“Then if I do die here, will you visit her? My daughter? Not all the time, not every night, but often enough.”

  “You want me to visit her dreams and look like you.”

  “Yes.” I nodded. “I want her to know what I looked like, not just from pictures. I want her to know what I sounded like.”

  “I can never be as obnoxious as you, Aunt Birdie,” said Karen. “You’re going to be fine. I won’t need to haunt her dreams, because she’ll be sleeping to get away from you. And no, I didn’t See anything. I just refuse to let anything else happen.”

  “You’re the best not-actually-a-niece a girl could ask for,” I said, smiling fondly at her. “I hope you’re right. I want to meet this kid.”

  “Well, then, maybe you should focus on waking up and finding out what Walther is doing,” said Karen.

  “And how do I do that?”

  “Close your eyes,” she suggested. “It’s natural to run away from pain. That’s what you’re doing right now. Focus instead on running toward the pain. You want the pain. You want to find it, and when you do, you want to hold on to it just as tightly as you possibly can.”

  “I’m not running anywhere,” I said staunchly—but when I closed my eyes and focused, really, really focused, like I was trying to find my magic after overexerting myself, I could feel a dull ache like a prodded bruise just on the very edge of my consciousness. Eyes still closed, I mentally willed myself toward the tender spot, and it got larger, and larger, until the pain was everywhere.

  I opened my eyes, and Karen was gone, but the gray iron darkness remained. It might have been my imagination, but it felt like it was split with more veins of bloodied red, lighting up the area around me. The sight made me think that I was missing something.

  Well, I had a body, or at least the idea of a body, and I was alive enough that Karen had been able to find me. I looked at my hands, memorizing them, then balled them into fists, closed my eyes again, and bit the inside of my cheek as hard as I could.

  There was no pain, only the dull ache from everywhere. There was also no blood.

  I bit myself again, harder this time—hard enough that I felt a crunch between my teeth, and the taste of blood, whether real or imagined, flowed across my tongue. I swallowed, and almost gagged as iron filled my throat. Coughing, I spat and spat, blackness into the dark, until the iron was gone.

  More careful now, I bit myself a third time, and this time the blood that filled my mouth was only blood, bright and vital and animal. I swallowed it, and for a moment, the space around me was fuzzy and lit from above. I couldn’t see anything clearly, but I could tell that there was something there to see.

  I tried again, and again, until the blur began to resemble the warehouse, and there were voices in the distance, soft and wrapped in cotton that muffled and distorted them, but still absolutely, totally there. I closed my eyes and bit myself one more time, hard enough to hurt even in the void.

  “—working?”

  “I can’t tell. It’s not like I’ve done this before, and you’re further away from her than I’d like in virtually every direction.” Walther sighed. “I’m sorry, Quentin. I’m doing the best I can, all right?”

  “Please, October. Please, my love. All I need you to do is open your eyes. Everything else can be negotiated later, if you’ll just open your eyes for me now.”

  Tybalt sounded desperate, not like he was on the brink of tears, but like he was talking through them, like he was already weeping. There was a bright new pain in the world; not only could I feel the damage I’d done to my poor, chewed-up cheek, and the cuts May had made in my stomach, but it felt like someone had stabbed me in the bend of my right elbow, driving their weapon in deep and leaving it there for some reason.

  “Please,” repeated Tybalt. “Open your eyes.”

  So I did.

  I was still on my back, and staring up at the unfinished stone of the warehouse ceiling. Tybalt was kneeling on my left, stroking my hair back from my forehead with one hand, and the tears I’d thought I heard in his voice were very real. He looked like a man in the process of falling totally apart. There was blood on his hands and arms, all the way up to his elbows, and the sleeves of his shirt were irreparably stained. There was even a smudge on his cheek, small and dark and silently accusing. See? it seemed to say. See what happened because you wouldn’t let me keep you safe?

  I closed my eyes again and pushed that thought away. There had never been a world where I would be content to be confined, to not fully be myself, and neither one of us should have believed there would be.

