iron without leaving a scar.

I paused, registering the other thing that had changed. My head was clear. Whatever healed the gunshot wounds also managed to cure my iron poisoning. I didn’t think that was possible. How could that be possible?

The taste of roses tickled the back of my throat. I stiffened. “Oh, no, not now . . .”

That was all the time I had. Evening’s binding flowed over me like a wave, strengthened by my return to health and anxious after my enforced idleness. Memories of her death slammed down on me, smothering the room in a veil of red, and my blood rose to meet the memories headlong, not giving me time to brace myself. Silly me, thinking I could act like I was Daoine Sidhe without paying the cost. There are always costs. The pixie, the key, the gunshots and the blood and the screaming—they were in the roses, waiting for me and dragging me down. They were all the same, as they had always been the same and always would be. Death doesn’t change. Death never changes.

Breaking free before the memory pulled me all the way into Evening’s grave was even harder this time. My blood had been in contact with iron, and recently. It didn’t just remember what it felt like to die by iron—it knew .

Let me go, I thought. If I die here, you lose, too. Let me go . . .

I slammed back into my body to find myself clinging to the edge of the sink, dry-heaving over the floor. I didn’t remember dropping to my knees or anything else after the roses hit. The world was spinning, making my chest and stomach ache.

Moaning, I let my head drop against the sink. I knew the binding would keep me moving; that sort of thing never lets you hold still for long. I just hadn’t realized how far it would go to motivate me.

It was at least partially my fault. The memories I took from Evening’s blood strengthened the binding, wrapping it around me until there was no way out. It would have goaded me on and made me miserable if I hadn’t ridden her blood, it would even have killed me, but it wouldn’t have used her death against me. And it was getting stronger. Eventually it would be strong enough that I wouldn’t be able to fight it, and it would force me to ride the memories of Evening’s dying moments until my heart gave out.

She probably didn’t mean for it to be that way, but unfortunately for the both of us, she thought like what she was: she thought like a pureblood. A pureblood could have ridden the blood without complications, gathering the information they wanted and shrugging the rest of it away. Evening thought in terms of what she knew, but I was just a changeling, and my magic wasn’t that strong. Her binding was too much for me to hold off forever. And it was getting stronger.