I slipped the blood jewel into my mouth. It burst on my tongue, and the pain receded further, still present but no longer all-consuming. I lifted my head.
Devin’s teen army was in a standoff with my equally mismatched assortment of companions, all of whom were watching them with the air of people who didn’t want to deal with this right now. Behind me, the Luidaeg turned and walked away, still carrying Andrew.
Chelsea sketched a quick circle in the air and disappeared. The teens flinched and blinked at the space where she’d been, for all the world as if they’d never seen a Tuatha transit before. Maybe they hadn’t. Tuatha aren’t terribly common in the Mists, and it was entirely possible that these people had never been at a Court that included one. Sometimes the things we feel are commonplace are the strangest of them all.
Ginevra kept growling. Grianne cracked her knuckles, utterly blank expression all the more unnerving in the absence of her Merry Dancers.
Chelsea reappeared, popping out of the air behind Carl with a coil of braided yellow and green rope in her hands. She tossed one loop of it over his shoulders, then threw the rest of the coil to Etienne, who laughed as he caught it.
“Really?” he asked.
“Really,” she said, and disappeared again.
I took a step backward, instinctively shielding Raysel and Dean with the angle of my body as I put a little distance between us and the fight that I could virtually smell coming. The air was thick with tension, and Carl was scrabbling to get the loop of rope off of his shoulders before it could become something more binding.
Etienne handed the rope to Grianne, who curtsied quickly and did a backflip into the air, vanishing. Carl was jerked forward, his efforts to remove the rope ending as he fought to stay on his feet. The rope didn’t break, but remained taut, simply disappearing into thin air until Grianne appeared on the other side of the room and jerked it tight, beginning to tie him up by disappearing and reappearing multiple times, the rope somehow never breaking, even when one end of it was clearly anchored on absolutely nothing.
None of the other teens moved to intervene. Willing to intimidate, they might be. Ready to risk their own necks, they most certainly were not.
There had been five of them in evidence when we arrived, including the unfortunate Carl. Now there were seven, two more having emerged from the shadows as the screaming began. None of them looked like they understood what was going on or how they were supposed to deal with it.
Chelsea appeared again, holding more rope. “Anyone who wants to sit down and be tied up without a fuss is more than welcome to surrender,” she said, voice bright and cheery. “I’m more than happy to get you secured, and no one has to get hurt. I was a Girl Scout.”
That apparently meant something to at least a few of the teens, who immediately sat down to make themselves easier to restrain, expressions of weary relief on their faces. They just wanted to be told what to do. That was an urge I could easily understand. After a lifetime of being told what to do, these last few days of being expected to think and decide for myself had been utterly exhausting.
One of the teens decided to try his luck with actually starting a fight, and swung for Ginevra. She moved faster than I would have thought possible if I hadn’t watched it happen, grabbing his hand before it could crash into her and pirouetting to bend his arm up behind his back, sweeping his legs out from underneath him at the same time, so that he went crashing to his knees and his arm twisted painfully. He bellowed, the sound more suited to an angry bull than a humanoid figure, and she twisted harder for a moment before planting a foot in the small of his back and shoving him briskly forward to land face-down on the floor. He started to push himself up onto his hands. She kicked him in the side of the head. He stopped trying.
It had all only taken a few seconds. I turned, finally, to see where the Luidaeg had gone. She was sitting on another of those ancient, tatty couches, Andrew stretched out with his head in her lap. She stroked his forehead with one hand, a sympathetic, almost-maternal expression on her face. I staggered toward her.
“What the hell was that?” I demanded, once I was close enough that I didn’t have to shout. With my head pounding the way it was, shouting would probably have been enough to crack my skull in two. Not wanting to see my brain on the floor, I was keeping my voice down.
“A calculated risk,” she said.
“Calculated, my ass. You planned this.”
“I did.” She looked at me calmly. “Blind Michael is dead. She put someone in my brother’s place, because she needed a room where she could lock the ones who logically don’t exist in this world. Devin is dead. She replaced him so the changelings who broke under the strain of being dutiful little helpers would have somewhere to run. The odds that she was using another of the Brown kids to do it were good enough that I was always going to want to unmask the person who was pretending to be him.”
“You could have warned me.”
“Not even getting into the layers upon layers of geasa that make that sort of warning difficult for me to give, but no, I couldn’t. You would have tried to argue, or pretended you weren’t going to do it, and we wouldn’t have a place to hide right now, and Andrew would still be wearing a dead man’s face.” She looked at me coolly. “Trust me, when you’re yourself again, you would have been furious if we let him stay bound for even a second longer than we did.”
“Why?”
“He’s your godson, or as good as,” she said. “I told you, his mother was your best friend since childhood. The two of you were teenage dirtbags in this place when you thought you didn’t have anywhere else to go, and when the real Home burned to the ground, the kids who survived spoke of you as the ones who got away. Devin didn’t like to release his people before he had to, and when you’re talking about petty thieves with the potential to live practically forever, well, he rarely felt like he had to do much of anything. You love this kid. On some level, you probably know it even now. There are four living Brown children. We’ve found two. I have ideas about where the other two might be, and they’re not fun ideas, which means they’re probably correct. But no, I couldn’t have warned you, and no, I’m not going to tell you what comes next, and you should probably check those refrigerators to see if there’s anything here worth eating, because we’re going to hunker down for a while.”
“I thought we were on a timetable.”
“We are. The Ride will go down at midnight. It’s two o’clock now. We have some time to kill, and you have a headache. I need you to be in top shape when we go up against my stepmother.”
“Are we just giving up on finding your mom?” It would have been nice to have a Maeve-sized stick to beat Titania with. We were outnumbered and outmatched, and it was starting to wear on my nerves.
“That was always a long shot, and we don’t have the luxury of long shots anymore.” She waved the suggestion away. “I wish we could, because fuck I am tired of being the adult in the room, but if she wanted to be found, she’d be here now. She’s either good or bad that way, depending on how you want to look at it. I do believe she’s somewhere in the Bay Area, because that’s just the way things work right now. I also believe she’s not going to get us out of this. Maybe she wants to. Maybe she’s locked outside the spell, stuck in the Undersea or just outside the Kingdom. Or maybe she doesn’t care, as long as she’s left alone to keep getting up to whatever bullshit she’s been getting up to while we tear each other apart in her absence. I don’t have all the answers, Toby. I just know there’s always a way to break a Ride, and Titania’s going to choose someone who’ll hurt you, which means we’ll have the authority to intercede. Now go eat something. It’ll help your head.”