An Artificial Night

FIVE

I HIT THE GROUND HIP-FIRST, rolling to a stop before I sat up. I was dry despite my fall through the water, and my hands didn’t hurt anymore. I looked at them and laughed as I saw that the skin was whole and smooth again. Well, I guess that’s one way to heal someone, assuming you go in for slapstick. “Lily, that wasn’t—” I stopped, blinking. “—funny?”

The knowe stretched out around me in an array of ponds and flatlands, all connected by narrow bridges. Lily, Tybalt, and Karen were gone. “Tybalt?” No one answered. I stood, automatically reaching up to shove my hair back, and stopped as my fingers encountered a tight interweave of knots and hairpins. I pulled one of the hairpins free and glared at it before shoving it back into place. Jade and dragonflies. Cute.

My frown deepened as I looked down at myself and took in the whole picture. Lily apparently extended her services to healing my fashion sense as well as my hands: my T-shirt and jeans were gone, replaced by a steel-gray gown cut in a vaguely traditional Japanese style and embroidered with black and silver dragonflies. A black velvet obi was tied around my waist, my knife concealed underneath a fold of fabric. It wouldn’t be easy to draw, but at least she hadn’t left me unarmed. Pulling up the hem of the gown exposed one battered brown sneaker—she’d left my shoes alone.

“Not funny,” I muttered and started down the nearest path. We were going to have words if she’d vaporized my clothes.

Finding your way out of Lily’s knowe is easy, as long as you don’t mind walking. The boundaries of her lands are flexible—sometimes there are miles between landmarks, at others it’s only a few feet—but all paths eventually lead to the moon bridge. I’d gone about a quarter of a mile, grumbling all the way, when a throat was discreetly cleared behind me.

“Yes?” I said, turning.

A silver-skinned man was standing on the water, the gills at the bottom of his jaw fluttering with barely concealed anxiety. He was wearing Lily’s livery, with slits cut down the sleeves and in the legs of his pants to allow the fins running down his calves and forearms the freedom to move. “My lady has … sent me?” he said, uncertainly.

“I can see that. What did she send you to say?”

“She wishes me to tell you she is … waiting in the pavilion? With … the King of Cats and … your niece?”

“Good to know,” I said, bobbing my head. “Which way to the pavilion?”

“Go as you are and turn … left … at the … sundial?”

That seemed to be the end of his instructions. I was turning when he spoke again, asking, “Lady?”

I glanced back over my shoulder. “Yes?”

“May I … go?”

“Yes, you may,” I said. He smiled and dissolved into mist, drifting away across the water. I shook my head and resumed walking. Naiads. If there’s a way to make them smarter than your average rock, nobody’s found it yet.

The rest of the walk was uneventful. A flock of pixies crossed my path at one point, laughing as they tried to knock each other out of the air. I stopped to let them pass. Pixies are small, but they can be vicious when provoked. Several flocks inhabit the park and are currently at war with the flock in the Safeway where I used to work. I’ve been known to supply the store pixies with weaponry—usually in the form of toothpicks or broken pencils—and I didn’t need a flock of park pixies descending on me seeking retribution. I started again after they passed, crossing several more small islands and mossy outcroppings before I reached a sundial in the middle of an otherwise featureless patch of ground. It cast no shadow. I rolled my eyes, wondering why Lily bothered, and turned left.

There was no pavilion before I turned. As soon as I finished turning, it was there: a huge white silk pavilion decorated with a dozen coats of arms I didn’t recognize and anchored to a raised hardwood platform by golden ropes. Its banners and pennants drifted in a breeze I couldn’t feel. Apparently, “turn left” didn’t mean “keep walking.”

Lily was kneeling on a cushion, pouring tea into rose-colored china cups that rested on a table so low to the ground that kneeling was the only option—not that she’d provided chairs. Lily can be a bit of a traditionalist when she wants to be, and that’s most of the time. Tybalt sat across from her on a similar cushion, looking entirely at ease with his surroundings. That’s another infuriating thing about him. He’s so damned self-confident that he could probably have dinner with Oberon himself and not feel like he was outclassed.

Karen was asleep against the pavilion wall, pillowed on a pile of cushions with Spike curled up on her stomach. It looked like she’d taken her own trip through the amazing Undine car wash and healing salon. She was wearing a white robe embroidered with cherry blossoms and her hair was combed into a corona around her head. She was just as pale as she’d been before Lily pulled her little stunt and, somehow, I didn’t think she’d woken up. Her original clothes were folded on the floor next to her, along with mine.

