Page 67 of Silver and Lead (October Daye #19)

TWENTY-ONE

T HE DARKNESS OF THE iron’s embrace was dark gray shot through with veins of gleaming red, not black, and it swallowed the world more comprehensively than I would have thought possible.

I could move again, here in the dark, and so I turned where I was, trying to make out details.

There weren’t any. This was a void of light and shadow, emptiness made eternal.

I folded my arms and huffed.

This wasn’t my first dance with iron poisoning: if anything, I’d dealt with the stuff more than any respectable changeling should be expected to—although that was at least in part because most respectable changelings would die after their first exposure to true iron.

The low-grade, adulterated stuff is everywhere in human cities, burning and warning, but the true, pure, cold iron…

that’s mostly reserved to Faerie. Where it can do the most damage.

So this wasn’t my first case of iron poisoning. But looking around this endless red-tinted darkness, I suspected it might well be the worst.

“Aunt Birdie.”

I turned to find Karen standing in the dark.

As was so often the case, having someone else to anchor myself against turned the space around me into something much more comprehensible: where she was standing was the ground, which meant that below her feet was down and above her head was up.

She gave dimension and direction to the dark.

As always in my dreams, she was wearing a white dress like an old-fashioned nightgown, something long and lacy that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a Gothic paperback.

Her hair was long and brown, the color of birch bark, darkening to black at the tips.

Like some Cait Sidhe, her hair was naturally ticked, and didn’t require any dye to achieve that somewhat startling two-tone appearance.

Her ears were pointed and almost cupped, like they were something right between feline and fae, tipped with black and white tufts like a lynx.

Most startling were her eyes. When she was younger they’d been an unassuming shade of blue.

Now, they were a pale yellow-green, as lynxlike as the rest of her.

There was nothing feline in her family tree, and yet I wouldn’t have batted an eye if I’d seen her in the Court of Cats. She looked like she belonged there.

“Hey, puss,” I said.

“You’re not dead.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Blunt, but not unwelcome. Am I dying?”

“Yes. No. It’s hard to say right now. Your body doesn’t want to die, but there’s so much iron in it that it’s having a hard time not dying. You’re more alive than you are dead?”

“And I’m dreaming?” Karen was an oneiromancer, capable of both reading the future in dreams and traveling through them to speak to the sleeping.

As long as she and I napped regularly, we didn’t really need phones to stay in touch.

Of course, that implied that either of us voluntarily “slept,” rather than being knocked unconscious.

She shook her head. “Not exactly. You’re dreaming enough for me to reach you, but you’re not dreaming so much that I can look around and tell your future from what you’re dreaming of .”

“I had the baby. Didn’t I? They performed an emergency C-section on me to get the baby out and away from the iron, and to give my body a chance to put itself back together without diverting all its resources to protecting the baby.”

Karen nodded. “That happened. The baby is fine, Aunt Birdie, breathing and crying and fine. Do you want to know—?”

“Tybalt and I were going to find out at the same time,” I said. “Jin had some tests she could have performed that would tell us whether we were having a boy or a girl, but we wanted to be surprised. Well, I guess we didn’t manage that one, did we?”

“No,” said Karen. “He already knows, and it’s not that important in the greater scope of a life. It’s just the only thing I have to reassure you with right now.”

“Then yeah. I’d like to know.”

“It’s a girl,” said Karen, and smiled earnestly. “You need to get better so you can go and meet her. She’s beautiful.”

“I’m not sure I have much control over whether I get better, puss. There’s all this iron I have to worry about before I can do that.”

“Walther is doing his best,” said Karen. “You’ll see, when you wake up. It’s going to be all right. Is there anything you need from me?”

“Yeah,” I said. The Luidaeg had taken over Karen’s education as soon as we realized she was a Seer, and while it had been odd at the time, we’d all allowed it to happen, because none of us had any idea how to raise a Seer, especially one who’d arisen without warning in a bloodline not known for producing them.

Well, the Luidaeg’s interest had turned out to be a lot more straightforward than any of us realized: Karen was the direct biological daughter of Titania, making her Firstborn, destined to be the mother of a whole new descendant line of fae.

Seers are rare. Firstborn are even rarer.