  We wouldn’t make that mistake again. I reopened my eyes and cleared my throat. It was a small sound, closer akin to a cough than anything else, but Tybalt reacted instantly.

  “October!” he exclaimed, making no effort to keep quiet. Stealth had apparently been abandoned in favor of dramatics.

  Having just been relieved of a baby and almost died, I wasn’t opposed to dramatics. I forced myself to smile up at him. “Hey,” I managed to whisper. “Did I miss the party?”

  I heard people moving to either side, and May asked, “Toby?”

  “S’me,” I replied. “What’s going on?”

  Madden leaned over me from the left, towering over Tybalt. “You’re not dead?” he asked, hopefully.

  “Not yet.”

  “That’s all thanks to Walther,” said May. “He’s been doing ridiculous things with blood since you passed out.”

  “Walther?” I turned my head to the right, guessing that he might be connected to the pain in my arm.

  There was what looked like the shaft of a crossbow bolt sticking out of the bend of my elbow, attached to a long piece of clear plastic tubing currently filled with something thick and red. Walther was there, clearly monitoring the bolt and keeping it from shifting. He smiled thinly at the sight of my open eyes.

  “Welcome back, Sleeping Beauty,” he said.

  I grimaced. “I appreciate you going with that fairy tale and not the glass coffin one.”

  “I don’t want to attract her attention any more than you do.”

  I relaxed into the blankets beneath me.

  Eira had a lot of names before she decided to spend a few centuries pretending to be Evening Winterrose. One of the earliest ones I’m aware of lasted long enough to leak out into the mortal world, where they made her a beautiful princess in a casket made of ice. Snow White. She’s real, she’s horrible, and she hates me. So that’s fun.

  Glancing back at the crossbow bolt in my arm, I asked, “Why is that there? Were you using me for target practice?”

  “It’s there because I am a genius and Faerie is so, so lucky to have me,” said Walther. He shifted positions so I could see Quentin at the other end of the clear tubing, sitting upright with a second bolt sticking out of his arm. “Don’t either one of you move, please. I need gravity to keep doing the work for me.”

  I blinked slowly. “What, exactly, is the work you’re doing?” My head was feeling clearer all the time, like I was recovering from a hangover inch by inch.

  “You and Quentin are both descended from Oberon,” said Walther. “The Titania heritage on his side makes things a little hinky, but since you claim him as a son, and Simon as your father, I was counting on the sympathies being on our side. He’s donating blood. Normally a human thing, but under the circumstances, it was that or sit back and do nothing.”

  “I would have had your lungs as a cradle-gift for my child,” said Tybalt, voice very solemn. He was holding my left hand so tightly it felt like the bones were bending. I didn’t try to pull away. After the day we’d had, he deserved to bend a few bones if that was what would make him feel better.

  “Yes, yes, you’re terrifying,” said Walther. “Quentin’s Daoine Sidhe. They’re blood-workers, just like the Dóchas Sidhe, and they’re incredibly good at borrowing other people’s magic from the blood. So I give you his blood, which carries the borrowing, and you can use that magic to borrow healing from your own blood while your own magic recovers.”

  “All that blood loss was actually a good thing,” said May. “It took a bunch of the iron out of your system with it. There’s still more in you than is any good, but a lot of it wound up on the floor.”

  I turned toward her as she spoke, and my breath caught in my throat.

  She was holding a very small bundle against her chest, wrapped in what had probably been a priceless tapestry before someone sliced a chunk of it off to use as a baby blanket. She followed the direction of my gaze and smiled, warm and welcoming as anything.

  “Can we prop her up a little, Walther? Or will that mess with your transfusion?”

  “We just need to keep Quentin higher than she is, so that gravity stays on our side.”

  “We can do that,” agreed May. “Especially since she’s still healing, and it won’t do us any good to get the iron out of her organs if we let her turn around and dump them all over the floor.”

  Tybalt shifted positions, easing me up until I was reclining, half-lying down, half-sitting up. He left his arm behind my shoulders when he was finished, settling to the floor beside me.

