Three hours later, I sat back, limp, with pages of notes I’d jotted down.
Strict leaned across the table. “It is much to take in, but that is what I and your other advisors are here for. We’re to help you make this transition, and it will take some time. We all expect that. It was bad enough when I helped Tabera take the throne, and she was born for it. But you…you may have been born with the destiny, but you were not born into Court, so you are still unfamiliar with all of the ways of our people. Your people, too, you know,” he added softly. “You are half Cambyra on your father’s side. You have our blood running through your veins.”
I’d been suspecting something for some time, and now I looked directly at Wrath. “You were born to the Court of Snow and Ice, weren’t you?”
He paused a beat, then nodded. “Yes. I moved to the Court of Rushes and Rivers when I met your mother. I fell in love with her, before she was Queen. I switched sides for her. But yes, the Winter…it is my true home.”
I met his gaze. “You and Lainule, you crossed courts like Grieve and I did in our life long ago. Perhaps not quite the same—Summer and Winter do not battle, generally. But you defied tradition.”
He winked at me then, his smile broadening. “That we did.”
And then Strict dismissed me for the day. “You must prepare for your coronation tonight.”
“Will Rhiannon and I take the thrones together?” I was hoping for a yes, but I already knew the answer.
“No. You will ascend to the throne in the Court of Snow and Ice at one hour before midnight. She will take the throne in the Court of Rivers and Rushes at one hour after midnight—when the year has begun to wax again. You will be moving to the Eldburry Barrow today.”
“Today…” And then it hit me—this was it. Today was my last day as just Cicely Waters. Tonight, by midnight, I would be Queen of a strange land. And a strange people. I sucked in a deep breath, feeling overwhelmed. “I can’t do this…”
“You can, and you will. You’ve passed through the hardest part. If you were not meant to take the throne, you and Rhiannon, you would have died when your heartstones were being extracted from you. There is no turning back, my daughter. You’re just afraid. Go now…spend some time outside the Barrow, but do not stray far. Get a breath of fresh air and take your cousin with you.” Wrath motioned to Grieve. “Attend them, and keep them safe.”
Grieve bowed to my father, then took my arm, and we headed back toward the common room. Rhia was just sitting down to lunch with Chatter. Peyton, Luna, and Kaylin were nowhere in sight.
“Cicely!” Rhia jumped up and grabbed me. She had a look of panic on her face, one I recognized only too well. “I’m…”
“I know. Me, too. Let’s eat lunch and then go for a walk. Grieve and Chatter can come with us, but we need to talk.” I glanced around. “Where are the others?”
“Today’s moving day. They’re up at the house, putting things to rights.”
“I want to go there. To help them. It will take our minds off tonight.” I turned to Grieve. “You will go with us?”
He shrugged, and—with a sideways smile at Chatter—said, “Do we have a choice?”
“No.” Feeling a little better, I sat down and dug into my beef and mashed potatoes.
As we emerged from the portal, with Check and Fearless behind the four of us, I shaded my eyes. The winter was still raging, and it felt like it had when Myst had controlled the Golden Wood. She must be near.
As we started along the path, I gasped. “Rhia—look at you. And me!”
Instead of sinking deep, we were walking on top of the snow, like Grieve and the others. Marveling at the ease with which we were able to travel, I danced around, jumping up and down. My leaps made little mark on the surface, and—to my delight—barely scuffed the top layer of snow and ice.
“I can’t believe this!” Rhia laughed. “But…can we run as fast as you guys?”
“I don’t know, my love. Why don’t you find out?” Chatter’s eyes were glimmering as he teased her.
She took off, with me on her heels. Our speeds had increased, though we still weren’t nearly as quick as the full-blooded Fae, but we’d definitely picked up steam. Grieve and Chatter were laughing at us, but we didn’t care. We were like kids in a candy shop. We jogged through the woods, eager to try out our changing abilities. We reached the house in less than a quarter of the time that it would have taken before the change and ran laughing up the steps.
As we burst through the doors, giddy, an odd smell caught my attention—one I was all too familiar with. I looked around, nervous now, motioning for Rhia to wait behind me. Grieve and Chatter came through the door, and I turned to them.
