Ashes of Honor

“This will help.” Walther stepped between us, holding a disposable Styrofoam cooler. “You have four jars of the dampening solution and four jars of the counter solution. Do not drop this. I don’t think I could handle mixing that stuff again.”

“Noted.” I tucked the Luidaeg’s charm into my pocket and took the cooler. “You do good work,” I said, avoiding the forbidden “thank you.”

“I like a challenge,” he replied, with a small smile. He knew what I wasn’t saying, and he appreciated it.

“Good, because I think we’re going to have plenty of challenges ahead of us. Quentin?” But he was already halfway to the door, not looking back as he made his way out of the room. I cast Walther an apologetic look and followed him. Not only was time something we couldn’t afford to waste, Quentin was the only one who knew where the car was.

Walther walked me as far as his office door and stopped there, waving tiredly as Quentin stalked down the length of the hall and I followed. Soon Walther was out of sight, and soon after that, we were outside and Quentin was charging down a gravel path toward the faculty parking lot.

I didn’t dare run with the cooler full of jars, so I settled for walking as fast as I could. When it became clear that I wasn’t going to catch up with him like that, I stopped, tucking the cooler under one arm as I placed the first two fingers of my now-free hand in my mouth and whistled shrilly. Every visible head—human, canine, and squirrel—turned toward me. Every head but one. Quentin just stopped where he was, hands fisted at his sides, head down.

He stayed there as I walked the rest of the short distance between us. Once I pulled up alongside him, he started to walk again, pacing me.

“We’re going to find him.”

Silence.

“Tybalt wouldn’t have told me Raj was missing if he didn’t think we could help.”

Silence.

“If this is going to interfere with your ability to help me look for Chelsea, I swear by the root and the tree, I will send you back to the house right now.”

Now his head came up, eyes narrowing. The sunlight cast bronze glimmers off the metallic halo of his hair. I remember when he was a cornsilk blond, wide-eyed and innocent, and would never have dreamed of looking at his sworn knight like that. Good times. And I wouldn’t trade a single glare to have them back again.

“You wouldn’t,” he said.

“I would,” I replied calmly. “What’s more, I would make sure May and Jazz were under strict instructions to keep you in the house, no matter how much you argued. So how about you keep on working with me, and we bring them both home?”

Quentin sighed, seeming to deflate. “He’s my best friend,” he said, like he was admitting something strange and surprising.

I blinked. “Yeah. I know. So?”

“So he’s…he’s who he is, and I’m who I am. People like us aren’t friends. We’re passing acquaintances. Maybe. If we’re not busy hating each other all the time.”

“Ah.” Raj was a Prince of Cats; Quentin was the son of some unidentified noble family. They weren’t the sort of people who should have become friends. But they had. I liked to think I had something to do with that, although, if I were being honest, I had to admit that a psychopath named Blind Michael had more to do with it than I did. As a Prince of Cats, Raj had been pretty sequestered until Blind Michael kidnapped him. If that hadn’t happened, we might never have met at all. It’s funny how people can change your life without meaning to. Even the fucked-up, crazy people leave everything different when they go away.

Well, Raj wasn’t getting off the hook that easily. He might be missing, but he wasn’t free of us yet.

We were at the mouth of the faculty parking lot. The Luidaeg’s car was nowhere in sight. I squinted around at the few open parking spots before giving up and turning to Quentin. “Okay, where’d you park?”

“Over here.” He led me to a seemingly empty space under one of the big oak trees that dropped dead leaves and acorns with impunity on the vehicles below it. After glancing around to be sure we weren’t observed, he waved his hand. The brief smell of heather and steel rose around us, and the illusion that had been concealing the car popped like a soap bubble.

“Very good,” I said. Quentin’s illusions had been improving steadily since he finished with the worst parts of puberty and settled in to maturing into an adult Daoine Sidhe. I wasn’t in charge of that part of his education—Daoine Sidhe illusions are so far beyond me that I would have been barely more than useless—but Sylvester was doing an awesome job. I’d have to tell him so, the next time I got the chance.

Normally, Quentin would have taken a moment to preen and look pleased with himself. Instead, he smiled wanly and offered up the keys. “I didn’t want to bother Walther for a parking pass when he was working with dangerous chemicals.”

“Hey, what’s the point of having magical powers if you can’t use them to avoid parking tickets?” I took the keys before handing him the cooler. “Don’t drop this.”