The Winter Long
Page 24

“All right,” I said. “Will you meet us at the Luidaeg’s?”
“I will,” he said.
The tension slipped away again. His logic was sound, and more, it didn’t carry any hint of him going to track down Simon without me. “Then I’ll call May and let her know where we’re headed. If she doesn’t pick up, we’ll swing by the house instead, just to make sure she and Jazz are all right.” If Simon had circled back, they could be in trouble. May couldn’t be killed, and she would recover from most physical wounds just like I would. That didn’t mean she couldn’t be incapacitated. Jazz had no innate physical defenses, and she’d been unconscious when I’d last seen her. This time, I managed to force a smile. “So if we’re not hanging with the sea witch, come save us.”
Tybalt reached up and pressed the knuckles of his right hand lightly to my cheek. “You are very fortunate that I love you, for I doubt I could endure you otherwise,” he said.
My smile grew. “I love you, too.”
“Of course you do. I’m wonderful.” With that, he turned and walked away, vanishing into the shadows beneath a nearby clump of trees.
“Okay. Now we move.” I turned back to Quentin, who was watching me with concern. “What?”
“Nothing. I’m just . . . I never met Simon. He was before my time. How worried should I be?”
I hesitated. He needed to know what we were up against—but I could explain just as well while we were moving. “Get in the car,” I said.
He got.
Once we were safely on the road, heading toward the freeway, I said, “Remember Oleander?”
Quentin shuddered. “I don’t think I could forget her if I tried.”
“That’s good. When you forget your enemies, you give them the power to come back and surprise you. Never forget her, or the things we learned from fighting her.” Mostly what I learned from fighting her was that if someone really wanted to poison me, I’d need to be in a hermetically sealed bubble to prevent it. Then again, that was when I’d been more human; my body might just shrug off the poison if something like that happened to me now.
“So what does Oleander have to do with anything? She’s dead.”
“When she was alive, she was Simon’s . . .” I hesitated, not sure how to finish that sentence. I’d always assumed they were lovers, but if he was married to my mother, would that really have been true? Yes, I finally decided. He’d fallen far enough that he would have been willing to cheat on his wife on top of everything else. “She was his lover, and his accomplice. She went to see my mother once, to ask if Simon had been allowed to see me. The way she looked at Amandine, and the way Amandine looked at her . . . there was so much hate there.”
“Okay,” said Quentin, sounding puzzled.
“Think about it. Oleander was the sort of person who killed kings for money, and she poisoned Lily just to frame me. Simon, though? Simon ran around with her on purpose, knowing what she was. Now what kind of a person do you think that makes him?” I shook my head. “I got stuck in the pond because everyone figured Simon had kidnapped Luna and Rayseline, and I was looking for proof. He caught me, and sploosh, it’s fourteen years later.”
“Did he?”
“Did he what?”
“Kidnap them.”
“Yeah. He admitted it to me in the kitchen, before Jazz broke in on us and everything went to hell. Simon actually said he was responsible for Luna and Raysel disappearing.” If I could find him, if I could restrain him somehow, I could find out exactly where they’d been kept. I was good with knives, and I didn’t much care if Simon bled. Maybe knowing where they’d been would be the key to undoing some of the trauma that haunted Rayseline’s mind. She could wake up more than just forgiven: she could wake up healed—
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why did he kidnap his brother’s kid?” Quentin shook his head. “I just . . . I love my baby sister. I can’t imagine being willing to hurt her, even if we were having some sort of a fight.”
It was still a shock when Quentin mentioned his family so casually, like it was something I’d always been allowed to know. “I didn’t realize you had a sister.”
“Yeah.” He smiled. “My fosterage began when she turned seven and was old enough to understand that I wasn’t going away because I didn’t love her anymore. Her name’s Penthea.”
“That’s pretty.” Traffic was moving fast enough that I had to keep my eyes on the road. That made the conversation easier to have; I didn’t have to look at him. “He said someone had hired him, and that he couldn’t say the name of his employer because the geas still held. So whoever it was not only paid him, they swore him to silence in the most literal way possible.”
“At least that means we know it’s not Oleander.”
“How’s that?” I skirted a brief sidelong glance in his direction.
Quentin shrugged. “If he’d been talking about Oleander, and their whole relationship was some sort of cover, the geas would have broken as soon as she was killed. Dead people can’t maintain that kind of binding. Oleander’s dead, so that means she didn’t hire him.”
“Great. Then we’re looking for a living person, powerful enough to throw a geas on Simon Torquill, with a grudge against Sylvester, and . . .” I paused again. “And against me, or at least against Amandine. Simon said my death was one of his employer’s goals.”
“That might be why he fled the Kingdom. If he wasn’t willing to kill you, and he was dealing with someone that powerful, that could have been the only way to prevent himself from being forced to go through with it.”
“Yeah.” I quieted, sinking into my thoughts. Who hated Sylvester that much? Who hated me that much? I couldn’t think of anyone, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to. The trouble was, I was going to have to figure it out, because until I did I had no way of knowing what had driven Simon out of the Kingdom, or what might have brought him running back, ready to “save me” again. Considering the way he’d saved me the first time, I wasn’t sure I could survive a second salvation.
Quentin must have caught my mood. He leaned forward, turning on the radio and flipping through the stations until he found the one that he usually liked to listen to, playing modern folk and light rock from Canada. The Barenaked Ladies were offering to light up my room. He started to sing along, quietly at first, then louder and louder, until I couldn’t fight my smile any longer. He grinned back.