Once Broken Faith (October Daye #10)(122)

“He’ll die,” said Cassandra. She sounded horrified. The emotion was so simple, so pure, that I had to blink back tears. She was as young as she looked. She was still capable of being shocked by how cruel Faerie could be. “Dehydration, starvation . . . you can’t sleep forever.”

Master Davies glanced at her. Then he looked at me, and his expression hardened. “Maybe not,” he said. “But you can sleep for a while before you have medical consequences, and we don’t need much more than that. The charm isn’t dangerous in and of itself. It’s what it does that’s bad. Your Highness, how do you feel about larceny?”

I blinked at him. Then, as hope dawned, I smiled.





FIVE


One convenient thing about spending so much time living in the human world: I not only knew the location of all the local urgent care centers, but I knew which ones were in good enough financial shape to handle a few losses. Better yet, I knew where the security cameras were. Street fae and changelings—the sort of people I was likely to be dealing with, the ones who thought I was like them, who’d never had enough interaction with the Courts to figure out that maybe I looked a little too much like our dear lost King Gilad—didn’t usually have much disposable income, much less health insurance, and sometimes they needed to be able to manage their own long-term care. I’d lifted my share of antibiotics, IV bags, and syringes over the years.

One gate and we were inside an urgent care clinic halfway down the Bay, one where the clientele could afford discretion and the nurses could afford coffee breaks. They weren’t understaffed and overworked like the people at County. It was easier to steal certain supplies from the big hospitals for exactly that reason—chaos forgives a lot of ineptitude—but I didn’t like doing it, also for that reason. A facility that was already stretched thin couldn’t afford to lose things.

But this was for Nolan. If Master Davies had directed me to the smallest, most underfunded clinic in the Bay Area and told me to steal every drop of morphine they had, I would have done it. My brother mattered more to me than all the strangers in California.

As soon as we were inside, Master Davies dropped a don’t-look-here on the three of us and murmured something in Cassandra’s ear. She nodded, and they took off in different directions. There wasn’t time to wonder what they were up to. I had my own shopping list to fill. Bags of saline solution; needles; tubing. I filled my arms with my brother’s salvation, hoping either Master Davies or Cassandra had some medical training. I’ve done my share of petty theft, but I’d never been the one trying to keep body and soul together until a healer could be called.

A healer. The thought was like a bulb coming on in a dark room. I stiffened, nearly dropping my stolen goods. Jin. She worked for Sylvester; he’d loaned her to me during the conclave, and I was sure he’d loan her to me again if I asked. I could bring her to Muir Woods and have her monitor Nolan’s condition. I could—

I could ask her to sit there and cure his dehydration, over and over again, saturating the area with magic, while Master Davies tried to mix a countercharm to something he couldn’t identify yet. She wouldn’t make things better. She could make things worse. It was amazing how fast I was falling back into the habit of thinking of magic as a cure-all, and it never had been.

“Damn,” I muttered, and grabbed another bag of saline.

Master Davies and Cassandra were waiting when I returned to the hall. Cassandra had an IV stand and a bag of first aid supplies. Master Davies had a brown canvas satchel that he must have pilfered from somewhere, packed full of small bottles. I frowned. He didn’t meet my eyes.

“We should go,” he said.

Right. If my new court alchemist—and there was really no question whether I’d be offering him the job after this; I was virtually obligated to do so—wanted to have a painkiller addiction, that was on him. It was better than goblin fruit, at least. I waved my hand through the air. The portal opened again, and we were gone, stepping back into Muir Woods.

My head began to ache as soon as the portal closed behind us. I hadn’t overexerted myself yet, but I was on the cusp of it. “I can make one more jump tonight, and that’s assuming you don’t mind taking the bus back,” I cautioned. “I haven’t got the sort of range I had when I was younger.”

“You’ll get it back,” said Master Davies, releasing his don’t-look-here. We were in the hall again, outside my brother’s room. That hadn’t been intentional on my part; I’d been trying to get us back to Nolan as quickly as possible. Exhaustion was messing with my aim.

He opened the bedroom door. Cassandra and I followed him inside. For a few moments, everything was simple. Master Davies told us what to set up and where to put it; we did as we were told, hanging bags of saline, helping him run tubes from the equipment to my brother. He seemed to know what he was doing. That was reassuring. If it had been entirely up to me, things would have gotten ugly.

“Thank Oberon for gravity,” he said, turning Nolan’s arm over and rolling up his sleeve. “If we needed electricity to operate an IV, we’d have bigger problems.”

“I still have the generator you brought in to power the lights up in the tower,” I said. “We could use that.”

“I don’t like using generators in the Summerlands when I have a choice.” The needle in his hand slid under the skin of my brother’s arm, so quickly that it was like a magician’s trick. Different from real magic, but reassuring all the same. “The smell upsets me. It’s like I’m profaning something holy.”