Ashes of Honor: An October Daye Novel (42 page)

It might have worked…but Officer Thornton didn’t move. Instead, he stopped where he was, staring out the nearest window. Unlike the windows upstairs, these were wide and high, giving an excellent view of the star-speckled sky and the wide, unearthly moor stretching outward to the sea. “What
is
this place?” he asked.

“Hey! Hush!” I rushed back over to him, gesturing for him to keep his voice down. “It’s a bad place, okay? It’s a place we’re going to get you out of as fast as we can. But you have to keep quiet, or else—”

“You might find yourself in a bit of a pickle.” Samson’s voice was self-assured enough to make my teeth crawl. He stepped out of the shadows in front of me, a smile on his face that showed the points of all his teeth. To add insult to injury, he had my knife tucked into his belt. “Then again, you might find yourself in a bit of a pickle no matter what your human pet chooses to do. Really,
Sire
?” He looked past me to Tybalt. “This is the woman you would betray your people for? The sort of sentimental fool who can’t even make an escape without saddling herself with invalids and idiots? I thought better of you, once.”

“My first mistake was in letting you stand beside your
son, Samson,” said Tybalt. His voice betrayed nothing of his injuries. “Run, and I may let you live.”

“That gift is no longer yours to give.” Cait Sidhe can move almost impossibly fast when they want to. I didn’t see Samson preparing to lunge; I barely saw him moving. Officer Thornton fell to the side, shouting in dismay, and then Samson was behind me, my hair knotted in one hand, the claws of the other hand pressed against my throat. “It seems to me,
Sire
, that the right to dispense life lies elsewhere.”

I swallowed, feeling the points of Samson’s claws prickling against my skin. “Uh…”

“Got something to say, slattern? Wishing you hadn’t interfered with the Court of Cats?” Samson leaned close, his breath hot against my cheek as he murmured, “I’ve seen the way you heal. I may have to dig all the way to your spine before you stop breathing. It should be one of the more interesting deaths I’ve granted in years.”

“Samson…” There was a warning in Tybalt’s voice that would have made my blood run cold if it had been directed at me. “Release her.”

“Surrender,” Samson countered. “Give me your word as both cat and King that you will put your throat into my son’s hands, and then, perhaps, I’ll let your little bitch walk free.”

The smell of cedar smoke and limes drifted through the air. I stiffened. Samson, oddly, didn’t. Maybe he didn’t know the smell of Etienne’s magic, or maybe he just thought there was nothing anyone could do to interfere with his plans—not at this stage, not when he had me in his hands. Whatever the reason, he didn’t slacken his grip until he went stiff, claws digging into my skin. I yelped, feeling blood start to run down my neck toward my collarbone. Then Samson’s hand fell, and I ducked away from him before he could get any more bright ideas.

Samson wasn’t getting any ideas about anything. He was just standing there. I turned to look back at him and saw him staring down at his own side in amazement. Etienne
was right behind him, his hand grasping the hilt of my knife. The dark stain spreading through Samson’s shirt told me the rest of the story.

Tybalt’s hand closed on my shoulder, stopping me from stumbling any further backward. I leaned into it, clamping my own hands over the punctures in my throat. Etienne pulled the knife out and stabbed Samson again, and again.

And Samson raised his head, pupils narrowing to hairline slits. “This isn’t over,” he spat, and pulled away from Etienne, moving shakily, but still moving. He grabbed something from his pocket, throwing it into the shadows, and dove after it. The smell of apples and snowdrops rose, overlaying the more distant smell of Chelsea’s magic, and he was gone.

“Oh, goody,” I said faintly. “This is the
best
day.”

“Sir Daye, you’re wounded.” Etienne vanished, reappearing next to me in another wafting gust of smoke and limes. “Let me see.”

“It’s nothing. Really. It’s already starting to heal.” I didn’t actually know that, but recent experience told me the odds were on my side. I kept my hands where they were, feeling them turning sticky with blood. “Did you get my knife?”

“I did.” Etienne held it out to me, hilt first. “I am afraid you may need to clean it.”

