Page 68 of Silver and Lead (October Daye #19)

“I can’t tell. It’s not like I’ve done this before, and you’re further away from her than I’d like in virtually every direction.” Walther sighed. “I’m sorry, Quentin. I’m doing the best I can, all right?”

“Please, October. Please, my love. All I need you to do is open your eyes. Everything else can be negotiated later, if you’ll just open your eyes for me now.”

Tybalt sounded desperate, not like he was on the brink of tears, but like he was talking through them, like he was already weeping.

There was a bright new pain in the world; not only could I feel the damage I’d done to my poor, chewed-up cheek, and the cuts May had made in my stomach, but it felt like someone had stabbed me in the bend of my right elbow, driving their weapon in deep and leaving it there for some reason.

“Please,” repeated Tybalt. “Open your eyes.”

So I did.

I was still on my back, and staring up at the unfinished stone of the warehouse ceiling.

Tybalt was kneeling on my left, stroking my hair back from my forehead with one hand, and the tears I’d thought I heard in his voice were very real.

He looked like a man in the process of falling totally apart.

There was blood on his hands and arms, all the way up to his elbows, and the sleeves of his shirt were irreparably stained.

There was even a smudge on his cheek, small and dark and silently accusing.

See? it seemed to say. See what happened because you wouldn’t let me keep you safe?

I closed my eyes again and pushed that thought away. There had never been a world where I would be content to be confined, to not fully be myself, and neither one of us should have believed there would be.

We wouldn’t make that mistake again. I reopened my eyes and cleared my throat. It was a small sound, closer akin to a cough than anything else, but Tybalt reacted instantly.

“October!” he exclaimed, making no effort to keep quiet. Stealth had apparently been abandoned in favor of dramatics.

Having just been relieved of a baby and almost died, I wasn’t opposed to dramatics. I forced myself to smile up at him. “Hey,” I managed to whisper. “Did I miss the party?”

I heard people moving to either side, and May asked, “Toby?”

“S’me,” I replied. “What’s going on?”

Madden leaned over me from the left, towering over Tybalt. “You’re not dead?” he asked, hopefully.

“Not yet.”

“That’s all thanks to Walther,” said May. “He’s been doing ridiculous things with blood since you passed out.”

“Walther?” I turned my head to the right, guessing that he might be connected to the pain in my arm.

There was what looked like the shaft of a crossbow bolt sticking out of the bend of my elbow, attached to a long piece of clear plastic tubing currently filled with something thick and red.

Walther was there, clearly monitoring the bolt and keeping it from shifting.

He smiled thinly at the sight of my open eyes.

“Welcome back, Sleeping Beauty,” he said.

I grimaced. “I appreciate you going with that fairy tale and not the glass coffin one.”

“I don’t want to attract her attention any more than you do.”

I relaxed into the blankets beneath me.

Eira had a lot of names before she decided to spend a few centuries pretending to be Evening Winterrose.

One of the earliest ones I’m aware of lasted long enough to leak out into the mortal world, where they made her a beautiful princess in a casket made of ice.

Snow White. She’s real, she’s horrible, and she hates me. So that’s fun.

Glancing back at the crossbow bolt in my arm, I asked, “Why is that there? Were you using me for target practice?”

“It’s there because I am a genius and Faerie is so, so lucky to have me,” said Walther.

He shifted positions so I could see Quentin at the other end of the clear tubing, sitting upright with a second bolt sticking out of his arm.

“Don’t either one of you move, please. I need gravity to keep doing the work for me. ”

I blinked slowly. “What, exactly, is the work you’re doing?” My head was feeling clearer all the time, like I was recovering from a hangover inch by inch.

“You and Quentin are both descended from Oberon,” said Walther.

“The Titania heritage on his side makes things a little hinky, but since you claim him as a son, and Simon as your father, I was counting on the sympathies being on our side. He’s donating blood.

Normally a human thing, but under the circumstances, it was that or sit back and do nothing. ”

“I would have had your lungs as a cradle-gift for my child,” said Tybalt, voice very solemn. He was holding my left hand so tightly it felt like the bones were bending. I didn’t try to pull away. After the day we’d had, he deserved to bend a few bones if that was what would make him feel better.

“Yes, yes, you’re terrifying,” said Walther.

