Page 21 of Be the Serpent

I positioned myself so my body would hopefully block the worst of the bloodstains, taking a deep breath. Everything was about to be very real, whether we were ready for it or not. As if a dead child wasn’t real enough. Tybalt moved to stand behind me.

The door swung open. Mitch Brown blinked when he saw me, surprised but not shocked by my presence. “Oh, hey, Toby,” he said. “Stacy didn’t tell me you’d be coming by today. Hey, Tybalt. How’s things in the king game?”

“Very nearly retired,” he said, sounding only slightly subdued.

Mitch laughed. “Good to hear. You need some time to breathe before the next time this one gets you into trouble.”

Simon came up behind me on my other side, the three of us effectively blocking Mitch’s view of the living room. Mitch blinked.

“Duke Torquill?” he asked, blankly. “Why are you in my house?”

“Can we talk on the porch?” I asked, before Simon could answer and make things even more confusing for the poor man. Mitch’s day was about to get a hell of a lot worse. We didn’t need to draw it out.

Mitch blinked again. “Sure,” he said, and took a step back, out of the doorway. “What’s going on . . . ?”

Tybalt and Simon followed close behind as I stepped onto the porch, Simon muttering under his breath. It wasn’t until I smelled smoke and apple cider twining around us that I realized what he was doing, and shot him a grateful look over my shoulder. Anyone passing on the street would see Mitch talking to three perfectly normal human people, and not a bunch of escapees from a fantasy novel.

Illusions are an incredibly useful tool, even if they do make my ears itch. I resisted the urge to scratch, focusing instead on Mitch, who was looking increasingly bewildered.

He was a tall man, especially for someone of Hob descent, and like all Hobs or part-Hobs, he was solidly built, fat layered over muscle until he had the basic physique of a barrel, or a throwing caber. His hair was sandy brown, a few shades lighter than my own, in that same “colorless dishwater” family, and his eyes were bluish gray. When we were kids, Stacy used to swear he was the most handsome man in all of Faerie, and I’d never quite been able to understand the appeal. These days, I got it a little better.

I would have shattered him beyond repair if I’d been the one he fell in love with, and he would never have been able to hold me up. Still, there was something to be said for a person who radiated rooted solidity. I just hoped that I wasn’t about to destroy that forever.

“Have you heard from Stacy today?” I asked.

Mitch shook his head. “No,” he said. “I was doing the ordering all afternoon, and I haven’t been checking my phone. Why, did she call you? Is something wrong?”

I took a deep breath. “No,” I said. “She didn’t call. I was at Arden’s Court—today was the day of Rayseline’s appeal—and—”

“Did they let you wake her up?” he interrupted. “That poor kid. I always thought she was going to be a part of our chaos, you know, and then everything went wrong. Begging your pardon, Your Grace.”

I blinked. I had forgotten he thought that we were here with Sylvester. It seemed so improbable to me now, after everything we’d been through, that I hadn’t even considered the possibility that he wouldn’t realize the man behind me was Simon. Nothing else made sense.

“No pardon needed,” said Simon graciously. “Dearly as I love the girl, she isn’t mine, and as a large part of what went wrong, I would be dishonest to object to it being named as such.”

Under other circumstances, I might have laughed at the look on Mitch’s face as he realized who he was talking to. Given everything else that was going on, I couldn’t even crack a smile. “Mitch, this is my father, Simon Lorden. Simon, this is Stacy’s husband, Mitch. He and I have been friends since we were kids.”

“Charmed,” said Simon, graciously. “I appreciate your past kindness to October.”

I rolled my eyes. “He’s taking the ‘allowed to have a friendly relationship with me’ thing very seriously, as you can see.”

“Indeed,” said Mitch, sounding only a little confused. It made sense. He mostly knew Simon as my liege’s estranged brother, the man who had put me into the pond. The irony of spending this particular anniversary in Simon’s company was not escaping me. “Toby, what’s going on?”

“There’s been an incident,” I said, grimly. “I was at Court when Karen and Cassandra started screaming. Did you know . . . ?”

“That my daughters could see the future? I did.” He sobered as he looked at me. “I didn’t know you knew about anyone but Karen. We made the decision, as a family, to keep those talents hidden from everyone else a long time ago. I’m sorry that had to include you.”

“I understand.” And I did, even though it stung. I wasn’t family, not really, and they were changelings trying to raise their children and get by without attracting too much attention from the Courts. I had always been more deeply entangled with pureblood politics than was normal for a changeling, thanks to the one-two punch of my mother and my relationship with Sylvester Torquill, and they had been protecting their kids from the possibility that news of an unprotected changeling Seer would get out and they’d find their children snatched in the night by the local nobles.

Changelings have very few rights in Faerie, and we don’t even culturally view kidnapping as a crime, not the way that humans do. Messing with fae kids is a quick way to wind up elf-shot or down a few limbs, but it won’t get you imprisoned or even arrested. When someone snatches a pureblood kid, there’s usually some form of punishment. Can’t say the same for changelings.

Karen’s wild talent had been discovered during the fight to recover the kids from Blind Michael, and anyone who might have thought it was a good idea to snatch her in the aftermath had been deterred by the presence of the Luidaeg, who had made it very clear, very quickly, that no one was touching Karen Brown but her. Sometimes it’s good to have a monster in your pocket.

“I didn’t know about Cass until recently,” I said. “But both girls were screaming and distraught, while the Luidaeg didn’t seem to realize anything was wrong, so I assumed that whatever was happening, it had to be very localized, and I came straight here.”

Mitch looked past me to the house, seeming much more nervous than he’d been a few seconds before. “October, where is my wife?”

“I don’t know.” I put my hands up, palms toward him, warding him off. “She was gone when we got here. Tybalt and I searched the house, and there was no sign of her.”