The Brightest Fell

by Seanan McGuire

  Beep. “Um, Toby, hi, it’s Quentin. I hope Simon hasn’t turned you into a rock and run away or anything like that. Anyway, I just wanted to call and let you know that the Luidaeg has Officer Thornton. She wants me to stay for a while, so she can question me about where we found him and what his living situation was like. Um. Call if you need me? And let me know where you are.”

  Beep. “Toby, it’s Quentin again. Are you okay? Seriously, you’re freaking me out. The Luidaeg put Officer Thornton to sleep in her room. She says he’s really malnourished and probably sick from being in deep Faerie for so long. Oh, and she wants to know when the hell you decided she was your new home for misfit toys. Call me.”

  Beep. “October, this is Quentin. Please call me back.”

  Beep. “Toby, please. You’re freaking me out bad. Danny’s going to give me a ride home. I want to feed Spike and the cats and get some new clothes and charge my phone, since obviously I need to have enough battery to answer when you finally remember that I’m your squire and you need to call me.”

  Beep. “I hate you.”

  Beep. “I hate you and I’m eating the last of your ice cream because you suck. Please call. Please, please call.”

  I hung up and tucked the phone back into my pocket, glancing at Simon. He was watching me out of the corner of his eye, most of his attention still focused on the candle. He was doing an excellent job of steering us around the pedestrians, avoiding collisions that seemed like they should have been inevitable. I admired that, even as I was glad someone else was leading for a change.

  “Quentin,” I said. “He called from the Luidaeg’s to update me on Officer Thornton, and then he called a bunch more times to tell me what a terrible knight I am for not picking up or calling him back.”

  “How cruel of you, to ignore him so while you were unconscious and recovering from a near-disastrous act of blood magic,” said Simon gravely.

  “I know, right? I’m the worst.” I shook my head. “The officer’s not doing great.”

  “Humans were never meant to live that deep. They cannot thrive there. They can only wither or endure, doing their best to swim against a tide that means them only ill.”

  “Yeah.” What would Annwn make of me in my current state? I had already felt a little unwelcome there, unable to quite relax into the embrace of a land that had never known mortality. Now . . . it might throw me out entirely. And I would probably go willingly.

  We had turned off Valencia at some point, and were now walking up a familiar street. I didn’t see it during full daylight all that often, but some landmarks don’t change. I stiffened.

  Simon caught the change immediately. He cast a more direct look toward me, frowning. “What’s wrong?”

  “I know where we are.”

  “I thought you knew San Francisco quite well.”

  “I do, but we’re heading for my house.” I started to walk faster, forcing Simon to match my pace. The candle flame didn’t so much as flicker. We were still going in the right direction, and that was exactly what I’d been afraid of.

  Simon’s eyes widened. “August—”

  “Is Dóchas Sidhe, which means she could do the same ‘track me by my magic’ routine that we’ve been doing with her. She can’t find her home. She can’t go back to where she belongs. But my home? There’s nothing stopping her from going there.” She had left me broken and writhing on the basement floor; she had no reason to think I was a threat to her, or even that I would be able to figure out where she had gone.

  By taking my home, after she had subdued me, she had put herself into the best position possible. It was too bad for her that I wasn’t actually dead.

  “Oak and ash,” murmured Simon. This time, he was the one who sped up, and we half walked, half ran the rest of the way along the street to my front gate, where as expected, the candle flame leaped upward, telling us that we were close.

  Simon blew it out and snapped his fingers. The don’t-look-here dissolved. I gave him a curious look, and he shook his head.

  “She knew I was there, in the basement,” he said. “She may not be able to recognize me, but she isn’t blind to my presence. If we enter under an enchantment and she detects the magic, she’ll assume we’ve come to hurt her, and she’ll react accordingly. I don’t mean to offend, October, but in your current condition, I don’t think you can fight her off.”

