“Blue roses mean nothing, because they do not naturally occur in the mortal world, and the language of the flowers was borrowed, like so many other things, from humanity,” said Tybalt. “They are a flower without a definition.”
“Well, I’m just going to take a wild guess that roses made of ice are also outside the flower language, so . . . he gave me a bouquet that means both ‘warning’ and ‘nothing.’ What the hell, Simon?” I frowned at the flowers, taking another bite of my egg salad sandwich. There had to be something I was missing. Something—my eyes widened, and I swallowed my mouthful only half-chewed, to ask, “What if the point isn’t the message, but the contents of the bouquet?”
Tybalt frowned at me. “What do you mean?”
“He’s not saying ‘beware, I am worthy of you,’ or ‘beware, no definition found,’ he’s saying ‘beware’ and giving me roses made of ice. Winter roses.” I dropped the rest of my sandwich onto the table, whirling. “He’s telling us that whatever’s coming next, it’s going to happen at Evening’s old knowe. We need to get to Goldengreen.”
“Are you sure?” asked Quentin.
I snorted. “Kiddo, I’m not sure of anything right now, but I’m sure we don’t have time to waste standing around and arguing about it. Tybalt?”
“Yes?”
“Much as I hate to leave my car behind, it’ll be faster if we take the shadows. Can you . . . ?”
He smiled a little. “You know, every time you request this of me, I laugh on the inside.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know, once upon a time I freaked out at the idea of the Shadow Roads, and now I treat them like a faster version of the Monorail at Disneyland. The question stands. Can you get us both there without hurting yourself?” Tybalt was a King of Cats, but that didn’t make him indestructible. He’d died twice in the past three years, and while he’d recovered both times—it turns out the old “cats have nine lives” myth got its start with the Cait Sidhe—that didn’t mean I wanted to overtax him and go for a third.
Tybalt thought for a moment before he nodded. “Goldengreen is a friendly territory. I have passed through its wards before. I am more than willing to undertake this journey.”
“Good.” I offered him my hand. “Quentin, come on. We’re heading for Goldengreen.”
“I like field trips,” he said, and grabbed my hand, and Tybalt pulled us both with him, into the shadows.
The Shadow Roads seemed a little less cold than usual, as if the lingering chill from my contact with Simon’s roses was keeping the normal freeze at bay. That didn’t make me any more likely to linger, especially not with my head still pounding and my legs still a little weak from blood loss. Tybalt ran and I ran with him, keeping a tight hold on Quentin’s hand. The last thing I wanted to do was explain to his parents that I’d allowed him to become lost on the Shadow Roads for all eternity. Not to mention the fact that I would genuinely miss the kid if something ever happened to him.
We ran, as always, until I felt like there was no way I could run any farther; my lungs were going to give out, my feet were going to freeze solid, and I was going to fall. Then Tybalt’s body gave a lurch, his hand very nearly ripping out of mine as he abruptly stopped moving. There was a moment of disorientation, during which I couldn’t have said which way was up, and then Tybalt was pulling, and we were tumbling out into the empty air—
—some twenty yards above the cold black waters of the Pacific Ocean. I scrabbled to keep hold of his hand, and Quentin’s, but it was no use; the wind ripped them away from me as we fell, and then I hit the water, and everything went black.
TWELVE
I OPENED MY EYES ON watery gloom, surrounded by waving fronds of the kelp that chokes the California coastline like the hand of a cruel regent. For a moment I hung suspended in the green, too stunned to understand what was going on. One minute we were running along the Shadow Roads, and the next, we were standing on thin air somewhere above the waves. And then we fell—
I jerked in the water, comprehension sweeping over me as I finally realized what had happened, and more importantly, where I was. I began to thrash, trying to follow the trailing kelp up to the surface. There was no way of knowing whether I was going the right way, but it was a fifty-fifty chance, and that was fifty percent more than I’d have if I stayed where I was. There was no sign of Tybalt, or Quentin. I may as well have been alone in the ocean.
Oddly, their absence helped: it gave me something to focus on beyond my own predicament. If they were hurt, or worse, they would need me to stay calm. They would need me to help them. Even with my hydrophobia threatening to rise up and slap me down, I clung to the thought that my boys needed me, and I kept on swimming.
Dammit, Luidaeg, why aren’t you here to turn me into a mermaid again? The thought was almost dizzy, and I realized my vision was going black around the edges. All my runs through the airless cold of the Shadow Roads had been a sort of conditioning: I might not be a swimmer, but I could hold my breath for a surprisingly long time all the same. That was only going to get me so far, though. As I strained toward the surface, I was dimly, terribly aware that the end of the road was very close indeed.
Then something with all the grace and subtlety of a torpedo slammed into my middle, hard enough that the last of the air was knocked out of me and escaped toward the surface. I wanted to go after it, but I couldn’t break away from the arm that was locked around my waist, dragging me toward some unknown destination.
I tried to focus through the black spots that were increasingly devouring my vision, and caught a glimpse of black hair, pale skin, and scales like blue-and-purple jewels. Something about them was familiar enough that I stopped fighting and closed my eyes, letting their owner carry me wherever she would.
The darkness had just been waiting for me to relax. It closed in, pouncing on the shreds of my consciousness like a cat pounces on a mouse, and the world went away for a little while.
“—by? Hey, are you dead? Wake up if you’re not dead.” Someone grabbed my shoulders, shaking briskly enough that my head flopped from side to side. I coughed, and water filled my mouth, summoned up from my throat and lungs. “Shit, she’s choking.” The voice didn’t sound surprised, or particularly worried; this was more of a statement of fact than anything resembling concern.
Strong hands rolled me onto my side, and then someone gave me another shake, hard enough that I started coughing again. This time, I didn’t stop until I was vomiting water all over the sand next to me. Someone helped me sit up enough that I wasn’t throwing up on myself, which was a serious improvement. I struggled to catch my breath, breathed in, and resumed coughing. This time, no water accompanied the action. Thank Oberon.
“Oh, good, you’re not dead,” said a female voice. I started trying to sort through the options for who might have hauled me out of the ocean. I’d seen enough to know that I should know her, but the whole “nearly drowning” thing had put a bit of a crimp in my memory.
Everything was wet, and my body was one big ache, bruised by its impact with the water. My headache had become virtually an afterthought when held up against the rest of the pain. My leather jacket was like a lead blanket encasing my upper body, so waterlogged that it had probably pulled me almost to the seafloor before I woke up. I tried to roll toward the person next to me, and as I did, I realized I was covered in sand. That was a natural result of lying wet on a beach, but it was going to mean getting wet again, and somehow that was the final indignity. I braced my hands against the beach, shoving myself into a standing position, and turned.
Dianda was sitting on the beach a few feet away, her tail folded under her like something out of a Hans Christian Andersen story. She raised an eyebrow as she met my eyes, looking dubious. “Are you done with the barfing water and attempted suicide by ocean? I don’t mind dead bodies in the Pacific, but you were right next to Goldengreen. That means you were trying to get in. And don’t stress about my fins and your ears—I have the Cetacea maintaining a screen around this area, no one’s going to see you.”