Glimmerglass

The pressure on my throat eased, and I sucked in a big gasp of air. The second Knight advanced on Fi

“No!” I screamed. Fi

The Knight holding me laughed as his partner hit Fi

The Knight hit Fi

Fi

“No!” I wailed, although I knew it would do no good. “Why are you doing this?”

The Knight knelt at Fi

“Leave Avalon,” he said to me. “Leave, and never come back. Else, it will be you next time.”

I screamed as he raised his hand, then plunged the knife into Fi

The Knight who was holding me finally let go, shoving me to the floor. Their feet crunched on broken glass as they left the dressing room.

Horrified, I made my way to Fi

With a groan of pain, Fi

“Oh, God!” I cried. “Don’t move!”

His face was … ruined. That’s the only way I could describe it. I don’t know how many bones were broken, but it was a lot. But Knights are apparently made of some really strong stuff.

“I’ll live,” he managed to gasp at me. “Get help.”

I didn’t know if I believed his claim, but his words were enough to get me moving. Now covered in blood and mirror shards myself, I stumbled out into the shop.

The shopkeeper was lying on the floor behind the cash register. Kimber, sporting what was soon to be a massive bruise on the side of her face, was helping the other woman sit up. I’d have been relieved to see they were all right if my fear for Fi

“The phone!” I screamed at the shopkeeper, hysteria threatening to take over. “Where’s the phone? I need to call an ambulance.”

She pointed at the phone, which was practically right in front of my face. I picked it up with shaking hands, but my palms were full of glass, so I dropped it. The shopkeeper had recovered enough to stand, and she reached out her hand.

“Let me,” she said. And since I didn’t know what number to dial, and couldn’t give an address, and probably couldn’t dial correctly anyway with my injured hands, I did.

Chapter Nineteen

The ambulance and paramedics arrived at the same time as the police. I was still shaking, but I had enough brain function to know I was better off staying by Fi

Kimber and the shopkeeper received a cursory examination by the paramedics and were quickly dismissed as non-emergencies. Fi

I rode in the ambulance with Fi

“He’ll be fine,” the Fae paramedic said. “If they’d been trying to kill him, they’d have used an iron knife instead of silver.”

“And they wouldn’t have put it through his shoulder,” the human muttered.

The Fae are vulnerable to cold iron, which is what they call pure iron. It doesn’t exist in Faerie, where silver is a much more common metal.

I’d gotten a better look at the knife than I’d wanted as I sat by Fi

There was nothing I could do to prevent being separated from Fi

I was gritting my teeth, trying to be a brave little trooper as the healer hunted for glass with his evil forceps, when my dad arrived. I was more relieved than I could say when I laid eyes on him.

I think Dad was pla

“What happened?” Dad asked.

I opened my mouth to blurt it all out, then thought better of it. I glanced pointedly at the healer, who seemed to be finished picking glass out of me and was now using magic to heal the wounds. Dad nodded that he understood.

“Is Fi

“He’ll be fine,” Dad reassured me. “We Fae are a hardy lot, and our Knights more so than most.”

“What exactly is a Knight?” I finally remembered to ask.

“They are a warrior caste, the protectors of Faerie. They’re also sometimes known as the Daoine Sidhe. Most of them reside in Faerie and don’t set foot in Avalon. But those who live here are the best bodyguards in the world.”

“All done,” the healer said with a satisfied nod. “You can go home whenever you’re ready.”

I blinked, startled. No insurance forms to fill out? No bill to pay? And, most puzzling, no police to talk to?

I sent Dad a quizzical look, but he just smiled at me. “Let’s get you home and into some clean clothes, shall we?”

I wasn’t at all unhappy with the proposition, so I went with him despite my misgivings. On the way out of the exam room, he snatched a hospital gown off the top of a pile on a shelf in the entryway.

“I’ll give it back,” he assured me when I looked surprised.

I didn’t know why he wanted it in the first place—thank God he didn’t make me wear it—until we got to the parking lot that adjoined the hospital. Then I remembered the hot little sports car, and realized Dad didn’t want me to mess up the seats. It didn’t exactly give me a warm, fuzzy feeling, but Dad didn’t seem to notice anything amiss as he draped the gown over the seat and held the door open for me.