“No,” I said. “Stay.” I turned toward the open balcony door. So did the others.
We waited as the air grew hazy with fragile, half-seen wings, and the night-haunts streamed into the room. The flock moved like smoke, buffeted by an unseen wind. The frailer, more faded night-haunts stuck to the middle, where they could be protected by the bodies of their more solid kindred. The night-haunts around the edges of the flock were doll-sized replicas of Faerie’s dead, wearing heartbreakingly familiar faces and forms, turned alien and strange by the tattered wings that grew from their backs, by the emotions hanging frozen in their eyes.
The flock circled the room twice, wings buzzing, searching for danger. None of us said anything. We simply waited to see what the night-haunts would do. Karen shivered against me but didn’t pull away. Finally, the night-haunts landed on one of the long banquet tables, the shadowy central figures clustering together while the others shielded them with wing and body. One night-haunt—slightly taller than some of the others, with eyes as purple as wildflowers, and the face of a decadent, black-hearted Peter Pan—stepped forward, eyes fixed on the Luidaeg.
“Auntie,” said the night-haunt, and his voice was the voice of Devin, my old mentor and first lover, and hearing it was like sandpaper on my soul. I had seen this night-haunt every time I’d faced the flock since Devin’s death, and it never stopped hurting. “Why do you come between us and our prey? The flock must feed. We’ve lost two to the wind in the last year.”
“Father did you no favors when he bound you,” said the Luidaeg. “Hello, Egil.”
He bowed, only half mockingly. “It’s been a long time.”
“Indeed, it has.”
I still said nothing. It was easy to forget that the night-haunts had lives aside from the ones they stole from Faerie’s dead. Sometimes they seemed to forget, too. But they were purebloods, even when they wore changeling faces: their mother had been one of the Luidaeg’s sisters, and they had been born predators, intended to devour fae flesh, which would never rot under normal circumstances. Without the night-haunts, we would never have been able to hide our existence from the human world. It was just that at first, they’d preferred the taste of the living. They’d been a scourge upon our kind, eternally hungry, fast and fierce and unstoppable . . . until Oberon changed them, binding them to eat only the dead. Without the lives they took from the blood we left behind, they had nothing. They would fade, and fade, until they became the only purebloods in Faerie who could die of natural causes.
Fae died rarely. The night-haunts were always there.
The night-haunt with Devin’s face—Egil—was joined by another, this one shorter, stockier, and wearing the face of my dead Selkie lover, Connor O’Dell. I didn’t know this night-haunt’s true name. I wasn’t sure it would have helped if I had. He turned to face me, sadness and longing in his eyes. The night-haunts got more than just form from the blood. They got memory, emotion, even personality, to a certain degree. Connor had died to save my daughter. He’d died loving me. And now he was a night-haunt, and I was in love with another man.
“Hi, Toby,” he said.
“Hi,” I replied, keeping my arm around Karen. That didn’t feel like enough, and so I continued, “I kept my promise. I stopped the goblin fruit.”
Egil laughed. He sounded so much like Devin that I shivered. “You did, and you knocked down a monarchy to do it. Oh, October, I wish I’d understood what a glorious disaster you were when I was alive. I would have used you to undermine the world, and laughed while it was burning.”
“I can’t tell whether that was meant to be a compliment or not,” I said. “Either way, I did what I promised, and now I need a favor.”
Both night-haunts blinked at me. So did several others, some of whom had faces I recognized. Others were foreign to me. Death was rare in Faerie, but not so rare that I was present every time it happened. Thank Maeve for that. If I’d been the sole cause of death in Faerie, High King Sollys would have locked me up and thrown away the key.
“We told you once that we would eat you if you kept summoning us,” said Egil. “What makes you think that’s changed?”
“Well, first, I didn’t summon you. The body under the table did. Second, I did you a favor. You don’t want there to be any chance I could claim you were in my debt, do you?”
Egil narrowed his eyes. “I take back what I said. You’re too destructive to be trusted. What do you want from us?”
“I want something that should be pretty easy to give, all things considered. I want you to feed on the dead king, and then let me talk to whoever gets his memories. I need to know if there’s anything he saw that I wouldn’t know how to interpret when I saw it in his blood.”
There was a momentary silence, broken only by the endless dead-leaf rustle of the night-haunts opening and closing their wings. Finally, almost cautiously, the night-haunt with Connor’s face said, “If you leave this room, we won’t be here when you come back. We won’t wait for you.”
“I know.”
“You’ll have to watch us feed.”
“I know that, too.” I glanced to Quentin and Karen. “The others can leave if they need to, but I’m going to stay. I need answers.”
“I want to see,” said Quentin, which seemed brave but ill-thought-out to me. I didn’t say anything. He was going to command a continent someday. The night-haunts who patrolled North America would be subjects of his, as much as anyone else was. Maybe it would make a difference if they felt they were allowed to speak to the High King. They certainly didn’t feel that way now.
“If Quentin’s staying, so am I.” Karen’s voice shook. I turned to frown at her.
“Sweetheart, are you sure?”
She looked at me with cool, bleach-blue eyes, and nodded. “I can handle anything he can handle. Maybe more. He doesn’t spend his days walking through other peoples’ nightmares.”
I wanted to tell her she didn’t have to be strong for me, that I’d love her no matter what. I wanted to remind her that Quentin was older than she was, and that she didn’t have to compete with him. I did neither of those things. Karen was a changeling. I knew what that meant. She was going to spend her whole life trying to prove she was as good as the purebloods around her, and now that more and more people knew about her oneiromancy, she was going to be fighting to be sure they understood she wasn’t there to be controlled. If she wanted to be her own person, she would have to be stronger, better, and capable of standing up to more than anyone around her, or they’d use her blood against her. Every time.
No one in this room would try to do that to her, but that didn’t matter. If you wanted to be steel, you had to be steel every day of your life, until it came naturally; until you no longer had to beat yourself bloody trying to achieve it.
“All right,” I said, and turned back to the night-haunts. “You can go ahead and feed.”
“Ah, milady grants permission!” Egil sketched a mocking bow, his wings rattling like plastic bags rolling down a gutter. Then he straightened, smile fading, and turned to speak to the flock.
The language he used wasn’t English, or Welsh, or anything else I recognized, but it suited the strange accent that sometimes crept into May’s words, the one she only had when she was reaching past the memories she’d received from me and Dare. It was an old language, I knew that much, sweet and fluid and filled with vowel sounds that more modern languages had tucked away as too hard on the ear.
The Luidaeg stepped up next to me. “We had our own language once,” she murmured, in English. “Mother spoke it, when she talked to the children who spent less time around humanity. But it was easier to use the words the mortals had. They were lords of language in those days, spreading across the world and naming everything they saw as quick as a blink. We’ve never been fond of doing labor that we didn’t have to do for ourselves. My tatterdemalion nieces and nephews may be the only native speakers of Faerie left in the world.”