Death's Mistress (42 page)

For a minute, I just stood there, swaying a little on my feet and wondering how paranoid a person had to be before she decided the toys were out to get her. But in the end, I shrugged my shoulders and just went with it. I picked the little thing up and carried it down the stairs.

At the bottom, another small warrior was doing something near the rusted hulk of Pip’s still. There was no light in the basement, and the tiny torch cast wavering shadows on the walls that confused me further. But when I got closer, it became obvious that he was pushing around small sticks and bits of moss, arranging them in some sort of pattern.

The first small warrior started poking me in the side of the hand with his sword, so I put him down. He made his way across the peeling paint of the floor and touched his torch to the end of the nearest pile of kindling. Fire ran across the old concrete, forming jagged letters for a brief instant before the tiny fuel was exhausted:
OPEN
.

I stared at them and then at the wavering imprint they’d left on my retinas. The message was clear enough: it had been left in front of the wall where Pip’s conduit to Faerie manifested. But if Claire was on the other side, she could open it for herself. And if she wasn’t . . .

But
subrand would never leave a message like that. And the only time he’d been in the cellar, he’d been too busy trying to kill me to rig something up. At least, I fervently hoped so.

I reached out, wondering if I was about to make a huge mistake, and pressed the small talisman that powered the link between the ley- line sink and the portal. I jumped back, but not fast enough. A swirl of light and color appeared on the wall, flooding the ugly old basement with a rich golden light. And something huge tumbled out of nowhere and smacked me to the ground.

My skull hit the floor hard enough to have me seeing stars. But it was difficult to concentrate on that while the life was getting squeezed out of me. The massive weight shifted slightly, and while I was still crushed, I could breathe.

And that was worse.

My lungs had room to fully inflate, but they were cowering in my chest in fear. I’d once been buried under a pile of decomposing corpses, with jellylike flesh and gangrenous limbs, and it hadn’t reeked like that. I retched, but my stomach had nothing left to bring up.
Lucky I never got that sandwich
, I thought, as someone started slapping troll flesh.

“Get off her!
Move
, Ysmi! Dorina, are you all right?”

I didn’t answer. I wasn’t sure I could talk, and anyway, I was afraid to open my mouth and let in more of that hideous stench. But I looked up.

A thick, cracked, yellow toenail stared me in the face. It was attached to a foot with knobs and warts and skin as hard as a rock, all held together by some sort of greenish yellowish fungus and a lot of dirt. My last conscious thought was to decide that, all things considered, having a troll foot in my face was the worst thing that had happened to me all day.

I awoke an indeterminate amount of time later to find myself in my own bed with rain lashing the window and a note fluttering on the door. A glance down showed that someone, probably Claire, had stuffed me into a T-shirt and wrapped my wrist. But judging by my general filthiness, she’d stopped short of an actual bath.

I drew one in the tub for myself with a lot of bubbles, a rare luxury, and got in, taking the note in with me. It was a two-pager. Claire hadn’t been able to leave me one for so long, she was making up for lost time.

I grinned. I’d really needed the sleep, but damn . . . I was sorry to have missed that.

I was sure Christine appreciated being bedded down in the closet. On the other hand, the only other rooms without a view were the pantry, which we no longer had, and part of the basement, which was full of trolls. On the whole, I thought she’d gotten the better deal.

I wondered what “mostly” entailed. Decided I didn’t want to know.

Oops. I knew we’d forgotten something. I made a mental note to avoid ’Du for the near future. Maybe for the distant future, too. I wondered if there was any way to claim a Lamborghini on my expense account with Mircea. Probably not.

That last line sounded ominous, but it wasn’t like I could avoid Claire, too. I sloshed my way out of the bath and checked out my bruise collection. I hadn’t added as many as I’d expected, all things considered. I threw on a T-shirt and a pair of soft gray sweatpants and padded down to Claire’s room, trying to dry my hair with one hand.

I couldn’t have been out long, because it was still dark outside. Claire was up, or at least there was a strip of light under her door. I knocked and she opened up, her long red hair done up in fabric rollers. It looked like she’d put her time at the beauty shop to good use.

“We didn’t know you were home, or we’d have waited for you,” she told me earnestly before I could say anything. “But when we heard the commotion from the wards—”

“You mean they actually did something?” I’d begun to wonder.

“For about a minute. Until the damn Svarestri deactivated them!”

She moved aside and I came in. She’d moved a twin bed in here, and Aiden and Stinky were bedded down in snoring heaps. Or, at least, Stinky was snoring, sprawled out at the head of the bed like a drunken sailor, hairy limbs akimbo. Aiden was curled up at his side like a cherub. A thumb-sucking one, I was glad to note. Stinky had never done that. If he couldn’t eat it, he wasn’t interested.

“The Svarestri had to have altered the wards from the inside,” I said, sitting on her bed. Wards could be overwhelmed from outside, but they could be taken down only when someone had access to their source of power. “How did they manage to reverse the portals?”

Claire sat on the vanity chair, propped her foot up on the quilt and continued what she’d been doing, which was to paint her toenails. “I’ve been thinking about that. Manlíkans are usually used for scouts into Dark Fey lands and as training dummies on the practice field. Not as warriors. I don’t think subrand intended to use them to fight us, but rather to find him a way into the house. I should have wondered what the rest of those things were up to while a handful kept us busy.”

“Wouldn’t it have been simpler to have them take down the wards?”

She shook her head. “Wards ignore Manlíkans. As far as they’re concerned, they don’t exist. But a portal is a different kind of magic, and the Svarestri somehow knew there was one in the pantry—”

“
subrand saw it the last time he was here,” I said, recalling how Louis-Cesare and I had once escaped him using that very portal.

“I had wondered; they aren’t that easy to detect unless you’re right on top of one. Anyway, they managed to reverse it, but by that time they were exhausted from the storm and the struggle with us—”

“So they waited to break in until tonight, when we were asleep,” I finished for her. It made sense.

“Yes. Attacking women and children in their beds—that’s what
subrand calls honor!”

Personally, I thought it was what
subrand called smart. I didn’t like his tactics, but from a purely military standpoint, it had been a flawless plan. And if Cheung hadn’t shown up, it might well have worked.

I said as much, only to have Claire frown savagely. “Caedmon should have killed him when he had the chance!”

I blinked. It was pretty much where my thoughts had been going, but it was a little disconcerting to hear it from her. The woman I knew had planted marigolds in the garden to keep the bugs off the plants because she didn’t like swatting them. She wouldn’t talk to me for a week once after seeing me beat a rat to death with a broom handle. She’d been a tofu-eating, fur-hating, plastic-shoe-wearing pacifist, but it looked like things had changed.

She flushed, but she didn’t drop her eyes. “It’s true. You know it is!”

“No arguments here. What I don’t get is why
subrand waited so long to attack. His odds would have been better had he struck sooner, before I got home with reinforcements . . . so to speak.”

Claire looked up from putting a piece of cotton between her final two toes. “Yes, about them . . .”