“I see you’ve found us,” said Lily. She waved a hand toward the other side of the table, indicating the place next to Tybalt. “Please. Sit.”

“You could have warned me, you know,” I said, walking over to settle as directed. My knees complained when I tried to kneel, so I sat instead, sticking my legs straight out in front of me. Tybalt appeared to be kneeling as comfortably as Lily. I shot him a dirty look. Show-off. “Was there a reason you needed to shunt me halfway across the damn knowe?”

“Yes,” she said, continuing to pour. That was really no surprise. I rarely get out of the Tea Gardens without stopping for a cup of tea with Lily, no matter how urgent my business seems to be. Still …

“I’m not sure we have time for this, Lily,” I said. “We should be looking for the kids.”

“There’s always time for tea,” chided Lily, placing a cup in front of me. “I ‘shunted you,’ as you so charmingly put it, because you needed to be healed. The damage was magically done, which made it fixable, if I was willing to be firm with it. As for why I didn’t warn you, your dislike of water is difficult to miss. I thought you might resist if you knew what was intended.” A small smile creased her lips. “A certain resistance to getting wet is a trait you share with our royal friend here.”

Tybalt made a face. “I don’t consider avoiding pneumonia to be a bad thing.”

“If you can contract pneumonia in the waters of my land, you have more troubles than a touch of moistness,” said Lily. Sobering, she looked toward me. “I am sorry, October, but I can’t wake the child. I tried. I can keep body and spirit together for the time being, but I fear that may be the extent of my capabilities.”

“But what’s wrong with her?”

Lily raised her teacup, using the habitual gesture to try to conceal the worry flickering in her eyes. “I don’t know.”

“Should I take her to Jin?” Jin was the Court healer at Shadowed Hills. She wasn’t in Lily’s league—almost no one who isn’t an Undine even comes close—but she was good, and her skills were somewhat different. The Ellyllon aren’t environmental healers, like the Undine; they work with charms and potions, and that can make them try harder. They aren’t limited by what the water can do.

“I don’t think so,” said Lily. “Moving her before we know the source of her condition may do more harm than good. You did well to bring her here. I can watch over her until more is known.”

“So we don’t know why Karen won’t wake up, we don’t know what happened to the missing kids—I don’t even know where I should start with this one.”

“Ask the moon,” said Lily.

“You keep saying that,” Tybalt said, with a frown. “Perhaps you’d like to translate it.”

“I can’t,” said Lily, calmly meeting his eyes. “If you wish to find your answers, you’ll need to begin thinking, not merely reacting.”

“Thinking,” I said, and turned toward him. “Tybalt, when you went looking for the missing kids, did you notice anything unusual about the places where they normally slept?”

“Beyond their absence?” His frown deepened. “The air was sour. It smelled wrong, like things that shouldn’t have been there.”

“Things like what?” I asked, a grim certainty growing inside me.

“Blood and ash. And candle wax.”

There was a crash from the other side of the table. We turned to find Lily picking up the pieces of her teacup with shaking hands. I stared. I’d never seen Lily drop anything before.

“I’m so very sorry,” she stammered, rising. “Please move away from the table … I’ll clean the mess directly … I am so sorry …”

I started to scoot back, but froze, staring at the tea leaves smeared across the table. There were shapes in the mess, almost clear enough to understand. Three loops, like arched gateways; a wilted rose; a tall, slim column tipped with a triangular smear. A candle … ?

Lily’s hand reached across the table and grasped my chin, turning me to face her. Her eyes seemed darker, less like eyes and more like pools of water. “It’s time to go,” she said. “I’m sorry, but the leaves have spoken. He’s too close for the safety of me or mine.”

“Lily, what—” Tybalt began. Lily shot him a sharp look and he quieted.

“You have business to conduct, both of you, although the weight of it stands on Amandine’s daughter,” she said. “You must speak to the moon, October. Leave the girl in my keeping. Perhaps I can wake her, perhaps not, but she’ll be safer with me than she could be on the road with you.”

“But—”

This time the sharp look was for me. “You know there are things I can’t discuss. I’m sorry they touch on your affairs. I can tell you this much only: you must ask the moon, for you’ll find no answers here, and you must leave the girl behind.”

“I can’t just leave her!” I protested. “Her parents trusted me with her.”

“Have you had an unexpected visitor?” she asked. I froze. She continued, “One who belongs to your line even as mistletoe belongs to the oak? You can’t lie to me. I know you.”