  “Okay,” said May. “Don’t try to move too much. We’ll take care of everything for now.” With this said, she leaned down and carefully transferred the baby to my chest. I raised the arm that didn’t have a tube attached to it, getting it curled beneath her as best as I could. I was mostly drawing on muscle memory of having done the same with Gillian—that, and a much-reduced fear of dropping the baby, since I could be reasonably sure that she’d recover from anything that happened.

  Not that I was planning to drop the baby. If anything, the exact opposite. I looked down into her tiny face, eyes closed and features just a little scrunched up, like the weight of being alive was still too much for her to stand. Her head was topped with wisps of thin, cottony hair, too baby fine for me to be sure of the color, but it looked as if it was going to be striped.

  “She’s beautiful,” I said, looking up again and smiling at Tybalt. “Not how I wanted to do this, but still, worth the whole process.”

  “She is,” he agreed, looking at me rather than at our daughter. “Like her mother.”

  “Sitting right here, bleeding to save my knight, not even going to get a glass of orange juice when this is over,” said Quentin dolefully. “Can you maybe hold off on getting all sappy until she can stand up, and I can walk away?”

  We both laughed, exhaustion and relief coloring the sound, then settled to just exist as a group, me leaning against Tybalt, the baby bundled on my chest, Quentin’s blood flowing out of him and into me. Bit by bit, the pain in my guts went away, taking my various other aches and pains with it. I relaxed, sitting up straighter. The baby slept. That wasn’t going to last, I knew, but while it did, I was going to enjoy it as much as I could.

  After a few minutes of restorative silence, Madden scuffed his foot against the ground.

  “I’m gonna go search the shelves some more,” he said. “Maybe I can find a baby carrier or something.”

  Splitting the group seemed like an absolutely terrible idea, but Madden was clearly smart enough to want to give our little family unit some space. Walther was the only other semi-outsider, and he was occupied enough with maintaining the tubing between myself and Quentin that he wasn’t going anywhere. I watched as Madden vanished into the warehouse with a speed that would have been insulting if he hadn’t been so clearly terrified of overstepping and offending someone. “Poor guy.”

  “Not accustomed to infants?”

  “Not accustomed to Cait Sidhe,” I corrected. “You’re sort of terrifying when you’re upset.”

  “I have had more than sufficient cause to be upset,” said Tybalt. He reached over and stroked a fingertip down my cheek. “The scratch has gone.”

  It took me a moment to realize what he meant. Then I blinked, turning to Walther. “Are we done?”

  “Not quite,” he said. “Give me your hand.”

  Over the years, I’ve learned that things go more easily when I just acquiesce to that sort of request. Under the circumstances, with a baby in my arms and what felt like an exsanguination’s worth of blood pooled beneath me, I decided to be a little bit more cautious. “Why?”

  “I need a blood sample so I can determine whether you’re done recovering.”

  Hesitantly, I extended my right hand toward him, moving as little as possible to avoid dislodging the tube.

  Walther produced a small knife, the kind normally used for slicing samples off of growing herbs, and sliced the side of my thumb, catching the resulting blood in a vial. The cut had already sealed by the time he leaned away. “You can have your hand back,” he said.

  I withdrew my arm, looking at my healed thumb with measurable pleasure. “Things are getting back to normal?”

  “Seem to be,” he said, adding a few pinches of something to the vial and swirling it like a sommelier trying to determine the vintage of a glass of wine. He chanted as he swirled, the smell of ice and yarrow lighting up the air.

  A thin band of black formed at the bottom of the vial, leaving the majority of its contents bright and red and arterial. Walther nodded, looking satisfied, and held the vial up for the rest of us to see.

  “There’s still some iron in your system, Toby, but it’s no worse than you’d get after a visit to a place with lots of 1860s architecture. I recommend a trip to see Jin and get it properly flushed out.” He lowered the vial. “For all intents and purposes, you’re fine.”

  Relief washed through me, cold and bright and refreshing. I looked down at the baby. “And her…?”

