The Unkindest Tide (October Daye #13) - Seanan McGuire Page 0,167

the grave, I thought I finally did.

I closed my eyes and willed myself to sleep again. I needed to get stronger. I needed to heal. If I didn’t . . .

An empty cage, and silence, could be a fate that waited for anyone.

You were wrong, Uncle, I thought, the words petulant and small, like the crying of a lost child. We’re temporary, too. We always have been. We can go. We can disappear.

I slept.

FIVE

Helen’s face peered out at me from a tangle of thorny vines. They had wrapped themselves around her so tightly that they pierced her skin, thorns driving their way down toward her bones. When they struck, I knew, they would root there, growing into her body and becoming a part of her. She would unravel into a new briar, girl-shaped at first, but losing its form as it forgot what it had been, forgot that it was anything other than a predator designed by a monster.

“Run,” she whispered, voice ragged with agony and hoarse from screaming. She had stopped screaming several minutes before, when the pain had reached the point of becoming numbness. Her body was shutting down to protect her. Her mind was refusing to let go. Whether that was an intentional part of Michael’s cruelty or her own will shining through, I didn’t know, but she was still lucid, still Helen, and I couldn’t leave her. “Run, please, run. I don’t want you to see this.”

I tried to reach for her. The vines slithered, cradling her tighter, preventing me from touching her. They had their prey. Until she was digested, until she was transformed, they didn’t need or want me.

“Raj, please.”

No. This was—this was wrong. This was wrong. She was too young, her face too soft, her eyes not shadowed by the sleepless days she’d been enduring since our escape from Blind Michael. Since our escape. If we escaped, how were we back here on this endless, foggy plain?

None of this had happened. I’d seen another child taken by the vines, but not Helen. She’d been too slow. That was the terrible truth of Blind Michael’s lands. The faster you were, the better prepared for their dangers, the more likely you were to be taken, transformed, and consumed. It was the slow ones who stood half a chance of getting away, because the fast ones triggered all the traps.

I have always, always been fast. If not for Helen grabbing my hand and asking me not to leave her—if she had grabbed for someone else, if I had shaken her away, commanding her imperiously to keep her hands off of me—I would have been at the front of the mob. I would have been dead long before October could have come to bring me home.

None of this happened.

The thought shattered the dream. I opened my eyes and found myself back in the brightly lit room, back in the cage. I felt better after my nap, however unpleasant my dreams had been. Not enough to feel like myself, but enough that when I tried to sit up, my body obeyed me. I was still weak, and my legs were still unsteady; standing was out of the question. That didn’t matter. Sitting up was a start.

The cage across from me remained empty. Another human was there, wiping it down with a cloth. He was dressed like the woman had been, in soft pastel scrubs. I decided to take a risk and meowed as loudly as I could, attracting the human’s attention. He turned to look quizzically at me. Then he smiled, apparently delighted by what he saw.

“Hey, little guy, you’re awake,” he said, approaching slowly, like he didn’t want to frighten me. That was silly. I was in a cage. He was outside the cage, and had thumbs. He was clearly in the superior position here. “You’re a lucky fellow, you know that? If that car had been going just a little faster, or if it had hit you a few inches to the right, you wouldn’t be here with us now.”

I forced my ears to stay up and my whiskers to stay forward, trying to project an air of curious friendliness. The tube still taped to my arm made it difficult. I wanted to bite it. I wanted to bite it so badly, to bite and bite until it dropped away and I was free. But the shadows were still outside my reach, and while my thoughts remained somewhat fuzzy, they were clear enough for me to