Page 57 of Silver and Lead (October Daye #19)

I realized what he was doing. Janet was very old and, for all her hatred of Faerie, was so tightly entangled with us that she couldn’t tell her story to most people. She wanted to talk. He was just convincing her that talking was a good idea.

Villain monologues are a clich é for a reason. Most people who’ve been sitting on what they consider a great plan are desperate to share it with someone . Give them an excuse when they think they’ve already won, and they’ll tell you more than they ever intended.

“Faerie has stolen from me for the last time,” she said. “I needed to be able to defend myself. To have ways to stop them from attacking me, deterrents for my door.”

“Why did you attack Dame Altair’s people?”

“She didn’t get me what I needed most, and she called me a filthy human when I objected to her refusing to return my payment,” said Janet calmly.

“She needed to learn that being fae didn’t make her better than me.

Your people live in the human world. This is our world, not yours.

You need to show some respect for the people you would so gladly abuse. ”

“So you used iron on her footmen?”

Janet scoffed. “Where I come from, the crimes of a lord fall upon their vassals. They should have made better choices about their service.”

She was fully focused on Bucer by this point. I began moving slowly toward the kitchen door, easing my feet down with as much care as possible.

“It still wasn’t really a balanced exchange,” said Bucer. “Their employer let you down, so you attacked them with the one metal that can devour magic? Death by iron doesn’t just hurt fae, it destroys them. Setting them on fire would have been kinder.”

“But I don’t have a flamethrower,” said Janet, almost reasonably.

“I have a magic scabbard that turns other metals into purest iron. There was a time when you could have destabilized the economy of a kingdom with that thing, but now, all it does is devalue more precious metals. And help you kill fairies, of course. Sometimes fairies need killing.”

Even Bucer looked horrified. “That’s—”

“No worse than your kind throws at mine? I know. It’s like centuries of being treated like our lives don’t matter has left me a little bit bitter.

Or are you really going to tell me that Faerie somehow learned to play nicely with the short-lived, magic-free neighbors while I wasn’t looking?

I didn’t listen when my father told me not to go to the woods because he told me not to go anywhere for fear of the fae.

‘Don’t go by the river, Jenny, the hags will pull you under.

’ ‘Can’t take you to the harvest fest, Jan, two maids vanished there last week after they caught the eyes of the Sidhe.

’ My world has always been hemmed in at the whim of the fae.

Is it so wrong that I should try to balance the scales a bit? ”

“I would never have stolen those things if I’d known they were being put into the hands of a human,” said Bucer.

“Well, then, it’s a good thing you didn’t know, because I needed them,” said Janet. “I still need my hope chest.”

“Why? You’re not fae. It won’t do you any good.”

“No, but I’m expecting to come into the custody of a part-fae infant very soon, and when that happens, I want to be ready to make sure it becomes permanent.”

She started to turn, as if to look in my direction. Bucer saw it too. He grabbed her arm, snapping her attention back to him. I was still furiously angry with him, but I had never been prouder. Maybe I’d find a way to forgive him after all when this was finished.

“You can’t do that!” he said, the smell of pine and linen getting even stronger. Almost desperately, he continued, “Hope chests aren’t meant to be used before people can—before they make the Choice! They’re not supposed to be used to erase Faerie from the places it belongs.”

Janet refocused her attention on him, scowling.

Meanwhile, I had an open doorway into the kitchen.

I stopped there, fighting back the urge to charge at her and make her stop talking—forever if possible.

I had no question that she meant my child.

She wanted my baby, and she was intending to use the hope chest she’d asked Dame Altair to acquire for her to turn that baby fully human before they were old enough to understand what was happening to them.

My own mother had changed the balance of my blood when I was too young to remember.

Only the fact that she’d been trying not to do me permanent harm had stopped her from taking it all the way before Sylvester found out what she was doing and intervened.

I was still recovering the ground she’d stolen from me.

A hope chest wouldn’t be able to feel the baby’s suffering.

It was an object, a tool, and it would do as it was commanded.

Quentin was suddenly beside me, having crossed the room quickly and silently while Bucer had Janet distracted. He put a hand on my shoulder.

“We have to go,” he hissed.

“I will kill her,” I replied.

“You’ll do a better job with Tybalt to help you,” he said, voice soft but reasonable.

I turned to meet his eyes. Janet had been closer than she knew when she called him my replacement child.

I wasn’t his mother, but I was his mom, even as Janet was with Gillian.

I’d been the only stable adult in his life for too many years to call myself anything else.

I hadn’t been trying to put myself in that position.

I’d done it anyway, one lesson and adventure at a time.

“Okay,” I whispered, and stepped through the doorway.

It was quiet in the kitchen. Too quiet—we should have been able to hear Janet and Bucer talking, even if we couldn’t see them anymore.

I realized guiltily that Madden had stayed behind rather than sneaking after us as I’d expected, probably realizing that she would be able to hear his claws clicking on the wood if he’d tried to follow.

Walther and Spike had also remained behind.

Thanks to that strange silence, I no longer believed that I’d be able to hear them if they decided to follow now.

I pulled one of the knives from my belt, using it to lay open the ball of my thumb with a quick slash.

The smell of blood overwhelmed the smell of floor cleaner that lingered in the air, and I stuck my thumb into my mouth, sucking as hard as I could to get the most blood possible before the wound sealed over.

