crippled as my body.
“No,” I said. I tried to shake my head, but even the pain-killers couldn’t disguise the fact that my neck was too sore to twist. They’d choked me repeatedly.
“You’re not dead,” Dr. Ludwig pointed out.
But I’d come pretty damn close; I’d sort of stepped over the line. There’d been an optimum rescue time. If I’d been liberated before that time, I would have laughed all the way to the secret supernatural clinic, or wherever I was. But I’d looked at death too closely—close enough to see all the pores in Death’s face—and I’d suffered too much. I wouldn’t bounce back this time.
My emotional and physical state had been sliced and gouged and pinched and bitten to a rough, raw surface. I didn’t know if I could spackle myself back into my pre-kidnap smoothness. I said this, in much simpler words, to Dr. Ludwig.
“They’re dead, if that helps,” she said.
Yes indeedy, that helped quite a bit. I’d been hoping I hadn’t imagined that part; I’d been a little afraid their deaths had been a delightful fantasy.
“Your great-grandfather beheaded Lochlan,” she said. So he’d been One. “And the vampire Bill Compton tore the throat out of Lochlan’s sister, Neave.” She’d been Two.
“Where’s Niall now?” I said.
“Waging war,” she said grimly. “There’s no more negotiation, no more jockeying for advantage. There’s only killing now.”
“Bill?”
“He was badly hurt,” the little doctor said. “She got him with her blade before she bled to death. And she bit him back. There was silver in her knife and silver caps on her teeth. It’s in his system.”
“He’ll get better,” I said.
She shrugged.
I thought my heart was going to plunge down out of my chest, through the bed. I could not look this misery in the face.
I struggled to think of something besides Bill. “And Tray? He’s here?”
She regarded me silently for a moment. “Yes,” she said finally.
“I need to see him. And Bill.”
“No. You can’t move. Bill’s in his daytime sleep for now. Eric is coming tonight, actually in a couple of hours, and he’ll bring at least one other vampire with him. That’ll help. The Were is too badly wounded for you to disturb.”
I didn’t absorb that. My mind was racing ahead. It was a mighty slow race, but I was thinking a little more clearly. “Has someone told Sam, do you know?” How long had I been out? How much work had I missed?
Dr. Ludwig shrugged. “I don’t know. I imagine so. He seems to hear everything.”
“Good.” I tried to shift positions, gasped. “I’m going to have to get up to use the bathroom,” I warned her.
“Claudine,” Dr. Ludwig said, and my cousin put away her knitting and rose from the rocking chair. For the first time, I registered that my beautiful fairy godmother looked like someone had tried to push her through a wood chipper. Her arms were bare and covered with scratches, scrapes, and cuts. Her face was a mess. She smiled at me, but it was painful.
When she lifted me in her arms, I could feel her effort. Normally Claudine could heft a large calf without any trouble if she chose to.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I can walk. I’m sure.”
“Don’t think of it,” Claudine said. “See, we’re already there.”
When our mission was accomplished, she scooped me up and took me back to bed.
“What happened to you?” I asked her. Dr. Ludwig had departed without another word.
“I got ambushed,” she said in her sweet voice. “Some stupid brownies and one fairy. Lee, his name was.”
“I guess they were allied with this Breandan?”
She nodded, fished out her bundle of knitting. The item she was working on appeared to be a tiny sweater. I wondered if it was for an elf. “They were,” she said. “They are bits of bone and flesh now.” She sounded quite pleased.
Claudine would never become an angel at this rate. I wasn’t quite sure how the progression worked, but reducing other beings to their component parts was probably not the route of choice. “Good,” I said. The more of Breandan’s followers who met their match, the better. “Have you seen Bill?”
“No,” Claudine said, clearly not interested.
“Where is Claude?” I asked. “Is he safe?”
“He’s with Grandfather,” she said, and for the first time, she looked worried. “They’re trying to find Breandan. Grandfather figures that if he takes out the source, Breandan’s followers will have no choice but to stop the war and pledge an oath to him.”
“Oh,” I said. “And you didn’t go, because . . . ?”
“I’m guarding you,” she said simply. “And lest you think I chose the path of least danger, I’m sure Breandan is trying to find this place. He must be very angry. He’s had to enter the human world, which he hates so much, now that his pet killers are dead. He loved Neave and Lochlan. They were with him for centuries, and both his lovers.”
“Yuck,” I said from the heart, or maybe from the pit of my stomach. “Oh,
“Irish,” she said. “All the oldest ones in this part of the world are Irish. Claude and I used to have Irish names. It seemed stupid to me. Why shouldn’t we please ourselves? No one can spell those names or pronounce them correctly. My former name sounds like a cat coughing up a fur ball.”
We sat in silence for a few minutes.
“Who’s the little sweater for? Are you going to have a bundle of joy?” I asked in my wheezy, whispery new voice. I was trying to sound teasing, but instead, I just sounded creepy.
“Yes,” she said, raising her head to look at me. Her eyes were glowing. “I’m going to have a baby. A pure fairy child.”
I was startled, but I tried to cover that with the biggest smile I could paste on my face. “Oh. That’s great!” I said. I wondered if it would be tacky to inquire as to the identity of the father. Probably.
“Yes,” she said seriously. “It’s wonderful. We’re not really a very fertile race, and the huge amount of iron in the world has reduced our birthrate. Our numbers decline every century. I am very lucky. It’s one of the reasons I never take humans to bed, though from time to time I would love to; they are so delicious, some of them. But I’d hate to waste a fertile cycle on a human.”
I’d always assumed it was her desired ascension to angel status that had kept Claudine from bedding any of her numerous admirers. “So, the dad’s a fairy,” I said, kind of pussyfooting around the topic of the paternal identity. “Did you date for a while?”
Claudine laughed. “I knew it was my fertile time. I knew he was a fertile male; we were not too closely related. We found each other desirable.”
“Will he help you raise the baby?”
“Oh, yes, he’ll be there to guard her during her early years.”
“Can I meet him?” I asked. I was really delighted at Claudine’s happiness, in an oddly remote way.
“Of course—if we win this war and passage between the worlds is still possible. He stays mostly in Faery,” Claudine said. “He is not much for human companionship.” She said this in much the same way she would say he was allergic to cats. “If Breandan has his way, Faery will be sealed off, and all we have built in this world will be gone. The wonderful things that humans have invented that we can use, the money we made to fund those inventions . . . that’ll all be gone. It’s so intoxicating being with humans. They give off so much energy, so much