“Quentin’s Daoine Sidhe. They’re blood-workers, just like the D ó chas Sidhe, and they’re incredibly good at borrowing other people’s magic from the blood.

So I give you his blood, which carries the borrowing, and you can use that magic to borrow healing from your own blood while your own magic recovers. ”

“All that blood loss was actually a good thing,” said May. “It took a bunch of the iron out of your system with it. There’s still more in you than is any good, but a lot of it wound up on the floor.”

I turned toward her as she spoke, and my breath caught in my throat.

She was holding a very small bundle against her chest, wrapped in what had probably been a priceless tapestry before someone sliced a chunk of it off to use as a baby blanket. She followed the direction of my gaze and smiled, warm and welcoming as anything.

“Can we prop her up a little, Walther? Or will that mess with your transfusion?”

“We just need to keep Quentin higher than she is, so that gravity stays on our side.”

“We can do that,” agreed May. “Especially since she’s still healing, and it won’t do us any good to get the iron out of her organs if we let her turn around and dump them all over the floor.”

Tybalt shifted positions, easing me up until I was reclining, half-lying down, half-sitting up. He left his arm behind my shoulders when he was finished, settling to the floor beside me.

“Okay,” said May. “Don’t try to move too much.

We’ll take care of everything for now.” With this said, she leaned down and carefully transferred the baby to my chest. I raised the arm that didn’t have a tube attached to it, getting it curled beneath her as best as I could.

I was mostly drawing on muscle memory of having done the same with Gillian—that, and a much-reduced fear of dropping the baby, since I could be reasonably sure that she’d recover from anything that happened.

Not that I was planning to drop the baby.

If anything, the exact opposite. I looked down into her tiny face, eyes closed and features just a little scrunched up, like the weight of being alive was still too much for her to stand.

Her head was topped with wisps of thin, cottony hair, too baby fine for me to be sure of the color, but it looked as if it was going to be striped.

“She’s beautiful,” I said, looking up again and smiling at Tybalt. “Not how I wanted to do this, but still, worth the whole process.”

“She is,” he agreed, looking at me rather than at our daughter. “Like her mother.”

“Sitting right here, bleeding to save my knight, not even going to get a glass of orange juice when this is over,” said Quentin dolefully. “Can you maybe hold off on getting all sappy until she can stand up, and I can walk away?”

We both laughed, exhaustion and relief coloring the sound, then settled to just exist as a group, me leaning against Tybalt, the baby bundled on my chest, Quentin’s blood flowing out of him and into me.

Bit by bit, the pain in my guts went away, taking my various other aches and pains with it.

I relaxed, sitting up straighter. The baby slept.

That wasn’t going to last, I knew, but while it did, I was going to enjoy it as much as I could.

After a few minutes of restorative silence, Madden scuffed his foot against the ground.

“I’m gonna go search the shelves some more,” he said. “Maybe I can find a baby carrier or something.”

Splitting the group seemed like an absolutely terrible idea, but Madden was clearly smart enough to want to give our little family unit some space.

Walther was the only other semi-outsider, and he was occupied enough with maintaining the tubing between myself and Quentin that he wasn’t going anywhere.

I watched as Madden vanished into the warehouse with a speed that would have been insulting if he hadn’t been so clearly terrified of overstepping and offending someone. “Poor guy.”

“Not accustomed to infants?”

“Not accustomed to Cait Sidhe,” I corrected. “You’re sort of terrifying when you’re upset.”

“I have had more than sufficient cause to be upset,” said Tybalt. He reached over and stroked a fingertip down my cheek. “The scratch has gone.”

It took me a moment to realize what he meant. Then I blinked, turning to Walther. “Are we done?”

“Not quite,” he said. “Give me your hand.”

Over the years, I’ve learned that things go more easily when I just acquiesce to that sort of request. Under the circumstances, with a baby in my arms and what felt like an exsanguination’s worth of blood pooled beneath me, I decided to be a little bit more cautious. “Why?”

“I need a blood sample so I can determine whether you’re done recovering.”

Hesitantly, I extended my right hand toward him, moving as little as possible to avoid dislodging the tube.

Walther produced a small knife, the kind normally used for slicing samples off of growing herbs, and sliced the side of my thumb, catching the resulting blood in a vial. The cut had already sealed by the time he leaned away. “You can have your hand back,” he said.