Ashes of Honor

I shuddered. I couldn’t help it. Blood magic is always dangerous; maybe that’s why there are so few races in Faerie that specialize in it. Water magic, sure. Flower magic, why not? But blood magic? That’s the sort of thing that can get you killed. I should know. It’s come close to killing me, more than once.

“I’m not going to get her memories, am I? Because that would be a little bit distracting. Puberty was annoying enough the first time.”

“No. We’d need an actual sample of her blood for that.” The Luidaeg opened both jars of sludge. One, she poured into her teacup. The other, she dumped into a large ceramic mixing bowl that looked like it was made sometime in the 1970s. “This is the best I can do without having her on hand.”

“Which would make this whole thing unnecessary,” muttered Quentin. I glanced toward him. He winced a little, looking apologetic. “Sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it,” said the Luidaeg. She reached into a second cabinet and pulled out several jars of spices, all of which she uncapped and began dumping into the bowl. “You don’t have to drink this shit.”

“We don’t?” asked Quentin and I, in relieved unison.

The Luidaeg snorted. “Not this time. Once in a while, I make things you don’t need to ingest.” She pulled a wooden spoon from the jar next to the stove, beginning to stir the increasingly vile-looking paste. “Besides, it would probably kill you if you put it in your mouth.”

“You never lose sight of how important it is to be reassuring, do you?” I raked my hair back with one hand, eyeing the gunk. “If we don’t drink it, what do we do with it?”

“You carry it.” The Luidaeg gave the paste one last stir before holding her hand out toward me and saying, imperiously, “Give me your arm.”

Long experience has taught me that when the Luidaeg demands part of my anatomy, I’m going to be bleeding soon after. Still. It’s not like I wasn’t going to wind up bleeding anyway, given the way my life usually goes, and Chelsea was in trouble. If the Luidaeg needed some of my blood before we could find her, she could have it. I stuck out my right arm.

The Luidaeg grasped my wrist, gently turning my arm until my palm was facing toward the ceiling. Still gentle, she pushed up the sleeve of my leather jacket, revealing the skin. I grimaced. She glanced up at me.

“Still don’t like the sight of blood, do you?”

“Not really.”

“You know, there are times when I could slap Amy for what she did to your head.” The comment was made without malice. For the Luidaeg, slapping my mother just made sense. Then she bent her head, pressed her lips against my wrist, and bit down. Hard. Her teeth had looked entirely human when she was talking, but now, feeling them break my skin, I would have been willing to swear that she had a mouthful of shark’s teeth. I grimaced, fighting the urge to start swearing.

“Toby?” Quentin sounded concerned. “You okay?”

“I’m good, I’m cool, I love it when people chew holes in me.” I glared at the top of the Luidaeg’s head. “Haven’t you drawn blood yet? It feels like you’re about to start leaving tooth marks on the bone.”

The Luidaeg chuckled—an unnerving noise in and of itself—before lifting her head, smiling at me with bloody lips, and turning to spit a mouthful of blood into her bowl. I slapped my left hand over the wound before I could accidentally catch a glimpse of the damage. It would heal. These days, all my wounds heal. That didn’t mean I wanted to see it.

“This should just about do it,” she said, seemingly unconcerned by the fact that my blood was dripping down her chin. She stirred the paste again. The herbs-and-slime mixture changed from green to a deep, almost-black shade of red. “Quentin, go to my room and look in the top drawer of my bedside table. There should be a purple velvet box. Bring it here.”

“Okay,” said Quentin. Turning, he left the kitchen.

The Luidaeg tensed, waiting to hear his footsteps fade. Then she turned to me, speaking quickly and quietly as she said, “This is bad, Toby. You got that, right? This is very, very bad.”

“I thought you made that pretty clear.”

“No. Not clear enough.” She shook her head. “If you don’t find her soon, she’s going to start opening doors, and she’s not going to be able to stop. Those doors want to be open, and they’ll force her to keep on going. Killing her won’t undo the damage she has the potential to cause. If she opens a door all the way to the Heart of Faerie, it won’t close. The Heart wants people. It’s lonely. And that means it’s going to try to pull her toward it.”

I frowned. “I’m guessing that would be bad?”

She gave me an indulgent look, the kind adults give to children who think they’re smarter than they are. “Purebloods make knowes, Firstborn make worlds…what did you think my parents made?”

“They made Faerie,” I said.

“They did. And Faerie misses us.” She shook her head. “If Chelsea’s powers get all the way out of her control, she’ll punch a hole straight through to where Faerie was born, and then Dad help us all. You have to stop her.”

“And if I can’t?”