“How … ?” I whispered. Tybalt was frowning, but I didn’t care. If Lily knew about my Fetch, what else did she know?

Her smile was sad. “There are always ripples on the water. Some of us just watch them more closely. Leave the child and go. You have miles yet to travel on this road.”

“Lily, I—”

“There’s nothing else to say. You will go on your errand, and Tybalt’s, and all the others who haven’t time to reach you. You will go, because you must. Go now, October.” She looked at the mess on the table. “You have little enough time to find your way. Go.”

I stood. “You’re not telling me anything else, are you?”

“There’s nothing else to tell.” She crossed to Karen, picked up my clothes, and offered them to me. “You may keep the gown. It suits you.”

“Guess I don’t have time to change.” I took the bundle. “How do we get out of here?”

“Leave the pavilion and turn right.”

“Got it.” I turned to walk away. Spike leaped off of Karen, following at my heels, with Tybalt just a few feet behind, his footsteps silent on the pavilion floor. It was oddly comforting not to be leaving alone.

There was a moment of disorientation as we stepped down from the pavilion to the mossy ground. The landscape fell into place around us and we were back in the Japanese Tea Gardens, standing outside a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. There was a tingle in the air and the smell of jasmine tea. I reached up and touched one ear, feeling the illusion-rounded angle of it.

“Isn’t this fun,” I said, darkly. I realize most purebloods have absolute control within their knowes, but that doesn’t mean I need illustrated examples. I can’t stand other people throwing my illusions on for me. It makes my ears itch. Area illusions like Tybalt’s don’tlook-here were annoying enough, and they didn’t actually touch my skin.

“You look very nice,” said Tybalt.

I eyed him, unwrapping his jacket—unwrapping my jacket—from around the bundle of clothes and shrugging it on. The battered leather made an odd contrast against the formal silk gown. I didn’t much care. “I look like a geisha.”

A small smile tugged at his lips. “As I said, you look very nice.”

“Uh-huh.” I snorted and turned to head for the exit. Looking amused, Tybalt followed. The second time I tripped on the hem of my dress, he reached over and took the bundle of clothes from my hands. I blinked, but didn’t say anything.

Neither did he, until we were almost to my car. When he did speak, his voice was uncharacteristically soft. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“What?” I glanced toward him.

“I said, I didn’t mean to upset you. I didn’t realize my absence would be a problem.” His smile widened slightly. “It seemed you were eternally trying to be rid of me.”

“Yeah, well.” I stopped next to the car, taking my clothes out of his hands. “I guess I wasn’t expecting it to be quite that abrupt. Did I piss you off?”

“Piss me off? No. You didn’t. I’ve been …” He paused, sighing. “I’ve been looking for someone. There are questions that trouble me and I’d like to find some answers.”

“Anything I can help with?”

The question was casual; his response was anything but. Going still as a cat stalking a mouse, he studied my face, eyes darting back and forth as he considered me. Finally, almost wonderingly, he said, “No. No, I don’t think it is.” He looked oddly relieved. “My apologies for my absence. Clearly, you’ve been lost without me.”

I blinked, digging my keys out of the pocket of my jeans and checking the backseat for intruders before unlocking the car door. “You’re very strange, Tybalt,” I said. “But I guess I knew that. Do you need a lift anywhere?”

He paused, looking thoughtful. “What did Lily mean? The mistletoe and the oak?”

In for a penny, in for a pound. If he was trusting me to find his Court’s missing children, I might as well trust him with the realities of the situation. Squaring my shoulders, I met his eyes and said, “My Fetch showed up this morning.”

“Ah,” he said, softly. “I should have known it would be something of the sort.” Before I had a chance to react, he stepped forward, kissing me on the forehead. “I have to return to my Court and let the parents of the missing ones know that you’ve agreed. I’ll come to you later.”

I stared at him, stunned. “What … ?”

“Open roads, Toby. Find our children.” He hesitated like he was about to say something else, but he didn’t; he just turned and walked to the edge of the parking lot.

“What … ?” I repeated, standing there with my keys dangling in my hand.

Looking back over his shoulder, he smiled, almost shyly, stepped into the shadows, and was gone.

“This is officially getting strange,” I said, as much to hear my own voice as anything else. Missing children, a Fetch on my doorstep, Lily being freaky, and now Tybalt was deciding to redefine “acting weird”? The day wasn’t getting any better. I got into the car and started the engine.

I needed coffee, and I needed it now.