Page 62 of Silver and Lead (October Daye #19)

“What happened?” He pushed himself into a sitting position, looking around himself with bewilderment. He paused when he saw May. “May?”

“You got it, kid,” she said, shooting finger guns at him.

“You got your skull cracked by Dame Altair’s brother,” said Walther.

“The pair of them dragged us both in here, and she told me to save your life before they became Lawbreakers. She implied, fairly heavily, that right now they could run without any lasting damage done, just a few untitled ruffians and beasts who might try to claim offense against them, but if you died, they’d have broken the Law, and they’d have nothing left to lose. ”

Sometimes the convoluted rules and rituals the purebloods live by can work in our favor. My stomach still clenched at the idea that we would all have become expendable as soon as they were officially Lawbreakers.

Quentin gaped at Walther, as stunned as the rest of us. “They wouldn’t have done that,” he said.

“Maybe not, but Janet would have,” I said. “She doesn’t know the Law. Or if she does—if she’s been around Faerie long enough to have learnt it at this point—she doesn’t care about the Law. She’s outside it. She’s been an entity unto herself since Maeve’s Ride was broken.”

“Maybe she shouldn’t be,” said Quentin, and there was an uncharacteristically grim note to his tone.

I glanced his way. He met my eyes and shrugged.

“That hurt. A lot. I could have died. And now you’re telling me that if I had died, you would all have been murdered, because you can’t become more of a Lawbreaker by killing more than one person.

That sounds like the sort of idea someone who isn’t at risk has and hands to you on a shiny silver platter. ”

“Maybe so.” I stood, offering him my hands.

He took them and pulled himself off the bed, and I didn’t comment on the bloody mess that was the pillow and the back of his shirt.

“But right now, we need to get moving if we’re going to get out of here.

I’ll fill you in on the rest while we find Tybalt. ”

Telling Quentin about Janet’s plans while we were working our way down the hall might be the only way I’d stop an explosion.

I no longer thought we needed to be completely silent—and we couldn’t be, not with five of us trying to stay together in a dark, narrow hall with unpadded floors—but he had the sense not to start yelling while we were potentially exposed.

He didn’t get that from me. With every discovery along this glory road of horrors, I could feel the screams building in the back of my throat.

I was just glad we only had Tybalt left to find.

If he was still breathing, if he was still in one piece, I would be able to swallow those screams before they gave us away. If anything had happened to him…

If he’d been damaged in any lasting way, I was going to rip Bucer apart with my bare hands before moving on to his allies.

Even if he wasn’t working with them anymore, his service to Dame Altair had put us in the same place, had driven him to use his compulsion magic to dredge up deep desires I would never once have chosen to act upon.

Every couple fights. Everyone who’s being coddled feels smothered at some point.

But if not for Bucer, I would never have walked away and left Tybalt in danger.

It was easier to blame other people, even if the impulse had been partially my own. Given the circumstances, it was probably healthier, too.

Walther only looked back once at his alchemical station, loaded with ingredients he’d probably never seen before and might never see again, before he followed the rest of us to the door. I could see the longing in his expression. It wasn’t enough to keep him here.

He still looked annoyed as he turned to face me. I offered him a small nod, and was relieved when he returned it.

Quentin stuck close to me, which seemed a little counterintuitive—it was sticking close to me that had gotten him hurt in the first place.

I guess habits are hard to break. For years, I had been seeing him safely through situations as bad or worse than this one, although I couldn’t really imagine things getting much worse than they already were.

Together, the five of us slipped back into the hall.

Normally I would have been criticizing our captor’s prisoner management—leaving us in isolated rooms without guards on duty was nowhere near as secure as they seemed to believe it was—but under the circumstances, I couldn’t.

I didn’t want them to have more people on their side, which criticism would have absolutely implied they should have, and they’d been binding us with iron.

That’s normally the end of escape attempts.

But they hadn’t anticipated Madden, and he was making all the difference in the world.

“Madden, I owe you when we get out of this,” I said, voice low. “Is there anything I can do to repay you for your help?”

“How good are you at throwing things?”

“Not amazing, but not terrible either.”

