An Artificial Night - BK 3 (41 page)

“Luna,” Acacia whispered, raising one hand. Her fingers touched the edge of the circle, and she recoiled. “I . . . oh, Luna. I can’t reach you.”

“I know,” Luna said. “You’re too much part of Father’s kingdom. The circle is warded against his magic.”

“I know.”

“We could pull you through . . .”

“And what? Change me the way you’ve changed yourself? Free me from him? Would you hold me when I bit and struck and burned you? Would you cover my nakedness and set me free?”

“Yes.” Luna’s answer left no room for argument.

Acacia smiled. The expression was bittersweet. “I believe you. I’ve missed you so much, little rose.”

“I missed you, too.”

“Come home.”

“No.”

“I didn’t think you would.” Her smile softened, saddening. “I hear you’ve married.”

“Yes, I have. He loves me, despite everything.” Luna glanced at me. I looked away.

“He’s clever. Love matters.” Acacia’s smile faltered. “I’ve always loved you.”

“Come home.”

“No.” Acacia stepped back. “Now we’ve both asked, and both refused. I miss you, my dear one. I’ll always miss you, just as I’ll always love you. And now I follow your father.”

“Mother—”

Acacia shook her head and walked back to her horse, remounting. Luna started to follow, but the Luidaeg put out an arm, stopping her. “No,” she said. “You can’t go after her.”

“But—”

“No.” Acacia was already riding away, fading as she gathered speed. The Luidaeg lowered her arm. “We can’t save them if they don’t want to be saved. It doesn’t work that way.”

Luna stared at her for a long moment, then whirled with a small, choked cry and hugged me fiercely. I realized with vague surprise that she was crying. “I thought I let him take you forever,” she whispered. “After everything he’s taken . . . I thought he took you too.”

I shivered and leaned against her, closing my eyes. After everything that had happened, I wasn’t entirely sure he hadn’t.

T
HE STRANGENESS BEGAN BLEEDING out of the night, seeping away bit by bit, until the world outside the shining border of the Luidaeg’s circle looked like the world I remembered. A brisk wind blew by, carrying the Halloween scents of dried leaves, burning pumpkin, and impending rain. The Luidaeg was still standing on the circle’s edge, moving her fingers in small, seemingly random gestures that were probably all that kept us hidden. No one had exactly been focusing on their illusions in the chaos of breaking Blind Michael’s Ride.

The kids that had been saved were stumbling around the circle, disoriented and confused by what had happened. Only the ones who had someone capable of claiming them—“friends, family, or blood-tied companions,” as the Luidaeg said—had been pulled out of the Ride. Time in Faerie is a funny thing. Some of the kids from the Children’s Hall were mixed into the crowd, clinging to their parents or their suddenly grown-up siblings and crying, or laughing, or both. The Centaur who’d spent so much time taunting me was there, his scales and strangeness washed away by the changes he’d gone through. He had his arms around the waist of a tall female Centaur with a strawberry coat. They were sobbing bitterly, and neither looked inclined to let go anytime soon. His Piskie companion was nowhere in sight. I was sorry to see that. She’d been as horrible to me as she could, but it wasn’t her fault. A little cruelty didn’t mean she should never get to go home.

Of all the horses that had accompanied Blind Michael’s Ride, only Katie had been pulled inside the circle. She’d reverted to her human form after the cycle of transformations was finished, but that didn’t seem to have done anything to heal her mind. She was curled into a ball, sobbing. As I watched, Quentin tried to touch her upper arm, murmuring something that I couldn’t hear. She screamed, loudly and shrilly enough that if not for the Luidaeg’s spell, we would have had every security guard in Golden Gate Park on us in minutes. Luna winced and finally left my side, hurrying over to guide Quentin away from his huddled girlfriend.

Katie stopped screaming and balled back up again, shivering. Poor kid. She was home, but she was still lost. Maybe we all were. I could still feel Blind Michael at the back of my mind, a light, fluttering presence trying to find a way back in. I shuddered.

