“I thought you did it because Mab ordered you to.”
“Tsk. In all of Winter, I am second in power only to Mab—which she has allowed because I have incurred with it proportionate obligation to her. She is my dearest enemy, but even I do not owe Mab so much. I helped you as much as I did, sweet child, because I owed you for collecting a portion of my due justice from Bianca,” the Leanansidhe said. Her eyes grew wider, wilder. “The rest I took from the little whore’s masters. Though I admit, I hadn’t expected the collection to be quite so thorough.”
Memories flashed in my head. Susan. An obsidian knife. I felt sick.
I’ll get over it, I told myself. Eventually. It hadn’t been much more than a day from my point of view. I was probably still in shock or trauma or something—if ghosts could get that, I mean.
I looked up and realized that Lea was staring at me, at my memories, with undisguised glee. She let out a contented sigh and said, “You do not settle things by half measures, do you, my godson?”
I could get mad at her for being callous about calling those memories to my mind, or I could revile her for taking such joy in so much destruction and pain, but there wasn’t a point in doing so. My godmother was what she was—a being of violence, deceit, and the thirst for power. She wasn’t human. Her attitudes and reactions could not fairly be called inhumane.
Besides. I had gotten to know Lea’s sovereign, Queen Mab, in a fashion so hideously intimate that I could not possibly describe it. And believe me. If Lea had been the high priestess of murder, bloodlust, scheming, and manipulation, then Mab was the goddess my godmother worshipped.
Come to think of it, that was probably an apt description of their relationship.
Six of one, a half dozen of another. My godmother wasn’t going to change. There was no sense in holding what she was against her. So I just gave her a tired, whimsical smile instead.
“Saves time,” I told her. “Do it thoroughly once, and you don’t have to fool around with it again later.”
She dropped back her head and let out a deep-throated laugh. Then she tilted her head and looked at me. “You didn’t realize what would happen to mortal kind when you struck down the Red King and his brood. Did you?”
“I saw the opportunity,” I said, after a moment. “If I’d stopped to think about the trouble it would create . . . I don’t know if I’d have done it any differently. They had my girl.”
Her eyes gleamed. “Spoken as someone worthy to wield power.”
“Coming from you,” I said, “that’s . . . a little bit unsettling, actually.”
She kicked both feet, girlishly pleased, and smiled down at me. “How sweet of you to say so.”
The best thing about my faerie godmother is that the creepy just keeps on coming.
“I’ll trade you,” I said. “The rest of the tale for information.”
She nodded her head in a businesslike fashion. “The tale for questions three?”
“Done.”
“Done, done, and done,” she replied.
So I told her.
Chapter Thirty-one
I ran and ran for a good long while. I wasn’t on the cross-country team at school, but I often went running with Elaine. It was how we’d hidden sneaking off to make out—and stuff—from Justin. He was a thorough sort of guy, so we made sure to actually do the running, too, in order to make our deception flawless. And the whole time, we thought we were getting away with it.
As an adult, I could see that our efforts were about as obvious as they could possibly be. Justin had known, I was certain—now. But back then, Elaine and I had been sure that we were masters of deceit.
That scheme’s trappings were sure as hell turning out to be handy that day. My strides slowed but turned longer, steadier, machinelike. I was sixteen. I didn’t wind down for almost an hour.
When I finally stopped, the terror had faded, if not the heartache, and I found myself in an entirely unexpected position.
I didn’t know what was coming next. I didn’t know what was expected of me.
I had to think. All by myself.
I ducked off the road and into a large culvert, huddling there while I got my breath back and flailed at the wet paper bag my brain was trapped within.
Mostly, I just kept thinking that I should have known. No one in my life had gone an inch out of their way to look out for me once my parents were gone. Justin’s generosity, even seasoned with the demands of studying magic, had been too good to be true. I should have known it.
And Elaine. She’d just sat there while he’d been doing whatever he was going to do. She hadn’t tried to warn me, hadn’t tried to stop him. I had never known anyone in my life I had loved as much as Elaine.
I should have known she was too good to be true, too.
I wept for a while. I was tired and cold and my chest ached with the pain of loss. In a single moment, my home had been destroyed. My life had been destroyed.
But I shook my head ferociously, wiping my eyes and my nose on the leather sleeves of my jacket, heedless of what it did to them. I was still in danger. I had to think.
I had no means of travel, no money, and no idea of where to go. Hell’s bells, I was lucky I had my shiny new driver’s license in my pocket. It was mid-November, and my school letter jacket wasn’t going to be enough to keep me warm once it got dark. My stomach made a cavernous noise, and I added starving hunger to my list of problems.
I needed shelter. I needed food. I needed to find someplace safe to hide from my mentor until I could figure out how to take him on—and to get all of that, I needed money. And I needed it fast.
So, once it got dark, I, uh . . .
Look. I was sixteen.
Once it got dark, I sort of knocked over a convenience store.
For lack of anything better to hide my face, I’d tied my sweaty T-shirt around my head in a sort of makeshift balaclava. I didn’t have anything else to wear except my letter jacket, which seemed more or less like a screaming advertisement to make it simple for the cops to figure out my identity. There wasn’t much I could do except to rip all the patches off of it and hope for the best. After that, I’d scavenged a paper sack from a trash bin, emptied it, and stuck my right hand in it.
Once I had my equipment ready, I looked up at the streetlights glowing outside the QuikStop and flicked a quick hex at them.
Learning magic is hard, but if you can do even fairly modest spells, you find out that wrecking technology is easy. Anything with electronics built into it is particularly susceptible to a hex, but if you put enough oomph into it, even simpler technology can be shorted out or otherwise made to malfunction. At sixteen, I wasn’t anywhere near the wizard I would be even five or six years later—but those lights didn’t have a prayer. The two streetlights over the parking lot flickered and went black.
I hit the lights outside the store next, and two security cameras. I was getting increasingly nervous as I went along, and the last hex accidentally blew out the store’s freezers and overhead lights along with the security camera. The only lighting left in the place came from a pinball machine and a couple of aging arcade video games.
I swallowed and hit the door, going through in a half-doubled-over crouch, so that there wouldn’t be any way to compare my height to the marker on the inside frame of the door. I held out my right hand like it was a gun, which it might have been: I had the paper sack I’d acquired pulled over it. There was something cold and squishy and greasy on the inside of the bag. Mayonnaise, maybe? I hated mayo.
I hustled up to the cashier, a young man with a brown mullet and a Boston T-shirt, pointed the paper sack at him, and said, “Empty the drawer!”
He blinked reddened, watery eyes at me. Then at the paper bag.
“Empty the drawer or I’ll blow your head off!” I shouted.