“Mom’s Firstborn,” I said, with a shrug. “It makes me harder to impress.” Now that Mags had pointed it out, the strangeness of the situation was visible to me, too. There was a time when meeting any of the Firstborn would have been a terrifying notion. Now it was basically Tuesday.
“Your mother,” said Tybalt thoughtfully.
“Yeah?” I frowned at him. “What about her?”
“She knows the Luidaeg, obviously, in the same way Acacia does; they are all of them sisters. She knows Simon. She must have, to have married him.”
My eyes narrowed. “I don’t like where this is going.”
“I did not expect you to. That doesn’t mean you can refuse to come along for the journey.” Tybalt shook his head, expression turning grim. “She knows everyone we know to have been bound, and she has never kept any counsel save her own.”
“I’ll be the first to admit that I have issues with my mother, but she’s still my mother, and you may want to back off on the whole ‘your mother may have ruined your life’ song that you’re starting to sing,” I said, a dangerous note in my tone. “I don’t like it, it doesn’t suit you, and you’re beginning to piss me off.”
“That doesn’t mean you don’t need to hear it,” said Tybalt flatly. “Amandine is as strong a candidate to have spun this geas as any other. We cannot rule her out just because you do not want her to have done it, my little fish. If the world were that kind a place, it would be so different as to have never made us.”
“Fine. Fine. I can deal with this in one phone call.” I’d been looking for an excuse to pick up the phone anyway, although I couldn’t bring myself to say that part out loud. I dug my phone out of my pocket and began pressing the keys in a spiral, moving outward from the center. When I reached the end, I spiraled back in, and chanted, “One’s for sorrow, two’s for joy, three’s a girl, four’s a boy.” The smell of copper and freshly cut grass rose in the air around me.
“What’s she doing?” asked Mags, sounding concerned.
“Calling the Luidaeg,” said Quentin. I saw him shrug out of the corner of my eye. “Toby usually does that when she wants to ask questions that could get her dismembered. You get used to it. I’m surprised she hasn’t done it already, since worrying about the Luidaeg is part of why we’re here.”
“I’m not sure I’d want to get used to it,” said Mags.
I rolled my eyes as I raised the phone to my ear. There was no ringing: instead, there was the distant sound of waves, beating themselves endlessly against some unseen rocky shore. That was normal. The Luidaeg’s phone isn’t connected to any official “service,” either mundane or fae, and it reacts differently every time I call it. I think the creepiest thing it could do at this point is actually behave like a normal phone.
There was a click. The sound of waves stopped, replaced by empty air. That, at least, was unusual. I frowned. Normally the Luidaeg answered her phone by yelling at me. “Luidaeg?” I said.
There was no response. I thought I heard someone breathing, but it was a thin, distant sound, and it could have just been air running over the receiver.
I tried again: “Luidaeg? Are you there? Is something wrong with the connection?” I could always hang up and recast the spell, if that was the case. The fragments of my magic were still hanging in the air around me, ready to be grabbed.
Still the silence, and the faint, distant sound of what could be breathing.
“Okay. I’m going to try again.” I hung up, raising my head to look at the others. “Something was wrong with the connection. I didn’t get her.”
“That’s weird,” said Quentin. “That’s never happened before, has it?”
“No,” I said, barely keeping myself from snapping. Fear was beginning to rise in my throat, thick and cloying. I dialed again, this time in an X-shape. “Five’s for silver, six for gold, seven for a little girl who dreams of getting old,” I chanted. The magic rose, burst, and fell into the air around me as I raised the phone back to my ear.
Again, there was the sound of waves, followed by a click and silence. This time, I held the phone out to Tybalt, motioning for him to come closer and listen. Cait Sidhe have exceptionally good hearing. It’s a part of their feline nature.
He leaned in, bringing his ear to the phone. Then he frowned, and plucked the phone from my hand without saying a word as he straightened up. Seconds ticked by. He raised a hand, motioning for the rest of us to remain silent. Finally, he said, “If this is some form of punishment for October having asked you things she should not have asked, say so now. Failure to speak shall be taken as consent for what you know will follow.”
More seconds ticked by. He hung up the phone, tossing it back into my hands.
“Your squire has learned the necessary skills to drive in this mortal world, has he not?” he asked. There was a tight edge to his voice, like he was just this side of losing his composure. That was bad. When Tybalt loses his composure, things are always bad.
“I don’t have my license, but I can drive,” said Quentin.
I set the census aside as I stood, shoving the phone back into my pocket. “Why are we making Quentin drive? How freaked out am I supposed to be right now?”
“Someone was there, but it was not the Luidaeg,” said Tybalt, stepping in close to me. I recognized this as preparation for towing me into the Shadow Roads, and zipped my jacket as he continued: “The tempo of the breaths was wrong. Someone else is answering her phone.”
There was no way in this or any other world that that could be a good thing. “We need to go back to her apartment.” I pulled the car keys out of my coat pocket and lobbed them underhand at Quentin, who plucked them from the air. “Get there as fast as you can. Call when you’re at the alley.” Don’t be dumb; don’t walk into a potential ambush. In short, don’t be like your mentor, since I was about to run headlong into yet another life-or-death situation.
What can I say? I know my strengths, and I like playing to them. “Leaping before looking” is absolutely in my top ten Greatest Hits.
“I’ll see you there,” said Quentin.
I glanced to Mags. “Sorry. Not paying my debt about Mom today.”
“I’m sure I’ll be seeing you soon,” she said, ingrained politeness overwhelming the dismay that I saw written clearly on her face.
Then Tybalt’s arms closed around me and we fell backward into the shadows, descending into the darkness that never broke. He let go of my waist as soon as we were through, his fingers locking around my right wrist, and together we ran down the Shadow Roads. I quashed my rising panic; it’s hard to panic and hold your breath at the same time, and I wouldn’t do the Luidaeg any good if I gave myself hypothermia by trying to breathe in a place where there was no good air, only the endless cold. Instead, I focused on trying to match my stride to Tybalt’s, counting his steps instead of counting the breaths that I wasn’t taking. It helped a little, and anything that helped me to survive the shadows was a good thing.
Tybalt and I emerged from the Shadow Roads and into the more mundane shadows of an alley near the Luidaeg’s apartment. Her wards prevented him from getting us any closer. I hit the ground running—or tried to, anyway. I made it four steps before the lack of air and the glimmers of frostbite at my extremities brought me to a screeching halt. I caught myself against the alley wall, coughing the ice from my lips and out of my throat. Tybalt stood nearby, wary and watching. The Shadow Roads were hard on the Cait Sidhe, but it was a difficulty that they dealt with for their entire lives. Those same Roads were still new and cruel to me, and I was reminded of that fact every time we had to use them.
“If you can run . . .” he began.
“I can run,” I said, and pushed myself away from the wall as I did just that. Tybalt paced me, close enough to leap to my defense if I triggered a booby trap, far enough away that we weren’t going to trip over each other. Running that way was almost second nature for us these days. Anything that thought we were easy pickings would find itself in an awkward situation. With enough warning, we could even—