“Maybe hurry,” said Quentin urgently.

I swallowed, not saying anything, and closed my eyes for a moment, searching for the gleam of blood.

The house was so clean that it was even easier to spot than it should have been: a small streak on the doorframe, as if it had been carelessly left by a man slung over someone’s shoulder.

I took note of its position, the taste of blood still filling my mouth and lighting up the world.

It was inside the kitchen. Tybalt had been here.

With this knowledge in mind, I turned to study the kitchen around us with new eyes, still sucking blood off my thumb. It was a crudely infantile gesture, and I didn’t give a damn if it helped me find my husband.

The kitchen was as clean as everything else I had seen in this house.

The exterior was decrepit, but in here, the walls were straight and strong, with no sign of mold or water damage, and the floor was level, covered in linoleum slightly younger than the rest of the house around it, but still old enough to qualify as vintage, if not antique.

Two more doors marked the walls. One had a large window, showing another slice of garden; this place apparently had a backyard of some sort. Quaint.

The other had a drop of blood on the floor in front of it, setting my path. I turned that way, Quentin still following close. I reached for the doorknob.

He touched my shoulder again. I stopped.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

I nodded, biting the inside of my cheek this time. When I inhaled, I could pick up faint traces of magic, left behind by people who had passed through here—panther lily and cinnamon, cotton candy and pennyroyal.

And rowan. Beneath everything else, faint and pale, but present, rowan. I set my jaw and opened the door.

A narrow set of stairs descended into darkness on the other side.

Everything about this house felt like it had been constructed without the use of magic, and these stairs were no different.

I looked down into the dark and wondered what Janet had been thinking, digging a basement in a seismically active place like Berkeley.

But it didn’t matter. I stepped over the threshold, into the dark…

… and nearly fell down the stairs as the world spun wildly around me, the rarely used transition between the human world and the Summerlands smacking me in the head for daring to go where anyone with human blood wasn’t welcome.

Even the baby kicked, hard enough to be momentarily painful.

I grabbed the stair rail, driving splinters into my palm and re-scenting the air with my blood.

That helped. Blood is centering for me, and breathing in the scent of it let me get my balance back, although I still felt as if I might throw up at the slightest additional distress. I took a few steps down the stairs, making room, and mustered a smile as Quentin came through behind me.

There were no visible light sources, not even the open door that should have been behind us, but somehow the space around us was more late twilight than true night: I could still see.

He began to move his hand as if to call a ball of witch light, and I grabbed his wrist, shaking my head.

He blinked at me, barely visible in the gloom.

“No lights,” I whispered.

He paused before lowering his hands. I nodded firmly as I turned to face front once again, then began descending into the dark.

Knowes remain anchored to the mortal world because they’re used, as a general rule; it’s why the transition is so much more harrowing when it involves an unusual route.

They can be sealed and eased into sleep for long periods of time, if the right person does the sealing, but most of them will collapse if not in common usage.

Personally, I think they get lonely. No one does well for long in true isolation.

If knowes are alive—and knowes are alive, the evidence is overwhelmingly in support of that idea—then they can get lonely when they’re left by themselves.

There are other means of digging holes in the barrier between the mortal world and the Summerlands.

Shallowings are exactly that—shallow—and frequently share the physical rules of the mortal world to a degree that knowes do not.

This didn’t feel like a shallowing. It felt more like a den, the habitat of some wild creature, dug as deep as necessary and no deeper. Which meant it wouldn’t be very large.

That was something, anyway.

We continued to descend, and the reason for the shadowy nature of the light, rather than true darkness, appeared ahead of us: a torch was set into the wall, burning with a pale gray flame, only a few shades brighter than Quentin’s witchlights.

As we drew closer to it, I realized that it wasn’t putting off any heat; it was a cold light, swallowing warmth from the air around the flame.

No one else was coming down the stairs behind us. I paused to spare a concerned thought for Walther, Spike, and Madden—Bucer could take care of himself—and kept on going. There was no time left to waste.

As if summoned by the thought, the end of the stairs came into view, flanked by two more of those cold torches. I sped up as much as I dared given my current physical condition, putting one hand on the hilt of my sword, gripping it until the metal of the pommel bit into my palm.

Stepping off the stairs into a narrow, stone-walled corridor was so anticlimactic it was almost shocking. The corridor extended in both directions, lined by those cold torches. I looked both ways, trying to pick up on something—anything—that would tell me which way to go. There was nothing.

I bit the inside of my cheek again, grinding down until I drew blood.

The Luidaeg’s bracelets were slowing my healing enough that it hurt more than it usually would have, my molars slicing through already-bruised tissue.

But the blood came, as the blood always did, and I saw more droplets leading off to the left.

I turned, and Quentin followed, and we made our way deeper into the impossible dungeon beneath Janet’s equally impossible house.

We had gone about thirty feet when two things happened in quick, terrible succession. There was a soft gasp from behind me, and I turned to find Quentin gone, leaving only empty hallway behind me.

I began to draw my sword, only for something to hit me in the back of the head hard enough that I actually heard the bone crack before my eyes rolled back and I collapsed like a sack of potatoes to the floor.

I managed to stay awake long enough to feel myself land on my side, rather than my stomach, and then the darkness was all, and nothing else mattered.