The Unkindest Tide (October Daye #13) - Seanan McGuire Page 0,163
make sure that when that inevitable day arrived, she would be prepared to stand on her own.
We reached the bed. She sat, pulling me with her, pulling her mouth from mine and burying her face against my shoulder as she started crying. I put my arms around her and held her close to me.
There was nothing else I could do.
THREE
As was so often my wont, I stayed too late. Helen’s tears had been followed by more kisses, and then more tears, need and grief alternating until well past the hour when I’d intended to return to the Court. The sun was teasing the edges of the sky when I stepped onto the porch, the sound of her father’s footsteps on the stairs a whisper of sound behind me. He knew what it meant when I stayed that late and came downstairs with wild, haunted eyes. He’d go to her and offer her a father’s comfort, feed her breakfast and brush her hair and do everything in his power to help her go to bed feeling safe and loved and unafraid.
Sometimes he could achieve it. Other times she’d call at noon and beg me to come over, to sit with her, to keep the night at bay. October attributed the amount of time I spent asleep at her house to my dual natures as teenager and cat. My uncle, I knew, suspected there was something more.
I dropped to all four feet before darting off the porch and into the nearby bushes. I wanted to run, to clear my head, before I returned to the Court and to Ginevra’s judgment. I glanced back. Cal was asleep on the porch where they had gone to wait for me.
Well. I’d promised to come out via the front door, and not to try and sneak away. I’d said nothing about waking my erstwhile chaperone. If they woke on their own, they might be able to track me. If not, well. I couldn’t be blamed for acting on my nature, now could I? I’m a cat. Cats are not meant to be confined.
The bushes ended at a fence. I scaled it easily, running along the top of it until I dropped down into a narrow alley. From there, I ran down a set of residential steps, feeling my muscles warm up and relax with every loping stride. The air was sweet and the sun had yet to rise and the city was stirring, neither fully awake nor fully asleep. I might as well have already been King, for I had all the freedom of the world, and all the stars to share it with.
That, perhaps, was my mistake. I was so wrapped up in the joy of running and the pride of my own strength that I darted into the street without looking first. There was a screech of brakes and the honk of a horn. I looked back, intending to gloat at the human motorist who’d stopped for my sake. They’d never stood a chance of hitting me.
The car that had slowed was already roaring away. But Cal, in feline form, was frozen in the middle of the street, ears flat and fur puffed up in all directions, seemingly hypnotized by the headlights of the second car that was bearing down on them.
There wasn’t time to think, to consider the possible consequences of my actions. There was only one of my subjects in immediate danger. I wheeled and ran back to the street, slamming my body into Cal’s, sending them tumbling out of the way.
The car hit me.
It sounds so simple, put like that. Four little words. The car hit me. The car struck me, fender slamming into my body before I had a chance to move out of the way, momentum launching me into the air like I weighed nothing, like I was nothing. There wasn’t any pain, or perhaps there was too much pain: I could almost taste it, something huge and implacable and amorphous nibbling at the edges of my awareness, ready to swallow me whole.
I tried to breathe. I couldn’t breathe.
The pain descended, and the world went away, taking me with it. In the span of a single failed breath, I no longer existed; I, Raj, was lost, swept away in a tide so much greater than myself that it would have been foolishness to protest. Even Blind Michael couldn’t have stood up to this, this nothingness, this cessation of being.