“When does it end, Luidaeg?” I asked, voice pitched low.

She glanced over her shoulder at me. “That’s your choice to make, Toby. Go reassure your friends. They’ve been a little worried.”

“I—”

“We’ll talk about it later. Now if you’ll excuse me?” She smiled mirthlessly. “I need to hold this circle a little longer, and that does take a little bit of focus.”

“Right,” I said, and stepped away, giving her space.

Connor and Cassandra were working a strange sort of crowd control, keeping the kids and their parents inside the ring of light. Every time someone tried to leave, one of them was right there, guiding them back to the others. I couldn’t blame the parents for wanting to get their kids home—some of them had probably been missing for centuries—but a little more time wouldn’t hurt anything, and it might help a lot.

May and Tybalt were standing off to one side, not helping with the organization, but not breaking the circle, either. I walked over to them, clutching May’s cloak tightly around myself.

“Hello” seemed too simple and “thank you” was forbidden, so I said the first thing that popped into my head: “You two look awfully cozy.”

“Oh, we are,” May said. Her sunny good cheer had only been slightly dampened by getting pummeled, bitten, and baked by the person whose death she was supposed to foretell. “We actually turn out to have a lot in common.”

“Oh?” I raised an eyebrow.

“Yes,” replied Tybalt, flatly. “The urge to smack you until you stop doing stupid things to yourself is at the head of the list.”

“Hey, you helped me get to Shadowed Hills.”

“And never have I more regretted helping you, believe me. But it had to be done.” He scanned my face, expression unreadable. “You’re well?”

“Sure. I mean, except for the whole getting myself enslaved by a crazy Firstborn asshole who was planning to marry me at the end of the Ride part, this has almost been a vacation.” I shrugged. “How’s it been out here?”

“Karen woke up crying,” May said, voice suddenly flat. “Said your candle blew out. It’s a good thing she was with the Luidaeg. She would’ve scared the hell out of me.”

“He locked the roads after he took you. No one got in, no one got out.” Tybalt kept looking at me with that same blank expression. “Every route we tried to reach his lands was blocked. All we could do was wait until the Ride came down and take you on the road.”

“So, like, sorry about the whole abandoning you thing,” May finished.

I shook my head. “Pretty sure you can’t abandon me, May, being as you’re my Fetch and everything. But . . . I appreciate what you did.”
I appreciate
skirted the absolute edges of propriety, almost crossing the line into
thank you
. If it bothered either of them, they didn’t show it. A brief silence fell between us. I glanced around the circle, taking one more look at the small clusters that had formed as grateful parents kept their children close. More and more of them were beginning to don their human disguises, anticipating the moment when the Luidaeg would drop the circle and let them go. As I should probably have expected, Amandine was nowhere to be seen.

“You’d think Mom might have shown up,” I said, as lightly as I could manage. “Saving the life of her only daughter and everything. It could’ve been a bonding experience.”

“Sadly, Amandine has disappeared again,” said Tybalt, scowling. “Her tower is sealed.”

“Because that’s a big surprise.” Mom has spent more and more time vanishing into the deeper parts of the Summerlands since she decided to go crazy. I have no idea what she does there. It definitely doesn’t include sending postcards home.

Connor stepped up beside me, taking my elbow. “If you could all get your disguises on, the Luidaeg says she’s about to drop the circle,” he said. “Toby, May, Luna wanted me to inform you that you’ll be riding back to Shadowed Hills with us. Sylvester wants to see you. Toby, can I see you for a second?”

“Sure,” I said, and let him guide me away.

He tugged me to a spot on the far side of the circle, as far away as the ring of light would allow, and released my elbow in order to cup my face in both hands. His eyes were red. He’d clearly been crying.

“I thought—”

“You thought wrong.” I reached up, wrapping my fingers around his wrists and holding his hands in place. “Didn’t I tell you I’d come home? Sometimes it just takes a little while. And hey, two months isn’t even a
patch
on fourteen years.”

