An Artificial Night

the rhyme so intensely: I could get there and back, yes, but only by the light of a candle. If we lost that light, none of us would be going anywhere. Slowly, the flame shrunk, becoming brighter until it was nothing but a small, nearly blinding spark. The wax was melting twice as fast as it had been before. Damn. We needed to hurry, or the wax would run out and our problems would get a lot worse.

“Toby, what—”

“We’re just gonna follow the candle.” I stepped forward and the flame dimmed, almost going out. I stepped back, and the flame brightened again. Quentin followed as I walked to the mouth of the stable, and we began making our way down the middle of the room, both of us watching the candle.

We were halfway to the back wall when the flame turned red. There was only one door nearby. It was rough wood behind a gate of wire and brambles, just like all the others. I walked over to it, reaching out and trying the handle. It was locked.

“I can’t break this with a knife, and I don’t have my lock picks. We need to find a key.” I let go of the handle. A loop of thorns immediately snarled my fingers, holding them in place. “Oh, crap.” I pulled, trying to free my hand. The brambles tightened. “Quentin, it’s got me.”

“What am I supposed to do?” he asked, eyes wide.

“Get me loose!”

“How?”

“Cut it!” The thorns burned cold, freezing all the way down to the bone. “Fast!”

Quentin jerked the knife from my belt and swung it toward the briar. I gritted my teeth, doing my best to hold still. Having a killer thorn bush attack my hand was bad; accidentally losing a couple of fingers would be worse.

Then the blade hit the brambles.

The vines themselves seemed to scream, a thin, keening noise that came from everywhere and nowhere at once as they tightened, writhing and burying themselves more deeply in my hand. I shrieked before I could stop myself, crying, “Quentin, stop!”

His hand shook as he pulled the knife away. The thorns stopped screaming, but didn’t let go. I stood there blinking back tears, listening for sounds of alarm. We couldn’t afford to attract attention to ourselves. If we got caught … I shivered. If they caught us, we were worse than dead.

Fine: we couldn’t cut through the thorns. What else could we use to open the door? Blood obviously wasn’t the answer; it had plenty of my blood already. I could try a spell, but I don’t know any make-the-living-lock-let-go spells. I might have been able to manage an illusory key, but I didn’t know what it needed to look like, or how to make the lock believe it was real. Quentin wasn’t going to be any help until he calmed down, and the candle flame was so high that it was almost scorching my skin. I paused. Everything in Blind Michael’s lands had been affected by the candle. Why should the lock be any different?

I brought my free hand up and around, shoving the candle into the brambles. The vines wrapped around my hand let go, and I staggered backward, swearing. The cuts they left behind were small but deep and ran across the length of my hand.

“Are you okay?” Quentin asked, moving to brace me.

“I’m fine,” I said. The vines were continuing to retreat. The flame returned to its normal height as the last bramble pulled away, dimming to a placid blue. It looked like we’d reached our destination, whatever it turned out to be. “I think it’s safe to go in.”

“Are you sure?”

“No.” Unsurprisingly, the door wasn’t locked anymore. I pushed it open, stepping through into a narrow stall full of dusty straw and strange, unpleasant shadows. A trough stood along one wall, half-filled with murky liquid. It was too dark to see anything clearly. I lifted the candle almost without thinking about it, letting it illuminate the area.

The light wasn’t merciful. I closed my eyes, whispering, “Oh, sweet Maeve …” Quentin stepped up next to me and stopped, putting his hand on my shoulder. I could feel the tension in his fingers, and so I opened my eyes, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. It wasn’t easy.

Katie was in the far corner with her back pressed against the wall, watching the open door with obvious terror in her face. She wasn’t visibly injured, and her clothing was mostly intact; she hadn’t been beaten or raped. That was a point in Blind Michael’s favor. It wasn’t nearly enough.

There’s an art to transformation. Lily once described it as being a sort of sculpture, using flesh instead of wood or metal: you take something that is and turn it into something that isn’t. Like any art it takes talent and practice. Someone truly skilled in the transformational arts can finish a change in an instant or stretch it out into a year. It all depends on the work itself … and on how cruel the artist wants to be.

Streaks of white radiated through Katie’s hair, longer and visibly rougher than the human hair around them. Her ears had grown long, flexible and equine, sprouting a fine covering of short white hair and moving up the sides of her head until they were clearly more horse than human. She flicked them back as Quentin started to approach her; it was an instinctive gesture, and that, in and of itself, was chilling—how much humanity had she already lost? Her hands were splayed on her knees, like she was trying to force the fingers to stay apart, and her fingernails had spread to cover the first knuckle, taking on a dark, glossy sheen as they warped into hooves.

Her face was still human, even framed by horse’s ears and the beginnings of a mane, and the terror in her eyes told me that her mind was equally intact. Blind Michael was taking his time, making every inch hurt. That was the best way to get what he wanted; when the change was done, her spirit would be broken, and she’d be ready to obey. Bastard. Silently, I swore he’d die for what he’d done. It wasn’t the first time I’d made that promise. I was pretty sure it wouldn’t be the last.

Quentin dropped to his knees in front of her, reaching out as if to pull her into his arms. She whimpered and jerked backward, almost falling. The reason for her oddly formal posture became apparent as she moved: her skirt had been split up the back and tied together with a dirty shoelace. A fully-formed horse’s tail protruded through the hole she’d made there, matted with muck and straw from the stable floor. It would’ve been pretty, if it hadn’t been attached to a panicked human girl.

“Katie—” Quentin said helplessly, and reached for her again. This time she screamed. It ended in a high- pitched, inhuman whinny. Things were changing inside her as well as out.

“Quentin, move away from her,” I said.

“But—”

“Look at her. You need to move away.” Katie looked toward me and cringed, falling silent. She’d already learned the value of obedience. I guess terror is a good teacher.

Quentin rose and walked back to me, shivering. “What’s wrong with her?” he asked.

“Besides the obvious?” I gestured toward my ears, then his. “We’re what’s wrong with her. She’s already confused, and she thinks you’re human. Right now, you look like another part of this nightmare.”

“I—” he began, and stopped, staring at me. “Oh, root and branch.” He looked back to Katie, who was trying to vanish into her corner. “She thinks I’m one of them.”

“Yes, she does,” I said, gently. “You can’t go to her. She won’t let you.”

“But …”

I put a hand on his shoulder. “Let me do this?”

Quentin bit his lip, nodding. I could see how much the gesture had cost him.

The scratches on my hand were still bleeding, and that was a good thing; blood always makes things easier for me when there’s magic involved. I walked over and knelt in front of Katie, holding my candle between us. “Hello,” I said. She whimpered. I ignored it, continuing, “My name’s Toby. I want to take you home. Do you want to go home?” She burrowed farther into the corner, flattening her ears. She wasn’t going to believe a word I said, and that was fine; it just meant I’d have to work without her permission. With fresh-drawn blood on my hands, the lack of permission wouldn’t stop me.

“ ‘If we shadows have offended, think but this, and all is mended,’”I said. The smell of copper and cut grass rose around us, damped down and made small by the alien nature of Blind Michael’s lands. “ ‘That you have but slumbered here while these visions did appear …’ ” The spell wasn’t taking hold. I needed more blood; I wasn’t strong enough to catch her without it. I’ve never been strong enough to work without the blood.

I raised my wounded hand to my mouth and sucked at the deepest of the scratches. The blood was hot and