The Unkindest Tide (October Daye #13) - Seanan McGuire Page 0,125

me running, he ran after me, moving fast enough that he caught up before I could go over the edge. He grabbed me by the shoulders, spinning me around, away from the water.

“What in the world are you trying to accomplish?” he demanded.

“You can—” I began.

The knife hitting me in the back stopped me.

I saw Tybalt’s eyes go wide and his mouth go slack, hands starting to lose their grip on my arms as he realized what had happened. I grabbed his wrists, keeping him connected to me. Blood was filling my mouth, bitter and bright as a new penny. It hurt, oh, how it hurt, but I was grateful for the pain. If Tybalt hadn’t moved me to keep me from falling, the knife would have hit him in the chest.

“Run,” I whispered, and pitched forward, slamming into him, sending us plummeting over the edge. I was getting really tired of falling.

Come on, Tybalt, I thought, unable to convince my mouth to do any more heavy lifting. Figure it out.

His arms closed around me. There was a rustling sound, like a curtain being thrust aside, and instead of falling through the open air, we were suddenly falling through freezing cold and absolute blackness. I smiled despite myself, closing my eyes and relaxing as he slung me up into his arms. We were on the Shadow Roads. We’d be fine.

There was a jolt as his feet found whatever passed for ground here, and I focused on holding my breath, staying still, and bleeding as little as I could. The last of those wasn’t exactly within my control, but as I felt my wounds ice over and struggle to heal at the same time, I felt reasonably confident I wasn’t going to be leaving a gory trail through the dark for the next Cait Sidhe who came along to follow.

My lungs burned. I was almost used to that, at this point, and this was just suffocation, not drowning. I let the warmth of Tybalt’s body soothe me, the smell of his magic hanging in my nose like a promise that this wasn’t going to last forever. The darkness could hold sway for a time, but it would have to pass eventually. It always had before.

As if that had been the incantation to bring us back into the light, the atmosphere shifted around us, cold airlessness becoming ordinary heat. I could see flickers of brightness through my eyelids. I couldn’t open my eyes, since my lashes had frozen together, but that was fine; the warmth of wherever we were now would melt them soon enough.

“October.” Tybalt sounded distressed. Tybalt usually sounds distressed when I’m wearing more than a certain amount of my own blood. If fae could get gray hair from stress, he would have been a silver tabby by now. “The knife is still in your back, and I’m afraid to leave it there; your body is trying too hard to heal, and may refuse to let it go later. I am so sorry, love, but I have to do this.”

The ice on my lips cracked as I smiled. “It’s all right,” I said. “I would have asked you to pull it out if you hadn’t volunteered.”

“The edge, it’s—”

“Yeah.” I’d seen the spikes before they’d been sheathed in my body—in my spine, which definitely hadn’t been intended for this particular purpose. There was a reason I hadn’t asked him to pull it out before we ran. If he’d taken the time to work it free of my flesh, we might both be dead by now. And with my luck, being dead would have stuck with him and not with me, leaving me alone again. “It’s going to hurt like hell, and you’re probably going to see some pieces of me that you never wanted to. It’s all right. You’re not the one hurting me. Torin is. You’re the one helping me get better.”

He hesitated before saying, “You’re awake and coherent. Could you remove it yourself?”

“I don’t have the leverage.” The ice on my lashes was melting. I still didn’t open my eyes. I didn’t want to see the look on Tybalt’s face, which was doubtless unhappy enough to make me reconsider my stance on removing the knife from my own back. All I’d be able to do was hurt myself worse. No: this was the only way.

“I’ll need to put you down.”

“Where are we?”

“I . . . believe . . . this is the local manifestation of the Court of Cats,”