Blue Lily, Lily Blue (27 page)

t wasn’t that Piper had been unconscious for hours. In action movies of the sort Colin had always hated and she had always loved, heroes were always knocking out henchmen instead of shooting them. It’s how you could tell they were the hero. Villains shot minions; heroes knocked them out with a punch to the head. Then, a few hours later, they came to and went about their lives. Piper had read a blog post pointing out that this wasn’t really possible, however, because if you were unconscious for longer than a minute or two, it was because you had brain damage. And the post was written by a doctor, or someone who said they used to be a doctor, or someone married to a medical professional, so Piper thought it was probably true. Truer than those action movies, anyway.

As she lay there in the cave, she thought about all the braindamaged thugs in Hollywood, spared by dashing heroes who thought it would be kinder than killing them.

She was not really unconscious for hours, but she did stay down on the ground for hours, or days. She swam in and out of sleep. Every so often she heard another moan from in the cave. Morris, maybe, or just her own voice. Sometimes she cracked her eyes and thought that it was time to get up, probably, but then it seemed like too much work, so she stayed down.
Finally, though, she stopped hitting the cavern’s snooze button and got herself together. This was ridiculous. She sat up, head throbbing, and let her eyes adjust. She wasn’t sure exactly where the light was coming from. There was rubble and water all around her. She remembered suddenly that Colin had buggered off, leaving her to die in this cave that had been his idea in the first place. Typical. He was always off doing things for himself and pretending it was for both of them.

Suddenly, she realized where the light was coming from: a lantern, an old-fashioned kind, like a miner’s lamp. And there were hands folded together on the other side of it. Plump, pretty hands. Attached to arms. Attached to a body. It was a woman. She was looking at Piper with an unwaving and unblinking gaze.

The woman gave a serene nod. Piper didn’t take the nod as a guarantee of realness, though. This didn’t seem like the sort of place random women would appear.

“Are you paralyzed?” the woman asked kindly.
“No,” Piper said. Then she paused. “Yes. No.”
One of her legs was not obeying her, but that didn’t count as

paralysis. She thought it was probably broken. She was starting to feel not great about the situation.
“We can fix that,” the woman said. “If we wake it up.”
They both looked at the tomb door.
“If we wake him, he will give us a favor,” the woman added. “There are three of us, but just barely. Not for long.”
She gestured vaguely in the direction of Morris’s moaning.
Piper, who was interested in her own well-being above all others, was instantly suspicious. “Why didn’t you just wake him yourself, then?”
“It would be lonely to be a queen alone,” the woman said. “It would’ve been better with three, but two will have to do. Two is less stable than three, but better than one.”
Piper was supremely disinterested in magic math. Now that she was beginning to think about it, her leg really hurt. It also was leaking. She was getting angry about everything here. “Okay, fine. Fine.”
The woman lifted the lamp and helped Piper struggle to her feet. Piper said a word that usually made her feel better, but didn’t in this case. At least she now believed the other woman was real; she was squashing Piper’s rib cage in her effort to help her stand. “Who are you, anyway?”
“My name is Neeve.”
As they hobbled to the door, Piper observed, “That’s a kind of stupid name.”
“So,” replied Neeve mildly, “is Piper.”
In the end, there was not really any ceremony. They just both put their hands on the door and pushed. It didn’t feel magical; it just felt like a chunk of wood.
The tomb was already light inside. It was a similar amount of light as the lantern Neeve had at her feet. It was, in fact, the exact same amount of light, mirrored back at them.
The two of them staggered in. There was a raised coffin, the lid already ajar.
The sleeper wasn’t human. Piper wasn’t sure why she’d expected it would be. Instead, it was small, and black, and shiny, with more legs than she’d expected. It was powerful.
Neeve said, “We have to do it at the same time to get the fa —”
Piper reached out and touched it before Neeve could move.
“Wake up.”