Someone screamed as he hit the floor.
It may even have been me.
EIGHTEEN
“JIN!” THE NAME was ripped out of me, unthinking. A second name followed it: “Siwan!” Tybalt was bleeding; Tybalt was dying. Being a King of Cats made him sturdier than he had any right to be, but he wasn’t me. He couldn’t walk to the edge of death and come back none the worse for wear.
If his heart stopped beating, it might not start again. I could lose him.
I should have been screaming for him, not for the Queen of Silences, but it was her name I howled again and again as I fell to my knees and gathered my wounded lover in my arms, trying to stop the bleeding with the heels of my hands. It was hurting him, I knew it was hurting him, but that didn’t matter, because he didn’t have enough blood to keep on losing it. He needed to keep what little he had left.
Blood . . . it frothed at the corners of his mouth, a clear sign that the spike had pierced his lung, just like the last one had pierced mine. His breathing was labored and he was struggling to keep his eyes focused. They were fixed on my face, never wavering, like he was greedy for the sight of me.
“I need a fucking medic!” I shrieked. My throat felt like it had been stripped bare, like I wasn’t giving it time to heal between screams. Tough.
There was a popping sound, and the smell of blackberry flowers and redwood sap. I looked up. Arden was in front of me, her dress disheveled, her hands locked around the upper arms of Queen Siwan Yates of Silences. Siwan’s eyes widened as she realized what she was looking at. She’d been on the other side of the ballroom only an instant before. She must have heard the commotion, but she hadn’t understood what it meant.
“Oh, oak and ash . . .” she breathed.
“Fix him,” I commanded. “You fixed Holger’s arm. Fix him.” Jin would have been better. Where was Jin? Probably in the damn tower room with Walther and Marlis, avoiding the conclave. Curse her eyes.
Thank Oberon for intelligent people. Siwan’s expression changed as she realized what I was asking. Offering a quick nod, she knelt and said, “I need flame. Flame, a knife, and as much blood as you’re willing to give to me.”
“Take it all, I don’t care,” I said, and held up my hand. A knife was slapped into it. I glanced up. The Luidaeg was standing there.
“Flame I can give you, but it will cost,” she said, speaking fast. She knew as well as I did that we had no time to waste. “Will you pay?”
The Luidaeg did nothing for free. It wasn’t in her nature, and more, it wasn’t in the rules of her position as the sea witch. I nodded, not bothering to ask her price. Anything she wanted, I would pay. I would pay twice over, if that was what was required to save Tybalt.
She looked oddly sad as she returned my nod and held out her hands, suddenly full of green marshfire that burned and crackled with a chilly heat. I looked to Siwan.
“You need to be bleeding now,” she said, voice tight. “I need marigolds, rosemary, love-lies-bleeding, and a handful of fishbones.”
Arden stepped backward into a portal that opened in the air just in time to accommodate her. Karen took off running, presumably to scavenge supplies from the nearest table. And I did exactly what Tybalt had asked me not to do, and drove the knife through the center of my palm. The pain was excruciating. Watching him struggle to breathe was worse. The pain gave me something to focus on, something I could hate without worrying about whether my emotions were getting in the way of my actions.
“Keep bleeding,” snapped Siwan, cupping her hands under mine. She began chanting in quick, fluid syllables. The smell of yarrow and sweet cinquefoil rose between us, sketched over the blood.
“Toby.”
My name was barely a whisper. I glanced down. Tybalt’s eyes were fixed on me, his jaw trembling with the effort of speech. He smiled when he saw me looking at him. In some ways, that was the worst thing that had happened since all this had started. He smiled, like there was no way this could be my fault; like I shouldn’t have figured it all out sooner, like I wasn’t supposed to save him.
“I . . . very much . . . wanted to marry you,” he whispered, and closed his eyes.
My own eyes widened until it felt like the skin around them would tear, put under too much strain by the effort of keeping myself from breaking apart. “No,” I said, and gathered him closer with my free arm, still bleeding for Siwan, the knife jutting from my hand. “No, Tybalt, no, you don’t get to do this. Just because you’re a cat, that doesn’t mean you get to do this. You need to stay. You need to stay with me.”
Siwan continued chanting. Arden had returned, and she and Karen were throwing things into the flame the Luidaeg held, following the instructions Siwan muttered between phrases. Jin was nowhere to be seen. All I could do was bleed. That’s something I’ve always excelled at. It didn’t feel like it was enough, and so I bent and kissed him, hoping that something in the fairy tales Amandine had read me when I was a child would finally turn out to be true: hoping a kiss might convince him to stay.
His lips tasted like blood. A red veil slipped over the world, and I saw myself looking down at him, terror and compassion in my eyes. I was so beautiful when he was looking at me. I had never felt like I was that beautiful before.
This is always how I see you, little fish. The thought was in the blood, amused and pained and quietly furious. He thought he was seeing me for the last time. He was taking as much of me with him as he could, as he left me for the night-haunts.
I had never been so angry in my life. I raised my head, glancing toward Siwan. The blood in her hands had hardened into balls of what looked like red-frosted glass, all different sizes, none bigger than a cherry. She stopped chanting and looked at me.
“Get it out of him, now,” she said, and dumped the glass into the flame.
“Not the way we got it out of you,” said the Luidaeg, before I could move. “Shoving it through will kill him.”
When did everyone around me get so fragile? I turned my attention to the spike in Tybalt’s chest, moving to wrap my hands around it. The knife jutting from my palm made the motion impossible to finish. With a snarl, I ripped it loose and tossed it aside, not even waiting for the wound to close before I grabbed the rosewood stake and began to haul. Splinters bit into my palms, drawing more blood. I let them. Anything that could help me now was welcome; anything that could make this a little bit easier, a little more possible, was something to be absolutely desired.
The hooks on the harpoon caught and tore at his flesh as I pulled. I would have done anything to take that pain away from him. Anything.
Tybalt still wasn’t moving. I couldn’t be sure, as I wrested the stake loose and dropped it to the floor beside me, that he was breathing. I also couldn’t allow myself to dwell on that thought. If I decided he was lost—if I let myself lose hope—then I was going to be finished, and this time, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to find the strength to start over. My heart had been broken too many times. It no longer had the capacity to heal the way it once had. The rest of me might be immortal at this point, but my heart? No. That was wearing out.
The stake left a hole in Tybalt’s chest that seemed deep as a well, at least for the split-second that it was empty. Then blood rushed in to fill the space I’d created, flooding everything in red.
And Tybalt stopped breathing.
I didn’t think. I didn’t pause. I just moved, taking a deep breath and clamping my mouth down over his. The taste of blood filled the world, almost choking me. I pulled back and pushed down on the side of his chest that didn’t have a hole in it, trying to keep his heart beating as I forced air into his lungs and then pushed down on his chest again and again, doing everything I could to make him stay. Sweet Titania, let him stay.