Once Broken Faith (October Daye #10)(100)
It held my weight. Something felt wrong about the way the bones fit together, something in the interaction between joint and muscle, but it didn’t hurt, and I could handle a little limp if it didn’t slow me down. I stopped, closed my eyes, and breathed in as deeply as I could, looking for the blood that I knew was there.
The wind wasn’t helping. I crouched down a bit, getting closer to the wood. Quentin would have tried to bleed somewhere that wouldn’t be noticed or wiped away by the passage of feet. The path was a poor choice, which left . . . I turned to look at the trees around me, moving slowly, sniffing the whole time. Some of the redwoods had branches that overhung the path, making walking more difficult than it might otherwise have been. One of them slapped me in the face as I turned, and I stopped.
I smelled blood.
The branch would have been shoulder height if I’d been standing upright, which put it slightly lower for Quentin, who had been taller than I was for a while. It would have been easy for him to run his fingers over the fronds as they walked. I ran my own fingers through them, stopping when I hit stickiness that couldn’t be attributed to sap. They came away red. I hesitated for barely a second before I brought them to my mouth. Quentin would forgive me for violating his privacy, considering the circumstances.
The world washed in red. My perspective shifted, becoming higher, looking down on things that should have been at eye level. I closed my own eyes, giving myself over to the memory.
Verona is smiling. That’s the worst part of this whole thing. Toby’s frozen in a fairy ring and maybe Tybalt is going to die, and Verona won’t stop smiling. Maybe she can’t. Maybe this is the way she breaks.
“Keep moving,” she says. The Barrow Wight girl has been good since Verona shouted her sister’s name. She’s holding Madden in her arms, his legs pinned and her hand clasped around his muzzle. I don’t think he can turn himself human when she’s holding him that way. I’ve never seen Tybalt transform when Toby was holding onto him. I’ll have to ask later, if we get through this.
I don’t want to die. As we head down the path toward the tower, I run my fingers over the nearest leaves. Toby will come. Toby will find us. Toby will know what to d—
The memory shattered, leaving me gasping for breath. I opened my eyes, turning until my view of the trees matched Quentin’s. Then I started walking, wobbling as I compensated for my ankle, and gathering speed as I figured out my current limits. Finally, I broke into a run, feet pounding on the redwood slats, chasing my ghosts into the night.
Pixies flittered through the trees above me, their wings casting panes of candy-colored light onto the redwood at my feet. I kept running but glanced up, calling, “If you know which way I’m supposed to be going, this would be a great time to help.”
Most people don’t think pixies are very smart, and maybe they’re not, as big, slow creatures measure intelligence. We have the time to stop and think about things, while pixies lead fast, violent lives. Like all fae, they’re technically immortal. Unlike most of us, they have a tendency to wind up splattered across car windshields or be eaten by birds, and so have the high birthrate and bad attitude of creatures with much shorter lives. So maybe they’re not intelligent, but they can be smart, and they can hold a grudge.
Pixies swooped down from above, swirling around me like a wave of living leaves, their thin, translucent wings beating a maddened tattoo that only served to underscore their chiming. Then they surged forward, lighting the path ahead, showing me the way I needed to go. Verona had offended them somehow, maybe just by breaking that window: pixies could be very territorial, and protective of the places that were good to them. Whatever the reason, they were willing to help me now, and so I trusted them, and I ran, praying with every step that I wasn’t too late.
TWENTY
THE PATH WOUND THROUGH the redwoods like a river, looping and doubling back on itself several times, until I was grateful for the pixies keeping me on the right heading. Without them, I would have drifted off-course and fallen, and there was no easy way to get back up. Occasional stairways sprouted off the main path, ascending and descending to other levels in the tangle, but that wasn’t the same as finding my way from the ground, which seemed even farther down than it had been before. Maybe it was. Geography could be dramatic and odd in the Summerlands; it wouldn’t be out of the question for a canyon to be hidden somewhere below me, in the trees.
I ran, and the pixies flew, until we reached a curving stairway cut from a living redwood bough. They landed there, clustering on the bannisters and lighting up the area like a Candyland dream, chiming in a constant, dissonant wave. The stairs led up to another redwood, this one big enough around to qualify as a tower. The door was standing slightly ajar. Not enough that I would have seen it from the path; without the pixies, I would have run right on by.
“I owe you,” I said. The pixies rang even louder, startled expressions on their Barbie-sized faces. It occurred to me belatedly that I might have just pledged fealty to the local flock. I decided not to argue with it. They wouldn’t be any worse than the actual nobility, and I could probably buy them off with a bag of cheeseburgers and some open cans of Pepsi.
The smell of blood lingered near the top of the stairs. I paused long enough to find the smear on the left-hand banister, wiped it away with my finger, and pushed the door open, putting one hand on the hilt of my borrowed sword as I stepped through. The antechamber was dimly lit, and empty. A staircase wound itself in a tight upward spiral, beginning to my right and ascending up into the dark. I took a breath, steadied myself, and began to climb.