  “You’d be surprised,” I said. August had been fast and furious, but she hadn’t been trained. Every swing was supported by as much weight and momentum as she could put behind it. That made her a merciless opponent, sure. It didn’t make her unbeatable.

  My teacher had been a man named Devin, and he’d trained me on the assumption that I was always going to be a changeling, mostly mortal, hampered by the reflexes of my own body. He’d taught me how to take and throw a punch. Most importantly, he’d taught me how to incapacitate my opponent. August had been able to get the drop on me in the basement, because I hadn’t expected her to attack, and because she’d had magic.

  Well, she’d done all the damage she was going to do. No one was turning me wholly human against my will, and I wasn’t planning to let her touch my skin again. If she still felt like playing punchy games, she could find out what it felt like to have her teeth loosened.

  “Come on,” I said, and started up the path toward my front door, digging the keys from my jeans as I walked. My wards would have long since burned away, undone by the passage of successive dawns. A pang of concern hit as I remembered Quentin mentioning that he was going to feed the cats. Had we left enough kibble?

  Even with May staying at Shadowed Hills to anchor the blood trace, Raj would have come by the house to check on them. They were his subjects, and he was determined to show he would be a good King when his time came—even if that time was coming too fast for any of us to be comfortable. They’d be fine. They had to be.

  And all of this was me refusing to think about the possibility that any of them had been in the house when my sister decided to make it her own. I knew that. I focused on the inconsequential anyway.

  The doorknob turned as I was unlocking it. The door swung open, and there was August, draped in the glittering shine of a human disguise, dressed in one of my tank tops and a pair of May’s sweat pants. That made sense. August was thinner than I was, and none of my jeans had drawstrings.

  Her face darkened at the sight of me, and she moved to slam the door. I stuck my foot into the opening before she could, effectively jamming it open.

  “This is my house,” I said. “Punching me in the face doesn’t make it yours. If anything, it makes me less inclined to invite you over.”

  August’s eyes widened before narrowing in sudden anger. She lunged forward, grabbing for my arm. That seemed to be her go-to move. When in doubt, attempt to hurt the person you’re fighting on a cellular level, one that they can’t fight against, but can only endure.

  Not this time. When her hand closed, my arm wasn’t there. Instead, my shoulder was lowered and I was charging forward, bull in a china shop, crashing into her and carrying her backward into the hall. She couldn’t hurt me if she couldn’t touch my skin. I knew enough about our shared magical talents to know that, and right now, even if she could somehow focus after that impact, she didn’t have access to any skin. She had leather jacket and the heavy, too-dark fall of my hair, and if I was right, she wouldn’t know what to do without a better weapon than her magic. She was too specialized.

  August’s back slammed into the wall with a concussive bang, sending several framed pictures crashing down. Glass shattered. I pulled back just enough to let her feet drop flat to the floor before I slammed into her again, harder this time, not concerned about hurting her. I knew how fast she healed. I was more concerned about incapacitating her long enough for me to get the duct tape and tie her hands.

  Amandine had tried to turn me human when I was a c
hild, and she had failed. Part of it was that she hadn’t wanted to hurt her baby, but part of it was also that I had fought back as long as it was possible for me to do so. My own magic was still alive and kicking, however human I might be, and it wasn’t going to go gently into that good night. Even if August got her hands on me again, I was pretty sure she couldn’t turn me wholly human without my consent.

  That didn’t mean I wanted to test the theory. Call me weird, but letting other people try to mess with the balance of my blood for fun is not my idea of a good time.

  August groaned, stunned by the impact. I stepped back and brought my elbow up at the same time, intent on catching her in the throat. She dodged to the side. I hit the wall instead. The pain was a great bolt moving through my arm. Nothing felt broken, and so I went for my backup plan, grabbing her by the hair and using it as leverage for slamming her head into the wall.

  August shrieked. Behind me, I heard the door close and the latch click home. Most of my focus was on my sister and the need to keep her from touching me. I slammed her head against the wall again.

