Too bad I couldn’t let her die again for my sake. “Evening, stop,” I said. “Just stop. I don’t understand why you’re doing this, but I know that you’re not a bad person. You’re just . . . I don’t even know. You’re my friend. Friends don’t do this sort of thing.”
“Your friend?” Evening turned back to me, an astonished look on her face. “Is that really what you think, October? That we’re friends? We were never friends. I wouldn’t lower myself to form that sort of bond with someone like you.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Someone like me?”
“You’re a half-breed. A mongrel. You should never have existed, in this world or any other. I knew Amandine was perverse, but I had no idea she would lower herself to lying with a human before the day that news of your birth was brought to me. As if it were something to celebrate! As if I should have rejoiced in a new niece who carried the stink of mortality in her veins.” The air around Evening’s hands began to crackle with cold. “You should have been killed in your cradle, rather than allowed to live and taint our bloodline with your filth.”
“Huh,” I said. “That’s funny, because I mean, you had the hope chest. The whole time, you had the hope chest. You could have pulled the human out of me while I was still a baby, and I would never have known any better. But you didn’t. You left me the way I was, and you let Mom have me. It seems weird.”
Evening’s lip curled in a snarl. “Don’t talk about things you don’t understand.”
“What, the hope chest? I understand it. I’ve used it, several times. It knows me.” I held out my good left hand, fingers spread. “This is not the skin I wore when you left me, Evening. You really should have made sure I was dead. You should have killed me yourself, if that was what it took.”
“She can’t!” crowed the Luidaeg, her joy coloring her words until they were like fireworks in the dark forest night.
I turned toward her. “What?”
“She can take you, if you let her, but she can’t touch you. Can you, Eira?” The Luidaeg began walking toward us. She was limping slightly, although she was working hard to conceal it, much as I was trying not to show how badly my broken arm still hurt. “Our father made sure of that before he left, because he recognized that maybe leaving a sociopath in a position to wipe out the competition was a bad idea.”
“What are you talking about?”
“She can’t touch Amy either,” said the Luidaeg.
“Shut your mouth,” spat Evening.
“She doesn’t like being limited,” said the Luidaeg.
“I said be quiet!” Evening whirled, hurling another blast of ice at the Luidaeg. Again, the other woman deflected her attack—but this time it seemed to take more out of her, leaving her shoulders drooping while Evening began to fill her hands with cold for a third time. “You are not a part of this. You should have stayed dead.”
“I’ve never been good at ‘should haves,’” said the Luidaeg.
“I’d like a time-out here,” I said. “Does someone want to explain what’s going on? Because this whole situation is getting damned difficult to follow, and I’d really appreciate some footnotes.” I drew the silver knife from my belt with my uninjured hand, shifting so that I was holding it behind my back. I wasn’t sure what good it would do me—no matter what I did to Evening, I couldn’t kill her—but holding it made me feel a little better.
“She’s sowing dissent, that’s what, the same as she always has,” said Evening. She turned to face me, a cool wind blowing between us and carrying the scent of snow and roses. Roses. That was another clue I should have caught. When I believed that my mother was Daoine Sidhe, the fact that they both smelled of roses made perfect sense. Once I learned that Mother was something else entirely . . . but ah, Evening was speaking, and I needed to pay attention to that. I always needed to pay attention to her.
“My sister is the sea witch,” said Evening, taking a step toward me. The skirt of her torn and dirtied dress swayed around her legs, and I felt a pang at seeing such beauty disturbed. “She is the darkness under the waves and the bargain you fear to make. Of course she’s a troublemaker. Of course she wants to turn you against me, October, can’t you see? I’ve been your friend for years. I’ve always been your friend.”
The Luidaeg can’t lie and this woman just said in so many words that she could never be your friend, whispered the part of my mind that was distant enough from Evening’s spell to hold itself separate. Sadly, that part of me was outweighed by the sweet, cloying scent of her magic as it rose around me.
“I was the one who came for you when you returned from the pond,” said Evening, taking another step toward me. “I was the one who told you how your human family would react to your return. I tried to save you so much pain. Don’t you remember?”
I frowned, trying to find the line between what she was saying and what I knew her words actually meant. It had been so clear only a few seconds before, but now it was blurred and difficult to see. She had been my friend for so long. She had allowed me to enter her presence and treated me like I was almost worth something, despite my human heritage. She had hired me to do the things she didn’t want to do herself. She had . . .
She had ordered Simon Torquill to kill me. She had orchestrated the kidnapping of Luna and Rayseline Torquill, tearing wounds in the fabric of their family that would never really heal, just scab over and fester. She had treated me like dirt and, because I was a changeling, desperate for any sign of acceptance, I had allowed her to do it.
“You’re not my friend,” I mumbled.
“What’s that?” asked Evening.
“I said, you’re not my friend.” I forced my right hand into a fist, sending bolts of clarifying pain through my broken arm. It cleared the fog out of my thoughts as I raised my head, forcing myself to look at her. The air around her head crackled with the power she had gathered around herself, splintering and refracting the faint light until it seemed like she almost glowed. “You were never my friend. You were just using me until you didn’t need me anymore. I don’t know if you still need me. But I don’t need you.”
Evening smiled languidly. “You will,” she said, and let all that gathered power go, directing it straight at me, and at the thin cord of my fealty. What had been a faint glittering in the air exploded into true light, virtually blinding me. She was perfect, she was untouchable, she was above reproach, she was undying, she was everything I had ever wanted to be and everything I could never approach, she was—
—she was casting a spell, she was casting a spell on me, and spells could be broken—
Shaking from the effort, I forced my hands up, one balled into a fist and coated in my own dried blood, one holding Dare’s silver knife. My broken arm howled in protest. The pain was still helping me focus, no matter how much damage I might be doing to myself. I squinted into the brilliance, finding the individual threads of Evening’s compulsion. Then, before I could think about it too hard, I opened my right hand, grabbed a fistful of threads, and yanked them tight, slashing my knife down across them in the same gesture.
Evening shrieked with pain and surprise. The spell snapped, casting the clearing back into its previous darkness. And the faint smell of smoke drifted out of the trees across from me. That was my only warning before Simon Torquill stepped out of the tree line, a longbow in his hands, and fired the arrow that he had been aiming during our confrontation.
It flew straight and true, and would have embedded itself solidly in Evening’s back, had she not turned as fast as a striking snake, raising her hand in an imperious gesture. The arrow froze in midair, becoming completely motionless.