“Get the guards in here, now. Something’s wrong. I can smell it.” What I smelled was blood. And I’d smelled too much blood lately to be wrong.
Rhia’s eyes narrowed. “I can smell it, too,” she whispered.
Praying that we were wrong, that whatever it was we were smelling was throwing us off the mark, I moved toward the door leading into the dining room. Grieve grabbed my arm, shaking his head. Chatter had already darted out back, and now he returned with Check and Fearless.
The guards took the lead, motioning for us to stay behind until they’d checked things out. I didn’t bother arguing. I knew it would be futile.
A moment later, Check shouted for us and I rushed through the half-open door, followed by the others. There, in the middle of the room, Peyton and Luna were huddled near Kaylin. The girls were tied up but conscious, and duct tape was strapped across their mouths. Kaylin, unbound, was sprawled on the floor, covered with blood, and he wasn’t moving.
“Kaylin!” I pushed past Grieve, dropping to his side.
“I found a body over here!” Check called from the living room.
Grieve motioned for Chatter to go help him, while Fearless scouted the room and then ducked out. I could hear him going up the stairs—faintly but enough to tell me he was making sure we weren’t going to be ambushed.
Rhiannon knelt beside me as I frantically ripped open Kaylin’s blood-soaked shirt. His chest was unharmed, but he’d been stabbed several times in the side, and he’d lost a lot of blood by the looks of the pool of it drying around him.
“Kaylin!” I screamed at him, trying to jog his demon awake. His night-veil demon was strong, and maybe it could help me revive him. I began compressions on his chest, counting to thirty before I cupped his face and gave him mouth-to-mouth. Then back to compressions.
“He’s still bleeding out!” Rhiannon turned to Grieve. “Give me your shirt! Now!”
As Grieve stripped off his shirt and handed it to her, I thanked whatever power it was that manifested his clothing as real and not just illusion.
Rhiannon rolled it into a ball and, maneuvering around me, pressed it against Kaylin’s side, trying to stanch the blood. Grieve began to remove the duct tape around Luna’s and Peyton’s wrists. He gently tried to remove it from their mouths, but it was stuck firm, and finally, frustrated, Peyton shoved his hand away and yanked it off her face. Luna did the same. Both of them gave little screams as the adhesive ripped, leaving abrasions on their skin.I was still trying to revive Kaylin. He wasn’t coming around.
Luna crawled over to my side. “I can help.”
I shifted to allow her room, and she took his head and placed it in her lap. Tears streamed down her cheeks, but somehow she found her voice and began to hum. The melody was haunting and made the hairs on my arms stand up. As she grew louder, the weaving sounds became words and she was suddenly singing.
“Heal…” Her voice stretched out into one long, sonorous note.
Hear me, dark-souled demon of mine,
Hearken to my song.
Come back from the night-bound shrine,
Come back into your body, strong.
I search you out, seeking across time,
I call you back with song and rhyme.
I call your soul, I call your breath,
I call you back from the door to death.
Obey me now, walker of the dreams,
It is not the time for you to leave.
Kaylin jerked under my hands—I’d been continuing the compressions. A moment later, he shook his head and weakly opened his eyes. Rhiannon removed the cloth—the bleeding had stopped.
“Kaylin, can you hear me?” I leaned down, looking into his face. His eyes were dark, flashing with red, and I could feel his demon close to the surface. We’d had words when his demon first awoke in his soul. In fact, we’d had a knock-down, drag-out fight.
“We hear you, woman.”
So it was the demon. “Is Kaylin…is he with you?”
“Yes, but he’s too weak to speak. His body has lost a lot of blood and needs attention. I cannot bring him back further from the veil until he’s attended to. Even then, he will need a great deal of recuperation.” The demon closed his eyes and Kaylin fell into a deep sleep, his breathing shallow.
“We need to take him back to the Barrow.” I looked up at Luna. “What happened? Are you and Peyton all right?” I’d been so focused on keeping Kaylin alive that I’d forgotten to ask how they were.
“We weren’t hurt. Kaylin tried to protect us, but…they were too strong.”
