Groaning, I rolled onto my side and opened my eyes.
We were in a narrow alleyway. The ground beneath me was the same hard black stone that I’d seen outside Bridget’s house, the one the cars had been driving on, but here, there were no cars. Instead, there were looming brick buildings with strange metal scaffoldings clinging to their sides, and square metal containers that stank of filth and rotting trash. Light filtered in from either end of the alley, partially blocked by the buildings, but enough to let me see the people around me.
One loomed over the other two, topping them by easily a foot. That was the only indication that this was probably the Bridge Troll I’d heard before. A good illusion can make a giant look like a mouse, or vice versa, but it won’t actually change their sizes. Most Bridge Trolls, when they need to move in the human world, choose illusions that are at least close to their actual height, to avoid any awkward explanations.
The other two were an unfamiliar, twitchy-looking man and a woman who, even with her features softened and her clothing replaced by its mortal equivalents, I thought I recognized.
I groaned, and asked, in a weak, tattered tone, “Dame Altair?”
The woman immediately stiffened, looking around the alley like she was afraid I’d been overheard and now we were all going to be in trouble. “How do you know my name?”
“Sorry,” I slurred, closing my eyes again.
“You said it was just a changeling,” said the Bridge Troll. “Some stupid little chit we could roll for beer money and leave for dead. If she knows you, El, that means she’s a changeling with one of the noble houses, and that changes things. We can’t leave her out here knowing who you are.”
“She seems pretty drunk already. Maybe we can stick with the original plan, and she won’t remember this in the morning,” said the other man.
“How was I supposed to know one of my peers had been careless enough to lose track of their staff?” demanded the woman, shrilly, and now I definitely recognized that voice: Dame Eloise Altair, minor local noble. She was Daoine Sidhe, and had come around Shadowed Hills a few times, making broad and unsubtle propositions toward Uncle Sylvester. He shrugged them off, of course, but that didn’t stop her from trying again. And again. And again.
And apparently, she liked to attack changelings for no apparent reason beyond them being out and unprotected. That didn’t mesh well with the way she simpered and sighed in Court. She’d always been performatively nice to me and to the rest of the staff when we crossed her path. Maybe the key word there was “performance.” Maybe I was finally seeing her real and unfiltered, the way she was when she wasn’t trying to ensnare my uncle.
I wanted to tell her she’d never be welcome in Shadowed Hills after this, even though it would have meant snapping at a pureblood. Under the circumstances, I wasn’t sure that could have gotten me into any additional trouble. My head hurt too much to let me form a coherent sentence.
“It’s almost Moving Day, and the vermin have been fleeing down the coast all week,” said the Bridge Troll. “What’s one more that isn’t seen tomorrow?”
“Are you suggesting we—”
“It’s just a changeling. They vanish all the damn time. No one’s going to think it’s strange if one more goes missing.”
Rough hands scooped me off the ground, and for a moment, they seemed almost gentle.
“Look: she’s already covered in blood. That makes this easier.”
“Makes what easier?”
“Kyle? It’s your turn.”
“Can’t you just snap her neck?” asked the second man, almost petulantly.
“That doesn’t explain the blood, and you know the night-haunts will copy it over. They don’t care whether they make things harder with the local police. Now come on.”
There was a soft sliding sound, like steel rubbing against stone, and I realized what it was a bare second before a knife drove into my upper abdomen, right below my sternum, knocking the air out of me. That pain, combined with the pain in my head, was so intense that everything else went away: they almost seemed to cancel each other out.
My eyes snapped open again, my hand going automatically to the knife at my hip. I had managed to shove it back into its sheath before Chelsea pushed me out of the kitchen, and it was still with me. Less than a second later, it was in my hand, and I was bringing it up in a hard, slashing motion that seemed born half out of instinct and half out of some incomprehensible muscle memory.
The man’s throat opened like a flower, skin parting in a blossom of red blood and yellow fat. He made a startled choking sound and staggered back, dropping his own knife.
Blood was gushing down my front, already starting to slow down, and for the first time, I had to wonder how quickly I could actually heal. Was I going to run out of blood before my body closed the hole? Did it matter? I’d just killed a man. A pureblood, even, one of my betters in every possible way.
I sagged in the Bridge Troll’s grasp, all the fight going out of me, trying to ignore the choking sounds from the dying man and the high, agonized wailing from Dame Altair.
“Fuck this,” rumbled the Bridge Troll. He shoved me away from him, so hard I bounced off the edge of one of the metal boxes before hitting the ground again. “Come on, El. We’re out of here.”
“But Kyle—”
“Come on!”
Then they were gone. No more screaming, no more stabbing. Just gone, and everything was quiet in the alley.
In the distance, I heard the sounds of the human city. Cars rolling by, some kind of rubber bladder being honked, like children were having a wild party, loud alarms. None of it slowed or stopped for me, as I bled in the alley, alone with a dead man. I tried to pull myself into a sitting position. I couldn’t. I didn’t have the focus, or the strength.
Then there was a new sound. The sound of wings. I squeezed my eyes as tightly shut as I could, no longer trying to sit up; instead, I tried to turn my face away. Looking at the night-haunts was forbidden. I didn’t know why, only that it was. People who saw them never made it home.
The wings got louder, and louder, until I was surrounded in every possible direction. And a small, puzzled voice said, “Aunt Birdie?”
I didn’t move.
“Aunt Birdie, why are you here? You were asked not to summon us again.”
The voice was close to my face, and I couldn’t help thinking that whoever it was, they were speaking to me. I knew I wasn’t allowed to look. I knew it would do me no good in this world.
I still opened my eyes.
A figure about twice the size of a pixie hung in the air in front of my nose, held up by wings like fast-beating skeleton leaves, the delicate veins left when the flesh of a leaf has rotted away. It wasn’t glowing, like a pixie would have been; instead, it was pale as a moon-washed beach, faintly silvered and alien enough to be unsettling.
If I focused past that, I could tell it was a child, a little girl approaching her teens, wearing a winding white dress and no shoes. Her hair was brown, straight and uncombed, and her ears were softly pointed, topped in tufts of fur like a lynx’s. She didn’t look like a shapeshifter. She didn’t look like any sort of fae I knew. She was something terrifying and new.
“Oh, Aunt Birdie,” she said, deep sadness in her voice. “We knew what she’d done—she can’t touch the dead, everyone has their limits—but not the whole of it, and I didn’t know what she’d done to you. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry my mother is hurting everyone because you tried to save me. I know you tried to save me. I watched, after I joined the flock. I saw more of everything than I wanted to see, and I know you tried. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, and it shouldn’t be like this.”