Artificial Night, An - Seanan McGuire Page 0,46

and back by the candle’s light,” I murmured.

“What?” said Raj.

“Nothing. Just a rhyme.” A thin, steady light in the distance marked the edge of the trees. “It looks like we’re almost out.”

Raj tightened his grip on my hand, clinging to me like I was his only connection with home. Maybe I was; he didn’t exactly have any better options. “What comes next?”

“I don’t know.” I gave him what I hoped was a reassuring look. “I won’t leave you.”

I hate it when I lie by accident.

We stepped into the open, turning toward the mountains, and started to walk. Eventually, Raj let go of my hand, choosing to walk a foot or so ahead of me. Nothing disturbed us as we walked out across the plains, outside the range of any reasonable cover. There was nowhere left to hide when the flame of my candle suddenly flared upward, burning a bright, furious orange.

And the Huntsmen came. They boiled up out of the ground, surrounding us in an instant. There was no time to run and nowhere to run to; all we could do was stand our ground and wait to be taken. Their attention was fixed on Raj, but I didn’t expect that to last. I reached out and grabbed for his shoulder, even though I didn’t know what good it would do. It was instinctive. I suppose what happened next was instinctive, too. Cornered tigers will fight, after all.

Raj lunged for the nearest Huntsman, shifting into feline form in midair and going for the eyes. He was making himself a distraction. I had to admire the effort, even as I started after him, screaming, “Raj, no!”

Whatever illusion was protecting me wasn’t strong enough to hide me from my own stupidity. The nearest Huntsmen turned toward my voice, eyes wide and startled, like they were seeing me for the first time. The one Raj was lunging for swatted him away. He fell without a sound, landing in an unmoving heap as the others closed in on me, weapons drawn.

I was so busy watching their weapons that I never saw the one who hit me. There was a sudden, sharp pain in the back of my head, and I was falling again, back into mist and candlelit darkness. And there was nothing.

ELEVEN

I AWOKE FACEDOWN in the middle of a marble floor that had been white once, before it was buried under years of mud and gore. My head was throbbing in time to an unseen samba band. I took a brief mental census, confirming that my aching head was still attached to the rest of me before pushing myself upright.

I could feel the blood the Luidaeg used to make my candle even before I realized that my fingers were still wrapped tightly around it. The flame blazed up as soon as I looked at it, growing until it was a foot high and burning brilliant red. That couldn’t be good. Raj was nowhere in sight. That could have meant he’d managed to escape the Hunt, but I didn’t think so. There was probably some ceremony he’d already gone through that I still needed to undergo in my new role as one of Blind Michael’s captive children. There are always ceremonies in Faerie, even in the parts that we’d rather ignore.

The room I was in was probably a ballroom before it became a prison. The walls had been shattered about ten feet up, and the roof was entirely gone. Brambles boiled over the walls on three sides, obscuring all the doors. Tattered tapestries hung between the loops of briar, their patterns worn away by dirt and time. The sky had grown even darker while I was unconscious, but there were still no stars. No stars at all.

Shadows too dark for changeling eyes to pierce pooled at the base of the walls, and I could hear giggling and rustling noises coming from inside them. That wasn’t promising. I’ve learned to never trust the laughing ones; they’re either insane or genuinely glad to see people frightened and in pain, and either way, they’re likely to cause problems.

I stood, trying to ignore the shivering weakness in my knees. The Rider that knocked me out had obviously done it before, because I wasn’t dead—it takes skill to knock someone out from behind without smashing their skull. If I was lucky, the pain would pass before I needed to run. I seemed to be counting on luck an awful lot.

It took a moment to be sure I wasn’t going