I took a hand away from my neck and reached for the knife, relaxing as the weight of it settled into my hands. Then the weight of Etienne’s words hit me. Clean it. I needed to clean it.

The knife was covered in Samson’s blood, a thick coating of the stuff that looked almost black in the moonlight. Samson was working with Riordan. Samson knew enough to know where we’d be, and to be the one who had my knife. The thought was enough to turn my stomach. That didn’t mean I could just ignore it.

“What—what
are
you people?”

The panicked note in Officer Thornton’s voice was enough to make me set all other thoughts aside as I
raised my head and looked at him. He was backed up against the wall next to the window, staring at us with wide, terrified eyes. The blood had drained from his face, leaving him as pale as the moonlight washing over him.

“This isn’t a cult,” he said. “This isn’t hallucinogenic drugs. You’re not human.” Then he turned and ran, heading for the end of the hall.

I groaned. “Etienne—”

“Of course.” The smell of cedar smoke and limes rose again, and Etienne was gone. He would intercept Officer Thornton, and if he couldn’t calm him down, he could knock him out. That might be enough to buy us the time we needed. I hoped.

Tybalt’s hand tightened on my shoulder. “You don’t have to do this.”

“Got a better idea?” He didn’t say anything. I sighed. “Didn’t think so. Come on.” I pulled away from him, heading for the dark alcove that had been my initial destination on this floor. With Samson running wounded, presumably for Riordan, and the Folletti somewhere in the hall with us, we didn’t have much time.

Tybalt walked with me, frowning. “October—”

“Just watch my back, okay?” I raised my knife before he could say anything else, and ran my tongue along the flat of the blade.

Samson’s memories slammed into me, a thick cloud of resentment, jealousy, and unresolved hatreds. They were a tangled mass of images, hard to sort through or comprehend. I staggered, trying to figure out why it was hitting me so hard, and felt Tybalt’s hands catch me. Then the world dropped away, taking reassuring hands and the Annwn night with it, and everything was the red haze, and the weight of Samson’s bitter memory.

Bastard. He gets everything he wants—he always has, Prince of Londinium, King of San Francisco, and how much of it has he worked for? How much of it has he
earned?
Not a bit, and yet there he sits, and here I stand, hoping he’ll exploit my son enough to grant me the power to pull us away from this cursed place, these
cursed people who walk and talk and call themselves our
equals.

I’d always known that Samson was a cruel, resentful man, but I’d never understood how angry he was until that moment. Angry about his place in Cait Sidhe society, angry at the accident of birth that made Tybalt a King and him a subject, angry at the fact that his only living child would eventually have that same level of power and privilege. He resented Raj, even as he viewed his son as the one opportunity he’d ever have to achieve the status he thought he deserved.

I was dimly aware that I was on my knees on the cold stone floor of the hall; I could feel a hand gripping my shoulder, fingers clutching hard enough that I could feel them despite the leather of my jacket and the distance imposed by the heavy veil of blood between us. I clung to that sensation—to the knowledge of
self
, and the even better knowledge that there was someone ready and waiting to call me back—as I forced myself deeper into the spell.

“So you can get me the girl?”

“I can.” I do not brag—cats do not brag—but I still speak the truth. Riordan came to me with rumors, and I proved them to be reality. An untrained, unwatched Tuatha changeling. She could have amounted to nothing. Instead, she came to be so much more.

“How?”

“She walks the same route every day. I can take her into the shadows and bring her to you before she musters her senses enough to run.”

“If you fail me…” She does not complete the sentence. She doesn’t need to. I know the price of failure better than she does, because I understand what this is. She thinks it’s an escape from the eyes on her borders. I know it for something more.

This is a coup.

“I will not fail.”

Riordan says nothing. She simply nods, and I think again that power is the one thing the Divided Courts got
right. They understand that power should belong to the strongest—if you can take a thing and hold it, it should be yours. She would have made a fine cat. A pity, then, that she must belong to the lesser Courts. Unlike some, I will never dirty myself.

But still, she’s lovely in the moonlight.

