Ashes of Honor
Page 67

“Toby does,” said Quentin.
“Toby is genetically predisposed to swan around like an idiot,” Jin shot back. “Now sit.”
“Must everyone behave as if I am some sort of hound?” asked Tybalt. Still, he moved to the nearest chair and sat. “I simply wished to reassure October that my condition was improved.”
“She can see you. She has eyes. There is no reason for you to be on your feet.”
“Elliot is going to be furious when he sees the condition of the cafeteria,” supplied April. I didn’t need to look to know that she was behind me. “That is a perfectly valid reason to be on your feet and potentially running away.”
I didn’t say anything. I just kept looking at Tybalt.
Li Qin put a hand on my shoulder, nudging me forward. “You’re not the one who’s not allowed to move,” she said.
It only took me four long steps to cross the stretch of floor between me and the chair where Tybalt was seated. Jin moved out of the way. The blood on the linoleum made it slippery, and when my feet started to go out from underneath me, I let them, hitting the floor on my knees. Somehow, in the course of the motion, I managed to get my arms around him. Jin had objected to him standing, but she didn’t object to this. He closed his arms around me in turn. I buried my face against his blood-soaked shoulder, struggling to keep my breath steady.
“Thank you,” he whispered. “If you hadn’t called them here…thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” I whispered back.
My jeans had almost dried while I waited for Jin to finish working on Tybalt. Now, they were getting soaked again, becoming heavy with blood. The feeling of it congealing against my skin was what made me let go and climb to my feet. I rested one hand on Tybalt’s shoulder, like I was afraid he’d disappear if I let go for too long. And maybe I was.
“Chelsea was here,” I said, turning to Etienne. His eyes widened. There was a smear of blood on his forehead, spoiling his normally immaculate appearance. Oddly, that just made him look more like his daughter. Blood will tell. “She’s the reason Tybalt and I survived long enough to get here. We were attacked in Berkeley. We were just about done for when she teleported in, and we managed to get her to bring us back here.”
“Is she…is she hurt?” asked Etienne.
“She’s scared, and she’s running, but she wasn’t injured that I could see. She’s definitely teleporting without any problems.” Teleporting, and tearing her way through doors that were supposed to have been locked centuries ago. “She brought us back by way of Annwn. I think she’s starting to wear some seriously thin patches in the walls of the world.”
“What?” asked Jin. She looked from me to Etienne, her wings beginning to vibrate rapidly again. “What are you two talking about?”
“A Tuatha changeling—” began Etienne, then stopped when he saw my glare. He took a breath, and started again: “My daughter, Chelsea, is missing. Her human mother reported her disappearance to me, and I retained October to locate her. Unfortunately, there have been complications.”
“You involved Toby. Of course there have been complications. If you don’t want complications, you buy her a bus ticket and send her to Vancouver to buy those coffee-flavored candy bars they have in Canada.” Jin said this in an almost distant tone, as if her mouth were keeping itself busy while her brain tried to process what it had just heard. “What do you mean, your daughter?”
“Bridget,” said Etienne.
Jin’s eyes widened. “You got the folklore professor pregnant? Are you an idiot?”
“See, that’s what I said.” I blinked, leaning back against the table as a wave of dizziness hit me. “Whoa. Why is the room spinning?”
“Probably because you lost enough blood to count as exsanguination in a mortal hospital, and your body’s going crazy trying to rebuild itself,” said Jin. Her gaze turned accusingly toward the slashes in my shirt. “Did you decide to test just how indestructible you really are?”
“Yup,” I said, as lightly as I could. “It turns out that I’m pretty damn indestructible. Me and cockroaches.”
April appeared next to me in a haze of ozone and sparks. She had a bottle of orange juice in one hand and a pack of Twinkies in the other. “These will improve your current condition.”
“Awesome,” I said, taking my snack from her. My fingers were so bloody that it was impossible to avoid getting at least a little bit on my Twinkies. I did my best to ignore that as I crammed the first one into my mouth.
“While my dear October is preoccupied with restoring herself to a semblance of normalcy, if I may: Chelsea has been to Annwn at least twice. She opened a gateway into the Court of Cats. Her jaunts are becoming no less impossible with repetition.”
“And the shallowing is becoming unstable,” added Li Qin. “We’ve had at least five microquakes today that weren’t mirrored in the mortal world.”
“Seven, to be more precise,” said April. “I do not know how much longer I can maintain structural integrity of the grounds. We may need to evacuate for the sake of our own safety.”
I blinked, swallowing my mouthful of Twinkie before I asked, “How can you evacuate? Isn’t your main server inside the shallowing?”
“It is,” confirmed April. “I can survive on backup power for up to nine days before I encounter permanent systems failure. I am more concerned about our data storage and the employees in the basement, who cannot be moved into a mortal environ without raising questions we will be unprepared to address.”
“Employees in the…oh.” I stopped talking, turning my attention to my orange juice instead. It seemed safer, or at least a little less macabre.
The murders at Tamed Lightning two years ago weren’t the normal kind of killings. All the victims were purebloods, and they were killed in a way that meant the night-haunts wouldn’t come for their bodies. Faerie flesh doesn’t decay. The last time I’d been to Tamed Lightning, all the victims save one—January, who hadn’t been killed like the others, and whose body had been burned—were still in the basement, waiting for April to put together the necessary pieces and find a way to bring them back.
“Um, ew,” said Quentin, clearly following the same train of thought as I was.