Page 49 of Silver and Lead (October Daye #19)

“He heals like a normal person, and I doubt Altair or Dugan stopped to bandage him up,” I said. “Right. Do you still have the phone from before your last upgrade? Because we need to go after them, now .”

“I’ll get it.” Quentin ran for the stairs.

I turned to glare at Bucer. “You’re coming with us,” I said. “We need to find the things you stole, we need to stop Dame Altair, we need to find my people, and we need to find the missing pretender to the throne.”

“That’s a lot of finding,” he said. “Why do you think I can help with any of this?”

“You have a lot of fingers,” I said. “Why do you think you need them all?”

“Okay, okay!” He threw his hands up and walked across the kitchen to stand next to me.

Raysel, who had been watching quietly since I started searching for blood, followed him. “What do you want me to do?” she asked.

That stopped me. I couldn’t leave her here by herself, not when Altair and Dugan were on the loose, and she didn’t know how to drive. Bringing her with us would be counter to my promise to protect her. Dragging her into danger might be convenient, but that didn’t make it good.

Quentin came thudding down the stairs, phone in one hand. He stopped when he saw the expression on my face. “Toby?”

“We need to get Raysel to safety,” I said.

He nodded, clearly following my line of thought to the inevitable conclusion that she couldn’t stay here alone. “I’ll call Chelsea,” he said.

Raysel’s eyes widened. “I don’t want to go to Shadowed Hills,” she said, words tumbling over each other in her haste to get them out.

“I’ll tell her that, and you can tell her that, too,” said Quentin easily. “It’s only eight. There’s plenty of stuff open downtown. You can go see a movie and get something to eat.”

“I…” Raysel glanced at me, then visibly composed herself, clearly trying to look braver than she felt.

I don’t think I’d ever been prouder of her.

Sometimes it could be easy to forget that she was barely older than Gillian.

Thanks to the way she’d grown up, she was physically mature, with less life experience than a young teen.

It could make it difficult to accurately estimate how she was going to react to things.

“I think I would like that, if Chelsea’s willing.

I have some money, even, so I can help pay for things. ”

“How did you get human money?” asked Quentin, tone all curiosity without accusation.

Raysel shrugged. “Aunt May pays me to help her around the house sometimes. She says a girl should be able to go out and buy a soda if she wants one, and not need to ask people to pay for her all the time.”

“Practical,” I said, while Quentin brought the phone to his ear, waiting a few seconds before he started talking in hushed tones to the person on the other end.

He turned back to flash me a quick thumbs-up, smiling at Raysel, then turned back to his conversation.

I shifted my weight from foot to foot, trying to lessen the pressure on my knees.

Charging into danger used to come with a lot less in the way of logistics.

We didn’t have to make sure people were safely out of the way. We just did what needed to be done.

And sure, there was a lot of blood loss in those days, and some exciting near-death experiences that weren’t remotely as fun when they were happening as they were in hindsight, but at least everything happened faster back then.

Quentin lowered the phone, looking to Raysel. “Are you ready to go?” he asked. “Because she’s going to be right—”

A portal opened in the air beside him and Chelsea bounced through, black hair slicked down to hide the points of her ears, and copper-colored eyes muted by tinted glasses.

She wasn’t wearing a human disguise. Despite the fineness of her features, she didn’t need one; as long as she kept her ears covered and her glasses on, she could pass for human.

She was wearing jeans and a dark orange sweater, and would have looked perfectly at home lounging around any of San Francisco’s many malls.

“Hi,” she chirped.

“—here,” finished Quentin. He leaned over to punch Chelsea lightly in the arm. “You were supposed to wait a few minutes so I could make sure she was ready for you.”

“But I wanted to get moving now, ” said Chelsea.

She turned to Raysel, beaming. “There’s a showing of Kung Fu Panda 3 starting in fifteen minutes at the Metreon.

We can absolutely make it. There’s a good spot at the back of the arcade to pop in where no one will see us, and the box office is on the same floor. ”

“I have no idea what you just said,” said Raysel, sounding befuddled.

“We’re gonna have a good time, that’s what I said,” said Chelsea. “You got any money? It’s cool if you don’t, my dad has no idea what anything costs, so he gave me two hundred dollars. We can get burgers after.” She held her hand out to Raysel, clearly expecting her to take it.