Seen through Samson’s assessing eyes, Duchess Riordan was a beautiful tool, as clueless and malleable as the rest of the Divided Courts but with a strength of character that he found himself compelled to admire. The taste of his admiration was alien in my mind, so cold and calculating that I would have mistaken it for another flavor of hatred if I hadn’t been wound so deeply in his memories.

Too deeply; I was seeing Riordan in her own territory, and not in the moonlight of Annwn. I forced myself to move forward through Samson’s memory, clawing my way through the blood-soaked veils of recollection until the red shattered and re-formed into something more familiar. The cliff at the edge of the moor, overlooking the sea.

The mongrel girl is flagging. I thought she would collapse long before this, but fear, it seems, is a grand motivator; a few threats to the mother she loves and the father she’s never known, and she was so much more willing to work with us. Still, holding a portal this size open for so long is doubtless…draining. I doubt she will live.
Through his eyes, I watched Chelsea struggling to keep a passageway large enough to drive a car through open. I could see Riordan’s garage on the other side—and they
were
driving a car through, of a sort. A footman in Riordan’s livery was steering a cart through the opening, drawn by fae steeds and laden with farming equipment. From the tracks crushed into the bracken, it wasn’t the first, either.

“How much longer?”

Riordan turns her back on the supply train as she looks toward me. Behind her, that mongrel bitch’s spoiled little squire is bound and gagged in a wicker chair, watching
helplessly as the wagons roll through. “Why in such a hurry, my friend?” she asks. “We’re both getting what we want. Shouldn’t you savor your victory?”

“I’ll savor it when that door is closed, and I never need to see your face again,” I snap. “How much longer?”

She sighs, looking disappointed. “You never did have a sense of humor, Sammy. Most of the supplies and livestock are through, and all my people. Why don’t you make yourself useful? Go check on our prisoners. Make sure they’re not getting into any mischief.”

Her laughter follows me out as I use her blood charm to access the Shadow Roads that would otherwise be locked to me in this place, the cold and the dark numbing the sting of being mocked by a member of her debauched Court. And then the light, and sweet Titania, what a gift—they’re here, and this time, no one will stop me from doing what needs to be done—

I jerked myself free of the blood when my/Samson’s eyes fixed on the four of us standing in the darkened hall. There was nothing he could tell me after that, except for maybe what it felt like to get stabbed with my own knife. It probably wasn’t going to be that different from getting stabbed with anything else, and none of those stabbings were much fun. Pass.

“That’s why she was willing to kidnap a police officer,” I muttered, half-gasping. “I knew she wasn’t planning on going back, but this…this…”

“October?” Tybalt’s hand tightened on my shoulder.

“We need to get back to the cliff.” I spat on the floor, trying to get the taste of Samson’s blood—of Samson’s
life
—out of my mouth. “Riordan’s there, she’s got some sort of supply train going. This was never just a kidnapping.”

“What is it, then?”

I managed to lift my head, twisting around to look at him. “It’s a colonization,” I said. “Riordan is recolonizing Annwn, and she’s using Chelsea to do it.”

E
TIENNE DIDN’T COME BACK as the minutes ticked by, until we couldn’t wait any longer. Riordan’s wards couldn’t shut off the Shadow Roads completely—not here—but Tybalt hadn’t been in Annwn long enough to anchor them, and we didn’t have Luna’s favor to open the Rose Road for us. I was grateful not to be alone as Tybalt and I crept out of the hall and onto the moon-drenched moor together.

The bracken was so thick that don’t-look-here spells were useless; even if I were invisible, I’d be leaving a trail that would point our pursuers directly to us if I did anything but follow Tybalt’s lead through the brush. The way he blended into the landscape was unreal. Anyone following us would find him as hard to track as a tiger in the jungle, while I felt like a giant neon sign blundering across the field. “Hero incoming, look over here.” Even hunching over didn’t do me any good. Boughs of broom and heather disturbed by Tybalt’s passage kept slapping me in the face, and being hit with swinging greenery didn’t precisely help my attempts at stealth.