  Bringing her hand up, she raked her fingernails across my cheek, drawing blood without actually touching her skin to mine. She looked a little startled when she realized that. I slammed her head into the wall again.

  “Could you, perhaps, not break her?” asked Simon behind me.

  “We’re sturdy!” I snarled, and went for a fourth slam.

  August yanked her hair out of my hand, stumbling away. She stopped several feet down the hall. “Stop it,” she commanded, in a voice that was probably meant to be regal, but came off more as scared. “I demand you stop it.”

  “You started it,” I reminded her.

  There was a moment—one beautiful, shining moment—where I thought she might see sense and stop attacking me. We could talk this over like reasonable people. I might not even need to borrow Arden’s hope chest if I could convince August to lend me the necessary power to let me rebalance my blood. Quentin was probably asleep in his room, and if he wasn’t, if she’d enchanted him and stuffed him into a closet, I could wake him up. It was going to be okay.

  Then she snarled, “I don’t start things. I finish them,” and lunged, hands outstretched to grab the sides of my face and yank the last of the fae blood from my body.

  I forced myself to stay where I was until she was so close and moving so fast that she couldn’t possibly change her trajectory. Then I stepped to the side, sticking out my foot and hooking it around her ankle. She went down hard, sliding several feet across the floor.

  It didn’t buy me much time. It bought me enough to grab the baseball bat out of the umbrella stand, where it had been sitting unused for long enough to have gathered a thin patina of dust, and bring it down across the back of her skull. Something cracked. It wasn’t the bat.

  August lay still.

  TWENTY-TWO

  THE BASEBALL BAT HIT the floor with a clatter, rolling until it came to a stop against the wall. I bent forward, resting my hands against my knees and panting hard. The scratches on my cheek stung like fire. It had been so long since I’d had to deal with the long-term effects of my injuries that I wasn’t used to them anymore.

  “Mortality sucks,” I said finally, and pushed myself upright. Simon was standing next to the door, eyes wide and face pale. I guess seeing his stepdaughter bludgeon his long-missing biological daughter with a baseball bat had been a little much for his delicate sensibilities. “Help me with her. We need to get her into the kitchen before she wakes up.”

  “Before she—October, you hit her in the head with a club!”

  “Baseball bat, and yeah, I did, so I figure we have maybe five minutes before her skull puts itself back together and she wakes up. Probably pissed, because I did just hit her with a baseball bat. Come on.” I bent again, this time reaching for August’s arm. I paused at the last moment, before my fingers would have touched her skin.

  Could she hurt me while she was unconscious? My magic sometimes did things when I was asleep, when it thought I needed it to act on my behalf. I pushed my shoulders forward and bent my elbows, until the sleeves of my jacket covered my hands, like I was a five-year-old playing dress-up with Mommy’s clothes. Thus protected by a layer of leather, I wrapped my effectively mittened hands around August’s right wrist.

  Simon still hadn’t moved. I looked up and frowned at him.

  “You can help me move her, or you can stand there while I wrench her arm out of its socket dragging her,” I said. “The choice is yours.”

  “This seems wrong,” he said, and moved to grab August’s left wrist. Unlike me, he didn’t cover his skin first. He didn’t need to. As a pureblood, there was nothing in him that she could use as a lever.

  “Everything about this is wrong,” I agreed, as we dragged August down the hall toward the kitchen. “I’m not supposed to be this mortal. This isn’t how I wanted to meet my sister, if I ever did. You’re not supposed to be the last man standing on my list of allies. I’m not supposed to be asking myself where my squire is and fighting not to panic before I have my sister who, again, I just hit in the head with a baseball bat, safely tied to a chair. So, yeah, it’s wrong. It’s also the only right we have.”

  Simon said nothing, but he kept dragging, and under the circumstances, I was willing to accept that.

  The kitchen was empty, save for Spike, who was sitting on the counter taking in the afternoon sun. It sat up and rattled when it saw us, like an animate maraca. I smiled.