Connor laughed unsteadily. “Can we not make this a competition?”

“I’d win.”

“That’s why we can’t do it.” He leaned forward to rest his forehead against mine, still cupping my face with his hands. “Are you okay? Are you really okay?”

How was I supposed to answer that? No, I wasn’t okay. I was a long, long way from okay. I felt violated. I felt like someone had managed to leave stains on the inside of my skin, and my vision kept blurring around the edges, like it was trying to fragment. Blind Michael had something special planned for me, and his hooks were still sunk deep.

I pulled away from him, releasing his hands. “Yeah,” I said. “I’m good.”

He looked uncertain, but he didn’t argue. There was too much to do. Some of the kids hadn’t worn a human disguise in so long that they didn’t know how to craft one anymore, and the chaos that started as their parents attempted to walk them through the process gave me the room I needed to retreat, well away from anyone who would ask me uncomfortable questions, and start getting my own disguise on. Maybe the long pause had been good for my magic, because it felt like my illusion came together more easily than normal. It only took a few minutes for me to wrap myself in a facade of mortality.

I was one of the last. Almost as soon as my illusion finished settling into place the Luidaeg lowered her hands, and the circle collapsed. The last thin layer of unreality between us and the mortal night fell away with it, and the sounds and smells of a San Francisco Halloween surged in. It should have been a comfort, but it wasn’t, and I felt myself go cold.

It didn’t feel like home.

“End of the line, kids,” said the Luidaeg, stepping up next to me and looking across the crowd. “All of you, go the fuck home. Set the wards and use the spells I taught you. It may take a while, but they’ll come clean.” Some of the parents started to murmur, and a few cautious, questioning hands were raised. The Luidaeg scowled. “Do I look like a fucking advice column? Get out of here.”

That was enough to convince even the most die-hard worriers that they had better places to be. The crowd started to disperse, scattering in all directions. I looked at the Luidaeg. She was close enough that I could see the hairline cracks in her human shell, the places where the strangeness was bleeding through. For the first time, she wasn’t succeeding in hiding her nature, and that was frightening. Blind Michael was stronger than she was.

“Luidaeg?”

She shook her head. “Not yet, Toby. Soon, but not yet. I’m taking the human girl; I might be able to do something for her. Go on back to Shadowed Hills and figure out what you’re going to do now.”

I chuckled bitterly. “You mean beyond never sleeping again?”

“You got there by the light of the candle, but you didn’t get back that way.” She leaned forward, voice soft as she said, “He isn’t letting go that easily.” Then she was standing up straight, turning to stride across the circle with long, ground-eating steps. I stared after her, and when Luna came to take my elbow and guide me toward the parking lot, I didn’t fight.

They’d rented a small bus to get everyone to Golden Gate Park and back to Pleasant Hill afterward. Cassandra climbed into the driver’s seat, which made a lot of sense; other than myself and Connor, I wasn’t certain anyone else in the crowd had a license, and I was in no condition to drive. Half the kids were asleep before we’d even reached the freeway, collapsed bonelessly against their parents.

I wound up between Connor and Tybalt. They kept glaring at each other over the top of my head. I had a pretty good idea of why, but I didn’t want to deal with it; I closed my eyes instead, pulling my cloak tight and melting back into the seat. It all felt like the setup for a bad joke. Purebloods, changelings, a Fetch, and the Duchess of Shadowed Hills are in a bus headed for the East Bay ...

I dozed off somewhere during the trip, and woke when the bus pulled into the parking lot of Paso Nogal Park. That was the cue for everyone to scatter in every direction possible. The parents took their kids and went home, some of them stopping to take my hands and make sounds of meaningless appreciation. I smiled and nodded and pretended I couldn’t see the way they avoided meeting my eyes. Luna led those of us who remained into the knowe via a shortcut I’d never seen before, skipping almost all the ludicrous gymnastics. Cheater.