as I knew was just some schmoe who worked for Julian and had no clue about the nightmare that was, in all likelihood, about two minutes up the road.
I pressed the little intercom button. We were close enough now that I could walk the rest without it being too much of a problem and staying off the main drag would probably be a good idea. “You might want to stop here,” I suggested. “It’s a long way back to London and these roads get tricky late at night. I’ll be fine, you get back home.”
“If you’re sure, Miss Kane.” The driver’s voice seemed at once uncertain and relieved. I was glad I hadn’t been the only one sensing the general creeptastic vibe—I’d been known to get a little paranoid about mystical bullshit. Then again I always thought paranoid was a big upgrade from dead.
The driver very much did not need additional encouragement to leave me in the dust, turn the limo around, and hightail it back to the Velvet. It was probably for the best all in all—another mortal to worry about would only have made things more awkward—but it did mean that I was now on foot by the side of a very poorly lit road, with my arm in a rudimentary sling and a night of supernatural horrors closing in all around me.
I told myself I’d been in worse situations, and I had. Then again, I thought that probably said more about how crappy my life had been up until that point, rather than being any kind of silver lining to my objectively cloudy present situation.
There was nothing for it. With the trees arching up on either side of the road like claws and the stars and moon blotted out behind what I hoped against all probability was a completely ordinary overcast sky, I walked on.
Before long I decided to get off the road proper and a little deeper into the woods. The choice of strategy was partly because the posh berks who lived around these parts tended to think speed limits were strictly optional, and it would have been deeply embarrassing for even this half-arsed rescue attempt to end with my getting run over by some prick in a Beamer. But mostly it was because I suspected the roads would be watched, and while where faeries were concerned trees weren’t exactly mega-trustworthy either, at least I knew I could run and hide in the woods if the situation got out of hand.
Besides, something in the chill of the forest called out to me—not something I was especially comfortable listening to, but right about now something was a metric shit-ton better than nothing.
The woods around Safernoc Hall were a strange, enchanted place that bordered a whole mess of ever-shifting faery realms. The Realm of the Pale Stag—a creature of desolation and withering and autumnal decay, responsible for the white streak in my hair—was one, the Cold and the Dark another. I’d have been amazed if my mother didn’t have access to it somewhere, because it was a howley wolfey hunty place and she was a howley wolfey hunty lady.
I pushed on through the darkness, letting instinct guide me as much as memory. Maybe it was adrenaline, or maybe it was residual faery magic impulses, but my arm was beginning to bother me less and my head was starting to feel clearer. Through the trees, I saw a shadow moving in parallel with me. I stopped and it stopped too. I quickened my pace and it quickened.
I walked towards it.
The thing was large, though details were hard to make out in what was fast becoming near-total darkness. At first I thought it might have been one of the wolves, but it seemed bigger, more the size of a large horse. I fumbled on my phone light, and saw something gleaming pale between the trees.
Fuck. Not the unicorn.
It walked slowly towards me, head bowed, which given the giant fucking spike it was pointing at me could either have been a gesture of submission or a threat. Last time we’d met I’d managed to get it, or something like it, more or less on side by pulling faery princess rank. But there’d been a lot of vodka under the bridge since then.
Still, I approached it. Just very, very, very carefully. Horses were bad enough, horses with fucking spears coming out of their faces should have been nightmare fuel to any reasonable person. It knelt down in the undergrowth in front of