Death's Mistress

“Human children don’t shed light shadows,” I said softly, and watched her face crumple.

She put a trembling hand to her forehead. For the first time, what must have been months of constant strain showed. She looked almost haggard. “What am I going to do? They’re going to kill him, Dory. They’re going to kill my little boy, and I can’t stop it!”

“No, they’re not.” I put an arm around her, feeling awkward because I’m not a hugger. But she looked like she could really use one. “The wards held, despite everything. And that was a pretty good test. I’ll talk to Olga tomorrow, see what else can be done. We’ll keep him safe, Claire. Long enough for us to find this rune of yours.”

“Us?”

“Well, now I’m all interested.”

She stared at me for a moment, before breaking down into half-hysterical laughter.

“You’re insane,” she finally told me, wiping her eyes.

I cocked an eyebrow. “You’re only figuring this out now?”

I don’t think I’d have won the argument, but Claire looked like she was ready to drop. We hunted around and found some blankets in the hall closet that were miraculously still dry, and used them to bed the kids down on the sofa. Stinky was snoring almost immediately, and Aiden never even woke up in the transfer. Then we went up to check out Claire’s room.

It was about the same as mine, except the holes in the roof weren’t directly over the bed, and the mattress pad had kept the mattress largely dry. I helped her get the mattress downstairs, which mostly consisted of shoving it through a massive hole in the ceiling. It got a little waterlogged when it hit the river the melting snow was making out of the hall, but I didn’t think Claire cared.

We dragged it into the living room and threw a few blankets on it, and then she dove in. “There’s plenty of room,” she mumbled, as I snuffed the lamp someone had left burning.

“Thanks. I’ll be right back,” I told her, and shut the door behind me.

I went back up to my room to rescue my cache of weapons. I was standing in front of the closet, wondering if I should take the swords or if they’d be okay in their scabbards, when my legs started feeling a little fu

At first I thought it was blood loss. The wound in my thigh had bled heavily, staining my skin below in a red sheen that was starting to turn dark. I went to the bathroom for my first-aid kit and caught sight of myself in the mirror. My skin was waxy pale, my eyes and lips darkened as if bruised, the skin around my mouth crusted with something white and scaly.

I wiped it off and sat on the edge of the tub to bandage my leg. The bleeding had stopped in my thigh, although the knee still dribbled a little whenever I moved. And being a joint wound, it hurt like a bitch. But I’d had worse, and with my metabolism, I’d probably be well on the way to healed by tomorrow. Yet for some reason, my hands shook as I taped my knee off, and my lungs kept dragging in more oxygen than I needed.

They’d been doing it downstairs, too, like they thought there might be another shortage soon and needed to stock up. But it was worse now, to the point of making me dizzy. It took me a moment to realize that I was close to hyperventilating. I sat there, struggling to calm down, and wondered what the hell was wrong with me.

I’d come that close or closer to death more times than I could count, with many of them more painful and a lot more messy. I’d woken up from fits covered in my own and others’ blood, with broken bones still reknitting, or burned flesh still sloughing off. Then there had been the memorable incident of coming back to consciousness only to interrupt the feeding of the vultures who had mistaken me for a corpse.

Sometimes I still had flashbacks to that one, the feathers dragging over my skin, the claws digging into my flesh, the beaks tearing. Yet I’d beaten them off, retrieved my weapons and stolen one of the horses of the men who had tried to gut me to get to my next job. I was used to dealing with the aftershocks of near disaster: the taste of blood, the scent of death in the air and the quiet that followed.

But, I realized slowly, I wasn’t nearly as accustomed to the disaster itself. Most of the time, I was out of my head when the mayhem happened—a fact I’d always dreaded. I had never realized before how much I’d also relied on it.

It had been terrifying but also strangely comforting to know that death for me would simply mean failing to wake up from one of my fits someday. It meant knowing every time I heard the familiar rushing in my ears that this might be the last time, but it also meant being pretty sure that I wouldn’t see the end coming. Yet I’d almost seen it tonight.

And this is how you deal with it? I thought angrily. Five hundred years and this is the best you can do? Freaking out because your damn weapons failed? Because you finally met an opponent you don’t know how to kill?

I got up, furious with my body for its weakness, with myself because I hadn’t anticipated this, hadn’t realized after getting my ass kicked by the fey once before that it damn well might happen again. I didn’t know their magic, didn’t understand their weapons. A weapon to me was the reassuring weight in my hand, a sword, a club, a gun; how the hell could I fight people who had the very Earth and sky on their side?

I didn’t know, but I knew one thing. Ifsubrand was alive, he could die. And I really, really wanted him to die.

CHAPTER 8

I awoke to the smell of freshly brewed coffee and frying bacon, which was impossible. But since I needed to get up anyway, I rolled out of bed—and fell three feet to the floor. I hit with a thump that didn’t do the crick in my neck or the knots in my back any good.

My eyes crossed, focusing on a huge pair of smelly socks. They reeked badly enough to act as a kind of smelling salts. I sat up, fully conscious, and bumped my head on the underside of a table.

In front of me was a wreck that I vaguely identified as the living room. Blankets and old quilts had been thrown everywhere, clothes and bags of personal items had been piled in a heap by the cellar door, and a trail of huge, muddy footprints led from it to the hall. They obliterated most of the rug but skirted a waterlogged mattress.

The footprints had three toes each, pretty standard for mountain trolls, so I relaxed. I assumed they belonged to the large lumps curled up in a couple of wingback chairs in front of the fireplace, snoring loud enough to bring down what remained of the rafters. I ignored them for the moment, and stood up, my back cracking like old knuckles.

The edge of a quilt trailed off the tabletop, and I recalled what I’d been doing up there. Claire had been sprawled in the middle of the mattress when I returned last night, and I hadn’t had the heart to move her. I’d failed to find a dry patch of floor, so I’d piled some bedding onto the felted surface we used to play poker. It was only about four feet around, which explained the knots, and had a two- inch lip, which explained the crick.

After some much-needed stretching, I checked myself out. The wounds in my thigh and knee had ripened to purple with green and yellow around the edges. The knee was also puffy and tender to the touch, swelling up like bread dough when I peeled off the bandage. But both wounds had closed over, and my throat no longer felt like I was being choked from the inside. My wrist still hurt like a bitch, but overall, I’d woken up in worse states.

I wandered over and took a quick peek under the first lump’s blanket. A small green eye opened and regarded me unhappily. “Sorry, Sven.”

He grunted and went back to sleep. I didn’t check the other one, but it was probably Ymsi, his twin brother. They were a couple of Olga’s boys, second cousins or something, who acted as muscle in the business. It looked like word had gotten around that we might need a little added protection.