“Wanna spend a day down on the beach, throwing a stick for me to bring back to you?”

The question was sincerely asked, and I managed, barely, not to laugh. “That would be fine, yes.”

Madden looked pleased as he returned his attention to the hallway ahead of us. I looked over at Quentin. “Hey,” I said softly.

“Hey,” he said.

“You really feeling okay?”

“I am now . What did you do?”

“Me? I just bled. It was Walther who did everything that mattered. He mixed the base for the poultice he applied to the back of your head, and he pulled enough of the iron out of my blood to make it safe to use.”

Quentin’s eyes widened, then narrowed as his expression hardened. “What do you mean, he pulled the iron out of your blood? Toby…?”

I winced. “They had me bound with iron,” I said. “May, too. Madden wasn’t bound because he wasn’t caught, and Walther wasn’t bound because he was supposed to be keeping you alive. So they were our wild cards, and now we’re out.”

We passed more doors as we walked. Each time, Madden would tap the locks with his blistered fingers, then ease the doors open and look inside, searching for more captives. Each time, he would pull back and close the door again, shaking his head.

This complex seemed to go on forever. It didn’t feel alive the way most knowes do; it felt more like we were walking through the body of some great beast that had fallen long ago, dying quietly and unremarked in the wilderness.

There was no sense that we weren’t welcome here, that we didn’t belong, only that nothing was meant to be walking here any longer; this was a place for the dead, and we were still terribly, vitally among the living.

“Why?” asked Quentin.

I sighed. “What Janet said in the front room—this was all a trap, Quentin. It was a setup from the very beginning. Dame Altair was trying to get me alone, because the last thing she’d been hired to steal was my baby.”

“Janet wants your baby.”

“Yes.”

“Your grandmother wants your baby.”

“Yes. I guess she thinks Faerie owes her one at this point—and I can’t entirely say that she’s in the wrong for believing that. I can’t say that she’s right, either. Some debts can never be paid. They just get to go on existing, forever.”

I rubbed my stomach protectively as I spoke. Janet wasn’t going to get anywhere near my baby. None of them were. No matter how else this day ended, I knew that part for certain.

We were approaching the end of the hall, and another door.

Unlike the others, which had been set into the passage walls, this one was on the dead end, standing alone.

I swallowed hard as I looked at it. If he wasn’t here, we were going to need to start looking elsewhere—and I wasn’t sure how much more walking I had in me.

My knees felt like they were on fire. The rest of me wasn’t much better.

As Madden approached the door and brushed his fingertips against the lock, I leaned against the wall, trying to take some of the pressure off of my joints, even if it was only for a few seconds.

The door swung inward. Madden began to stick his head into the room, then staggered back, swearing more loudly than any of us had dared to be since stepping into the hall.

I jerked upright, staring, as Madden slammed into the wall, clawing uselessly at his face.

His hands were too damaged for him to grasp the furious beast that had latched onto his head, spitting and clawing, and even if he’d been able to try, I wouldn’t have liked his odds.

This wasn’t Tybalt as he’d been after my mother kidnapped him, traumatized and lost in the twists and turns of his own mind. This was a King of Cats enraged.

He was fully feline, tail puffed out until it was a visible beacon of his anger, and in his feline form, he was a tabby tomcat that weighed easily twenty pounds.

It was easy to think of him as small, because he was small in comparison to his human form, but as cats go, he was quite large, and quite capable of doing a lot of damage.

And he was set on doing all that damage to poor Madden.

I pushed away from the wall and hurried over as quickly as I could. “Tybalt,” I said urgently. “Hey, Tybalt, hey. Madden didn’t do anything wrong. Stop trying to chew his face off, okay?”

I grabbed for the flailing, furious form of my husband, and winced as he whipped around and drove his teeth into my already-injured hand.

Then he stopped, ears coming up from their flattened position and wildness clearing from his eyes.

He pulled his claws out of Madden’s skin, then took his teeth out of my hand and looked at me.

No matter what shape he wore, his eyes were always green, banded like malachite, and beloved. I raised my other hand and rubbed the top of his head, pressing his ears briefly flat.

“Hey, baby,” I said.