As far as anyone knew, there hadn’t been a new Firstborn since my mother, and she’d been hundreds of years old when Karen and her siblings were born.

Titania had been having children the whole time she’d been in enchanted obscurity, but the spell she’d been under had compelled her to stay hidden, and she’d twisted that to mean killing her children every time they got old enough to start dating.

Nice lady, Titania. Nice like a knife to the kidney.

But the fact remained that Karen had direct access to the Luidaeg.

Might even be asleep in her apartment right now, keeping her body safe while she moved through the dreams of her allies.

Looking at her solemnly, I said, “Please tell the Luidaeg that Tybalt and I have accepted her generous offer, and would be thrilled if she would stand as godparent to our daughter. I know she’ll protect my family if I can’t. ”

Karen looked at me, expression turning complicated. “That’s all you want from me? One message to the Luidaeg?”

“I—wait.” I paused. “How much can you control what happens in dreams while you’re inside them?”

“Real dreams, almost everything, if I try,” she said.

“I can change every aspect of what happens around me, and around the dreamer. I can look however I like. I got this nightgown from a book Jessica had, about a girl having adventures in dreamland. It made her laugh the first time I wore it into her dreams, and I liked making my little sister laugh.” She glanced down, picking at the lace on her cuffs.

“She didn’t do it enough. Not after Blind Michael. ”

“He did a lot of damage,” I agreed quietly. “So if you can look however you like, could you look like someone else? If you knew them well enough to know what that meant?”

“I can,” said Karen, glancing up again. “I do, when I visit the dreams of people who don’t know what I can do. I make myself into someone else and move through their dreams without sticking out and getting myself noticed.”

“Then if I do die here, will you visit her? My daughter? Not all the time, not every night, but often enough.”

“You want me to visit her dreams and look like you.”

“Yes.” I nodded. “I want her to know what I looked like, not just from pictures. I want her to know what I sounded like.”

“I can never be as obnoxious as you, Aunt Birdie,” said Karen. “You’re going to be fine. I won’t need to haunt her dreams, because she’ll be sleeping to get away from you. And no, I didn’t See anything. I just refuse to let anything else happen.”

“You’re the best not-actually-a-niece a girl could ask for,” I said, smiling fondly at her. “I hope you’re right. I want to meet this kid.”

“Well, then, maybe you should focus on waking up and finding out what Walther is doing,” said Karen.

“And how do I do that?”

“Close your eyes,” she suggested. “It’s natural to run away from pain. That’s what you’re doing right now. Focus instead on running toward the pain. You want the pain. You want to find it, and when you do, you want to hold on to it just as tightly as you possibly can.”

“I’m not running anywhere,” I said staunchly—but when I closed my eyes and focused, really, really focused , like I was trying to find my magic after overexerting myself, I could feel a dull ache like a prodded bruise just on the very edge of my consciousness.

Eyes still closed, I mentally willed myself toward the tender spot, and it got larger, and larger, until the pain was everywhere.

I opened my eyes, and Karen was gone, but the gray iron darkness remained. It might have been my imagination, but it felt like it was split with more veins of bloodied red, lighting up the area around me. The sight made me think that I was missing something.

Well, I had a body, or at least the idea of a body, and I was alive enough that Karen had been able to find me. I looked at my hands, memorizing them, then balled them into fists, closed my eyes again, and bit the inside of my cheek as hard as I could.

There was no pain, only the dull ache from everywhere. There was also no blood.

I bit myself again, harder this time—hard enough that I felt a crunch between my teeth, and the taste of blood, whether real or imagined, flowed across my tongue. I swallowed, and almost gagged as iron filled my throat. Coughing, I spat and spat, blackness into the dark, until the iron was gone.

More careful now, I bit myself a third time, and this time the blood that filled my mouth was only blood, bright and vital and animal.

I swallowed it, and for a moment, the space around me was fuzzy and lit from above.

I couldn’t see anything clearly, but I could tell that there was something there to see.

I tried again, and again, until the blur began to resemble the warehouse, and there were voices in the distance, soft and wrapped in cotton that muffled and distorted them, but still absolutely, totally there. I closed my eyes and bit myself one more time, hard enough to hurt even in the void.

“—working?”