“Shadow Hunters?” But I didn’t think so. If it had been the Vampiric Fae, they wouldn’t have stopped until all three of them were dead.
“No. I think…day-runners.”
Leo. Or Geoffrey. It had to be one of them or both. “Did they say anything?”
“They were threatening to kill us if we didn’t take them to you. Then Kaylin came in and started to fight them. He hurt both of them—bad.”
“He killed both of them, actually.” Check returned from the other room, Chatter behind him. “Two of the yummanii. Dead in the other room. Looks like Kaylin released his demon on them—they’re ravaged worse than he is.”
“They had tied us up by the time Kaylin stumbled in on us. He chased them into the other room and we heard a horrible noise—shouts and screams. Then Kaylin staggered back in, and he was trying to undo the tape when he passed out. Luna and I couldn’t do anything.” Peyton stared darkly at Kaylin. “I haven’t felt so helpless since Myst captured me and had me in her lair.”
Luna ducked her head. “I can do nothing magically without my voice. The duct tape…prevented it.”
“It’s obvious that we can’t do anything until we catch Geoffrey and Leo. Come on; we have to get him back to the Barrow, and you two are coming with us. We should also take the bodies back. Maybe we can figure out some way of getting information out of their spirits.” I stood back as Fearless hoisted Kaylin over his shoulder.
“I’ll head back as fast as I can go. The rest of you follow, and be careful.” He took off, a blur against the snow as we watched him race across the yard from the window.
I pulled out my cell phone and sat down at the desk to check my messages. Kaylin was in good hands, and he should make it. Fearless wouldn’t let anything happen to him on the way there.
As I punched in Lannan’s number, I knew he wouldn’t pick up—he’d be sleeping—but I got his voice mail. “Geoffrey and Leo’s sidekicks just about killed Kaylin, and they were threatening to do the same to Peyton and Luna. We have to find them, and we have to find them soon. I’m going through my coronation tonight, but tomorrow night I want to meet with you and Regina.”
After leaving the message, I checked the news on my phone’s browser. The headlines made me cringe. “Fuck. Another three deaths. Crawl—it has to be Crawl. He’s always hungry, and he’ll be gorging himself. I wonder if he’s staying with Leo and Geoffrey, or if they just turned him loose to his own pursuits.”
My messages showed that Ysandra had called me. I tapped in my voice mail password and listened. The news was just as bleak. The Consortium was demanding our appearance, and she had only been able to put them off for another two days. So day after tomorrow, we had to show up in front of them.
I told Rhiannon this, and she shook her head. “This is bad.”
“Things are chaotic. I’m glad we’re taking the thrones tonight. We’ve been spending so much time focused on this whole mess that we haven’t had time to really pay attention to what’s pushing our buttons.”
Grieve cleared his throat. “The problem isn’t that you’ve had to focus on the coronations. The problem is that there aren’t any aspects to your life right now that aren’t a priority. The Fae Courts, the situation with the rogue vampires, the Consortium, and Myst—they are all major concerns in their own right, and they are all competing for your attention.”
I pushed myself to my feet and texted Ysandra that we’d be there. After I finished, I turned off my phone and asked Check to lock the front door.
Turning to Grieve, I shook my head. “I try to make up to-do lists, but they keep getting blown away by the other stuff coming in. Strict will just have to postpone the tutor for a while until we catch Geoffrey and Leo. You can work on teaching me until then, and you can keep an eye on anything that needs a translator to understand. I think, my sweet, that you and Chatter are going to have to do more than the former Kings had to do. Share-the-wealth kind of thing.”
We headed out the back, Luna and Peyton in tow. The snow kicked in again and was beginning to fall in great, thick flakes. I realized that I wasn’t shivering like the others. As we entered the Golden Wood, the afternoon was beginning to wear away. Even though I was about to become Queen of Winter, the chill mist and ice scared the hell out of me, because I knew Myst was out there, waiting. A lone owl began to hoot softly from a nearby tree, and I glanced up. Not my father, that much I could tell, but it was another Cambyra Fae—another one of the Uwilahsidhe. As we passed by, it flew down, dipping in front of me in an almost aerial bow. I raised my hand in salute as the pale glow of blue and white glimmered through the woods.