I jerked myself free of the blood when my/Samson’s eyes fixed on the four of us standing in the darkened hall. There was nothing he could tell me after that, except for maybe what it felt like to get stabbed with my own knife. It probably wasn’t going to be that different from getting stabbed with anything else, and none of those stabbings were much fun. Pass.
“That’s why she was willing to kidnap a police officer,” I muttered, half-gasping. “I knew she wasn’t planning on going back, but this…this…”
“October?” Tybalt’s hand tightened on my shoulder.
“We need to get back to the cliff.” I spat on the floor, trying to get the taste of Samson’s blood—of Samson’s
“What is it, then?”
I managed to lift my head, twisting around to look at him. “It’s a colonization,” I said. “Riordan is recolonizing Annwn, and she’s using Chelsea to do it.”
TWENTY-FOUR
ETIENNE DIDN’T COME BACK as the minutes ticked by, until we couldn’t wait any longer. Riordan’s wards couldn’t shut off the Shadow Roads completely—not here—but Tybalt hadn’t been in Annwn long enough to anchor them, and we didn’t have Luna’s favor to open the Rose Road for us. I was grateful not to be alone as Tybalt and I crept out of the hall and onto the moon-drenched moor together.
The bracken was so thick that don’t-look-here spells were useless; even if I were invisible, I’d be leaving a trail that would point our pursuers directly to us if I did anything but follow Tybalt’s lead through the brush. The way he blended into the landscape was unreal. Anyone following us would find him as hard to track as a tiger in the jungle, while I felt like a giant neon sign blundering across the field. “Hero incoming, look over here.” Even hunching over didn’t do me any good. Boughs of broom and heather disturbed by Tybalt’s passage kept slapping me in the face, and being hit with swinging greenery didn’t precisely help my attempts at stealth.
At least following his trail meant that I’d be a little harder to track. I could tell from the way our path twisted and curved that he was choosing the easiest terrain for both of us, while still moving us the way we needed to go. I wanted to break into a run. I wanted to order him into cat form and just
I was so busy looking up that I ran straight into Tybalt’s outstretched arm, bringing myself to an abrupt halt. I managed not to yelp, biting down hard on my lip to smother the urge. Tybalt looked over his shoulder at me, pressing a finger to his lips. I nodded. Silence was the way to go. Then I looked past him, and my appreciation for silence died, replaced by the urge to start hurting people and not stop until I was sure there was no one left to hurt.
The scene was basically as Samson’s memory had shown it: Chelsea, struggling to hold open a glittering portal in the air; Quentin, bound and tied to a chair; Riordan, watching with smug delight as her wagons rolled through the gateway. What his memory hadn’t shown—maybe because he didn’t consider it important enough to bother remembering—were the bruises on Chelsea’s face, and the blood in Quentin’s hair. They’d been beaten, both of them. They were
Tybalt’s arm stayed extended, keeping me from charging forward. “Is she truly undefended?” he asked.
I took a breath to steady myself, and then took another breath as I tried to focus on the air around us. “No,” I whispered. “The Folletti are here. I just can’t tell you where ‘here’ is.”
“Charming.” Tybalt scowled at the patch of open ground where Riordan stood. “What, then, is our next move?”
“I don’t suppose you’ve got a flamethrower on you, huh?” Tybalt blinked before shaking his head, apparently taking the question seriously. “Didn’t think so.” I frowned at the portal, and then took a deep breath. “I have an idea,” I said. “But you’re not going to like it.”
Tybalt frowned. “Anything you introduce in that manner is a thing I am absolutely guaranteed to dislike.”
Still, he listened as I explained my admittedly idiotic plan, and although he didn’t like it, he saw the sense. At least that’s what I tried to tell myself as I shoved my hands into my jacket pockets and strode, whistling a jaunty tune, out of the bracken.
Riordan’s head whipped around at the first run of off-key notes, her eyes widening as she took in the sight of me. I pulled a hand out of my pocket and offered her a wave as jaunty as my whistle.
“Guards!” she shouted.
I’d been expecting that. It would have been nice to get a little farther into the open—I was only about five yards from the edge of the bracken—but beggars can’t be choosers. Her shout was still echoing when the Folletti appeared all around me, their weapons drawn and at the ready. I stopped where I was, putting my hand back into my pocket, and beamed at them.
“Howdy,” I said. “So you know, she’s not paying you nearly enough for this. Seriously, you guys should have renegotiated your rates the second I walked into Dreamer’s Glass.”
The Folletti frowned in confusion but didn’t lower their swords. I’d been expecting that, too.
“Now, you may be asking yourselves, ‘How is she up and wandering around and coming to see what we’re up to after the beat-down we gave her earlier’?” I kept beaming. It seemed to be making the Folletti uncomfortable. Cool by me. “You may also be asking yourselves, ‘What do we know about her species?’ I mean, that’s what I’d be doing, if I were you. That, and maybe running like hell.”
The Folletti’s confusion turned into scowling. “Surrender,” commanded one of them, his voice almost vanishing into the wind blowing across the moor.
“No,” I replied genially, and pulled my right hand out of my pocket.
This close to Chelsea and one of her gates, the Luidaeg’s charm went into instant overdrive. It was red when I pulled it out, but as it hit the air, it turned a shade of incandescent scarlet that was almost bright enough to mistake for white if you tried to look at it from the side. The Folletti, who hadn’t known what I was about to do, weren’t looking at it from the side. Their eyes had been drawn to the sight of my hand emerging from my pocket, trained soldiers looking for signs of a weapon. I guess they weren’t expecting a pocket-sized piece of the sun.
They screamed in eerie unison, like a hurricane trapped inside an echo chamber. Riordan shouted, clapping her hands over her ears. I wanted to do the same. Sadly, that wasn’t an option. Instead, I broke into a run, heading for Quentin as fast as my legs could carry me.
I was almost there when Samson appeared in front of me, surrounded by the weirdly mingled scents of Chelsea and Riordan’s magic. Blood drenched his shirt, smeared over his face and neck. He snarled, face contorted with an inhuman rage, and drove the claws of his right hand into my stomach, bringing me up short. I felt things inside me rip and tear—things that were never meant to be ripped or torn, things I’m pretty sure you need in working order if you want to stay alive. Pain lanced through me, overwhelming enough to make the screaming of the Folletti seem like an understated counterpoint. Evisceration will really focus a girl’s thoughts.
Most of me wanted to black out. The rest of me wanted to live. It was the part that wanted to live that drew the knife from my belt, slamming it into Samson’s belly in a parody of what he was doing to me. His eyes widened, the reflection of the light from the Chelsea-chaser making them seem to glow. Then he twisted his fingers inside me, and I screamed.