  “Hey, buddy,” I said.

  Spike crooned, and rattled some more.

  Before coming to live with me, Spike had lived with the rest of the rose goblins in Shadowed Hills, where it had originally sprouted from a seed planted by Luna. Like so many things in Faerie, it had been comfortably wild until someone gave it a name—that someone being me. I hadn’t been thinking. Sometimes my time in the human world shows itself in odd ways, one of those being a tendency to want to call things by their name. So I had named it, and it had followed me home, and I hadn’t been sorry, not once I adjusted to the idea of having a rose goblin now.

  Simon smiled wanly at the sight of it, before helping me to boost August into one of my kitchen chairs. Her head lolled limply forward. That was a good sign. I really didn’t want her waking up before she was safely restrained.

  “Hold her here,” I commanded. “I’m going to get the duct tape.”

  “Hurry,” said Simon. “I can hear her breathing. I think she’ll be awake soon.”

  “Hurrying,” I said.

  The kitchen junk drawer was a welter of strange herbs in jars, odd sticks, bones, dried flowers pressed between sheets of wax paper, dead batteries, and other semi-useful things that we had, for whatever reason, not been able to bring ourselves to throw away. I dug through it until my fingers closed on a roll of duct tape. Yanking it free, I rushed across the room to where Simon was holding a motionless August upright, keeping her from falling out of the chair.

  Quickly, I ripped off strips of tape and secured her hands to the chair’s arms, swaddling them with tape until she began to resemble a uniquely sticky mummy. Simon lifted an eyebrow but said nothing about this apparent overkill. I silently thanked him and kept taping, running loops of tape up her arms before I started taping her torso to the chair.

  I was securing her shoulders when she began to squirm. Not much; just enough to tell me she was waking up. Quickly, I ripped off the last strip of tape and took a step backward, out of the range where she could accidentally brush up against me.

  August shifted. August squirmed. August lifted her head, opened her eyes, and tried to stand, only to be held in place by most of a roll of duct tape.

  There was a pause during which it seemed like everyone in the kitchen, even Spike, was holding their breath. August turned to Simon as the closest person. There was still no recognition in her eyes. She might as well
have been looking at a total stranger, and my heart broke for him, to be so close to everything he’d sold his soul to get, and yet unable to touch it.

  “You, untie me,” she said. “Right now.”

  “You have no idea how much it pains me to say these words, my dear, but no.” Simon straightened up and took a step backward, away from August—away from the temptation she represented. It was taking everything he had not to reach for her.

  “Hello.” I stepped into her field of vision, jerking her attention away from Simon. She glared at me, eyes narrowed, and said nothing. “Nice to meet you, sis. Sorry about the tape. You clearly never learned not to hit.”

  “Untie me, mortal,” she spat.

  “Not mortal,” I replied. “Thin-blooded right now, but I’ll fix that soon enough. You might be stronger than me, and you might be better-trained than me, but that doesn’t make you capable of turning me human. Our mother learned that.”

  August’s eyes widened. “Mama. Where is she? What have you done to her?” She began to struggle against the tape again, harder this time, like she thought she could somehow change the laws of physics. The smell of smoke and roses filled the air, strong enough that I could pick it up even with my currently dulled senses.

  “Blood magic doesn’t work on duct tape, and since you’ve dialed my fae heritage down so far that you can hardly get a hook on it, I’m pretty sure persuasion spells don’t currently work, either,” I said. “If you’re thinking about making yourself look like someone I love so I’ll untie you, I’d skip it. Fairy ointment. I’ll see through any illusions you cast.”

  August looked utterly betrayed. “But you’re a changeling,” she said. “You can’t beat me. It’s not allowed.”

  I glanced at Simon. “So, bigotry, that’s fun. She get that from you, or from our mother?”

  “A bit of both,” he said, looking deeply uncomfortable. “It was a different time when she was born. It was still possible to live a long and happy life without ever crossing paths with the mortal world.”