Raysel looked at me, anxiety in her eyes. “This is safe?”

“Safer than staying here alone when we don’t know who might show up,” I said. “The world isn’t safe. But some risks are worth taking. A movie and dinner are pretty low on the ladder of possible dangers. Just go and have a nice time, okay?”

“Okay,” said Raysel. She scooped her hands through the air like she was filling them with water, bringing them to her face.

The air around her blossomed with the smell of hot wax and lightly crushed blackthorn fruit, and when she lowered her hands again, she looked perfectly human.

Still striking, with red hair and vividly hazel eyes, but human.

She and Chelsea were going to catch some admiring looks tonight.

They looked like movie stars walking among ordinary people.

That was at least within the realm of possibility.

I smiled encouragingly at Raysel, and she walked over to Chelsea, taking the offered hand in hers.

Chelsea grinned, stepping backward as she sketched an arc with her free hand, and a portal opened to swallow them both.

Before it closed I got a glimpse of a darkened room filled with flashing video game consoles.

The faint scent of popcorn and floor cleaner wafted through.

Then they were gone, and I was alone with Quentin and Bucer. I exhaled.

“She’ll be safer this way,” I said.

“She will,” verified Quentin. “If anyone tries to mess with them, Chelsea will get them both out of the situation. Even without being able to take Raysel to Shadowed Hills, Chelsea can get them out of harm’s way.

And she’s been wanting to spend more time with Raysel.

She feels like they don’t know each other very well, what with the whole ‘elf-shot followed by voluntary exile’ thing on Raysel’s part, and their dads are sort of best friends. ”

“Good,” I said. The social web formed by Quentin and his peers was complicated and constantly changing, and I didn’t feel like they wanted me intruding on it any more than I’d wanted Melly and the other adults intruding on my time with Kerry and the others when I was his age.

Childhood and adulthood are nebulous concepts in Faerie, where some people can hit puberty in their seventies, no one reaches their full majority until thirty years of age, and even after that, they’ll be considered young and dismissible until they’re at least a century old.

Chelsea was nineteen, adult by human standards, and Raysel was older, and I still felt like I’d just sent a pair of twelve-year-olds to the mall alone.

Oh, well. There would be time to brood over time and maturity in Faerie later, after we had my husband back. I put two fingers in my mouth and whistled shrilly. A second later, a rattling sound from the hall told me that Spike was trotting in our direction.

“Quentin, do you want to drive?” I asked, lowering my hand.

He shot me a startled look. “Are you sure?”

“My knees hurt, and I’d like to give my feet a rest,” I said. “Plus some asshole cracked the central column on my steering wheel, and I’m going to need to get that fixed before I can drive around safely.”

Spike entered the kitchen and rattled its thorns at me, then began to prowl around the border of the room, sniffing the floor and rattling angrily.

“You want to come with us, buddy?” I asked. “We’re going to find May and Tybalt.”

“Jazz,” said Quentin, tone horrified.

“What about h—oh, root and bloody branch .” Jazz was May’s live-in girlfriend and functional fianc é e: there hadn’t been a formal marriage proposal yet, but she’d agreed to the idea of marriage, and that seemed to be more than enough for my Fetch.

She should have been home at some point between my poisoning and now. “Can you call her store?”

“On it.” Jazz owned a small antique store in the unaffiliated part of Berkeley. They would be closed by now, but she had a habit of picking up the phone even outside of business hours.

Several seconds ticked by. Quentin lowered his phone. “Voicemail,” he said grimly.

I shuddered. I have a special aversion for voicemail and answering machines. Nothing good is ever recorded on them.

“Okay,” I said. “That doesn’t mean anything bad has happened to her.

Raysel would have said something if she’d seen them dragging Jazz out of the house too.

For right now, we need to focus on the people we know are in danger.

May will be able to tell us if we’re wrong about that, but for her to say anything, we need to save her first.”

“All right,” said Quentin reluctantly.

I turned my attention back to the single drop of blood I’d been able to locate, breathing in the scent of it and biting the inside of my cheek at the same time.

The familiar, almost comforting taste of my own blood flooded my tongue, trying to drag me into memories.

I shunted them hard to the side, pulling on the power of the blood rather than the images it contained.