jenny-hag’s bony withering. Eventually, Summer might choke out a gout of black brackish fluid, and expire, her eaten body collapsing into foul wet dust.
A comforting thought, and one Robin kept despite the danger. She turned away from Summer and faced the mortal world again. Everything now depended on luck, speed, and her native wit. Her whistle became a high drilling buzz, lips pursing and her hair lifting on a breeze from neither realm. Robin Ragged’s blue silken skirt snapped once, her heels clicking as she stepped with a jolt fully into the mortal world, slipping through a rent in the Veil just her size and shape. Her fingers left cold metal, the Gates’ thrum disappearing like a train rolling into the distance, and the alley closed around her. Bricks, garbage, the effluvia of combustion engines and decay.
For all that, it was an honest reek, and she welcomed it as she took a few experimental steps. The world rippled around her, cautious as it always was to accept a child of the sideways realms, then firmed like gelatin.
She made it to the alley mouth, peered out into the city. Night gathered in corners. It was the perfect moment of dusk, when the tides between all the realms, sideways and mortal, turned and the interference made it difficult to track anything, much less one ragged little bird with a whistle that trilled into silence.
She cocked her head. She’d gone unremarked.
At least, she thought she had, until the ultrasonic cry of a silver huntwhistle lifted in the distance, and she thought perhaps they had been watching far more closely than even the Queen had guessed.
It was whispered that Unwinter himself had loosed the plague, and even now reveled in its destructive force. Certainly Summer had openly hinted as much, when the black boils began to cut a swath through the unaligned. The free sidhe often named themselves the lucky ones who bowed to no master—at least, not fully, though there was always the Fatherless.
Don’t think about him. If all goes well, you won’t see him tonight. He won’t even know you’ve been out and about.
Robin slid out of the alley and set off down the deserted street, cars humming in the distance and every nerve in her body quivering-alert.
Now let’s see how well I run the course. Her heels tapped the sidewalk as she lengthened her stride, her much-mended skirt whispering and her curls bouncing. She was not so foolish as to think fear of any reprisal from Summer would keep her whole should Unwinter’s hounds have orders to bring the Ragged to their liege.
She was, however, just arrogant enough to think perhaps she could outrun them, and if all else failed, there was always the song, its thunder under her thoughts a comforting roil.
Dusk closed around her, and Robin hurried.
She doubled a time or thrice, turned counterclockwise in a deserted intersection, and worked closer and closer to familiar ground. The trashwood that had seemed a fairytale forest once was untidy stumps and clumps of refuse choking a small pond that used to be a blue eye, but the path up the hill was still used by something. Maybe animals, or homeless mortals. Her heels didn’t slip on the greasy, frozen dirt, but she went carefully anyway, stopping often to listen. Night’s wings had folded.
Everything here was familiar. She hadn’t chosen this place, and didn’t like the idea that it was a message from the sidhe who had found her skinny-dipping in the pond so long ago and opened her eyes to the sideways realms. Deciphering what such a message could mean took second place to the consideration that it was familiar ground, since Robin knew every inch of the trailer park. It would be difficult to trick her with glamour or pixie-leading here.
The entire place was abandoned now, maybe because of the fires evidenced everywhere by the gaping toothsockets of scorched, empty concrete foundations between slumping, gutted tin-walled boxes that had once been something akin to homes. Chill, forlorn menace eddied and swirled about the trailers lucky enough to be intact; she ignored it. She’d laid some of the glamours here herself, safeguarding the Queen’s pet.
One of the trailers listed uneasily on its pad, but it was eerily solid underfoot as she climbed the back stairs, finding the stable ones by touch and memory, ignoring the illusory ones and the traps just waiting to clutch an unwary ankle. The flimsy door was locked, but she whispered the password and twisted the knob,