  “I did a blood test as soon as she stopped crying, and Tybalt agreed to let me take a few drops from her foot,” said Walther. Tybalt narrowed his eyes at the reminder that he’d allowed Walther to cut his daughter. “No perceptible iron poisoning. She healed almost before I could take the knife away. She’s totally fine.”

  “She’s perfect,” I corrected, looking down at her squished little face again. “She’s going to need to eat soon, and that’s going to be a problem—if there’s any iron still in my system, I shouldn’t be breastfeeding, and I never got the hang of that with Gillian, anyway.”

  “Then we should be going,” said Tybalt. He leaned over, carefully taking the baby from my arms. I managed, barely, not to snatch her back as he stood, pulling her to his chest. Instead, I turned to Walther, holding out my right arm.

  He smiled indulgently and plucked the crossbow bolt out of the bend of my elbow, causing more blood to well to the surface. This time, it stopped quickly, the skin sealing in its wake, and I relaxed a little more.

  “All right,” he said, turning to Quentin. “May, can I get a little help here?”

  “On it,” said May, moving to stand beside him. He handed her a strip of gauze and a wad of what looked like raw wool, muttering instructions I didn’t need to hear.

  When he pulled the crossbow bolt out of Quentin’s arm, May was ready, pressing the wool against the wound. It began to turn red almost immediately, catching the blood before it could be fully spilled, and May wrapped the gauze around his arm, pinning the wool in place.

  “Can you stand?” asked Walther.

  He was talking to Quentin—of course he was talking to Quentin—but it was a good question. I pushed myself to my feet, tensing against the expectation of pain.

  There wasn’t any. For the first time in weeks, there wasn’t any. My sheet-dress was stiff with dried blood, and I was sure it looked like something out of a horror movie. I reached down to feel my midriff, still ginger, and found nothing there that hurt. The damage had already been undone.

  The pile of fabric where I’d been lying was like something out of a slaughterhouse. Even a Bannick couldn’t have gotten those tapestries clean again. I nudged the mess with the toe of my foot. “Can we burn this?” I asked. “I don’t like leaving this much of my blood around for people to find.”

  “Anyone who wanted to use it for magical purposes would get a nasty surprise when they encountered the iron,” said Walther. “You’d need a really good alchemist to separate the blood and iron after they’ve dried.”

  “Does Altair have access to a really good alchemist?” I asked.

  Walther looked unsure. “She has money,” he said finally. “She could probably hire one who doesn’t know why she’s not a safe employer.”

  “Then I ask again, can we burn this?”

  Walther looked up at the ceiling. “I don’t know what kind of ventilation we’ve got in here,” he said. “We could suffocate ourselves. And without access to the Shadow Roads, that would mean all of us.”

  I grimaced, glancing to Tybalt and the infant in his arms. Not being pregnant and dying of iron poisoning was nice. Needing to worry about the safety of our child outside the comforting buffer of my body was less so.

  Quentin staggered to his feet, wobbling. May hurried to relieve Tybalt of the baby, holding her with ease, and Tybalt moved to scoop my unsteady squire off his feet. Quentin started to protest, then relaxed against Tybalt, letting himself be carried.

  “Did you see anything that looked like a way out of this place when you were looking around?” I asked. “I was pretty out of it while you were searching.”

  “Only you would call a raging case of iron poisoning ‘pretty out of it,’” said Tybalt, with a sigh.

  “Still.”

  “No,” said May. “We didn’t search the whole place—there wasn’t time, and we had other priorities to worry about—but we didn’t see anything that looked like an exit, or even a door.”

  Somewhere in the shelves ahead of us, Madden yelped. The sound was distinctly canine, even though I knew he was still on two feet: he had to be, or he wouldn’t have been walking. Without a word, we collectively started walking, heading for the sound, leaving both my mess and Walther’s alchemical supplies behind.

  Really, it shouldn’t have been a shock when we came around a tall oak shelf to find Madden standing next to Janet, who was holding a scabbard in one hand and a long kitchen knife in the other. The knife was a dull, poisonous gray, and she had the edge of it pressed against Madden’s throat. He was watching her with wide, terrified eyes, the whites showing all the way around his irises.