Chapter 24

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

"Be careful!" a familiar voice panicked. "Don't stab her in the eye."

"I'm not going to stab her in the eye," came a condescending reply. "I'm just going to see how she's getting on. Now finish your bath."

"You're covered in soot too!"

"Sawyer," that second voice—clearly female—snapped. "I don't have time for your attitude. She's still out of it; probably will be for a while yet."

Were they talking about me? Thistle thorns, my head felt like it'd been sat on by an elephant. I was ghastly cold, and why did everything sound like I had cotton wool stuffed into my ears? Maybe that was the resulting pulp of my brain after getting sat on by an elephant clogging everything up.

"Has she said anything else, besides Emmett and Cody's names?" the female continued.

"Nothing specific, just a lot of mumbling. It was so slurred I couldn't read her lips. You got to Emmett and Cody, though, right?"

"They've been warned that she was concerned about them, but with nothing else to tell them, it's in their hands now." A sigh, then sternly: "You can't let her out of your sight again, do you understand? With your memories back, you know what's at stake. But don't push her, especially about those rubies. Unlike everything else, those are tied to her emotions. Her mind needs to heal, so she has to discover things for herself. If you just flat-out tell her, she'll get confused and angry and we'll be right back here with her drooling into her bed. Meadow has a job to do, and she can't do that if she's in a tizzy. You both need to be patient."

Okay, they were definitely talking about me. Rude. It was even ruder because as clearly as I heard her, my muddled brain whisked the conversation away. How dare she say something important when I couldn't concentrate?

"But Arthur," the first one whined.

"What did I just say?"

There was an exchange of muted yowls and a staccato bap-bap-bap , then something soft and velvety touched my face. Peeled back the lids of my right eye. Six shapes, three black and three striped, swam across my vision.

"Hmm," the black ones grunted. "Looks like your spell took, but it won't last. She wasn't exactly able to consent." All three turned back to the striped ones and popped them on the heads with a solid bap . The three striped ones flattened their ears with a mild hiss. "Don't you hiss at me, Sawyer Blackfoot."

Sawyer. I knew that name. I clung to it, clawing myself to the surface of consciousness.

"Had you not already forged some kind of bond," the black ones continued, "the Soul-Bonding Spell would've backfired and I'd be scraping your fur and maybe your guts off the wall! And after all the work I put into you too."

"It was the only thing I could think of," the Sawyers whined, becoming small. "She needed more help than I could give her otherwise. Bonded witches and familiars have more resistance against fae magic. She needed me, and… I love her. She was worth the risk. I'm—" The three Sawyers stood up tall, chins lifted. "I'm not sorry, Ame."

Ame . I knew that name too.

" You ," I croaked, forcing open my other eye. A sluggish blink condensed the six cats down to four, then two.

"She's alive!" Sawyer cried, flinging himself into my lap.

"We already knew that," Ame replied tartly, retreating to the side and leaving black pawprints in her wake.

As the half striped, half black tomcat wormed under my hands for snuggles, his lower half smearing soot all over my dress, I fought for clarity through… everything. At the recesses of my mind were the familiar golden haze, a retreating white fog, and something else. Something like an amber-colored shadow that was pouncing around and swatting at the haze and fog. "What happened to me?"

Sawyer stopped wriggling and cast a worried look at the other cat. Something told me she wasn't normally black, but she was making no move to clean her fur. She just sat there like a guardian of the underworld who'd abandoned her post, her yellow eyes drilling me with a judgmental stare.

"What do you remember?" she asked, her tone light. "Let's start there and work our way forward, shall we?"

"I… I was yelling at him." My brow furrowed at the tomcat, at the black smearing his flanks and tail. I couldn't tell where it ended and his black feet began. "Though I don't remember what about. Why are you gross?"

"I, uh, was hiding in the chimney?"

"Why?"

"That fae came in here," Ame answered for him.

"What? Why?" Ossian never came into the east wing, not unless I'd gotten drunk on fairy wine.

"You were not yourself, so he put you on the bed and left."

Curse that fairy wine. Glancing down at myself, I found the foraging bag and the censer right where I left them—on my person—along with yesterday's clothes, but the white fur coat was hanging up neatly in the open wardrobe. "You'd think he would've taken this all off to make me more comfortable," I muttered.

"Be glad he can't," came Ame's flat reply. Then, lightly: "How's your head?"

At its mention, I became aware of a persistent throb and clutched my head. "Uh, I think I'm dehydrated. And exhausted," I said, suddenly realizing the truth of it. "And my wrists feel like they've been crushed. My hand—"

From the ache, or the memory of the ache, I expected to find the knuckles of my right hand black and blue and pulpy, but visually, it was fine. Maybe a little tender to the touch and the skin a little redder than normal, but that was it.

"You had a tiring day, I'm told," Ame continued, interrupting my thoughts. "A little trip to the farmhouse, was it?"

I glared at her. "Now I remember why I was mad at him. I lost my ember because of you ."

She seemed smugly satisfied and not at all chastised like she should be. "I told Sawyer you could recharge the ember at the farmhouse. I didn't say you were recharging it for you ."

"Then who exactly? My family's back at the manor!"

The cat didn't bother with a reply, instead hopping off the bed and padding off to the bathroom, presumably to truly wash herself.

Well, I wasn't going to be ignored so easily. I needed that ember; I wasn't sure I could finish uncursing myself without it. Sawyer wisely sprang off my lap before I was forced to toss him aside, and I scrambled off the bed. Ame was on the sink counter, helping herself to a drink from the faucet, and just when I thought about snatching her up and thrusting her under the water—she needed cleaned anyway, and it served her right for using me for her own purposes—I caught sight of my reflection in the mirror.

I was my customary post-sleep hideousness—disheveled hair, chapped lips from drooling, the imprint of the duvet's pattern marring one side of my face like a rash, that veritable desert of crust the Sandman had poured into my eyes—but it was the plethora of red twinkling at my throat that had me stopping in my tracks.

Rubies, each the size of the marbles I'd seen in the farmhouse, were embedded in lacework silver around my entire neck. Their color and sparkle matched the rubies in my ears, all of them twinkling madly, and I quickly swept up my hair to get a good look of them together.

"Another gift from Ossian?" Ame quipped, her tone carefully neutral.

Tears sprang to my eyes as delight swelled in my heart. "I don't even remember him giving this to me. It had to be sometime last night—curse that fairy wine." I touched the rubies, feeling the warmth radiating from them, almost as if they were spelled. But it was just my body heat. "It's so beautiful. This must have taken him days to—"

"Looks more like a collar than a necklace to me," Sawyer said from where he sat in the doorway.

"I believe the term is ‘choker,'" Ame corrected, hopping down and stalking towards him. There was a pregnant pause where they just stared at each other, their tails flicking, and I knew they were having some kind of silent exchange. Ame won, Sawyer averting his gaze and hunching into a loaf.

"Wait just a minute," I said, forgetting the rubies and charging after her. Sawyer chased after my heels. "The Hawthorne ember—"

"Is back where it belongs," Ame said, hoping up onto a windowsill and batting the drapes aside for a brief glance outside. The gray light beyond that tiny sliver of window heralded a dawn that was still a quarter hour away.

"But I need it!"

"And it was needed more elsewhere." She hopped down and went to another windowsill.

I stalked after her. "Who are you to decide that?"

Apparently she didn't like what she saw in her brief glance out that window either and moved on to another, ignoring me.

"I'm talking to you, cat!" I snapped.

"Yes, and wasting perfectly good time on that fruitless endeavor when you should be unlocking more of your magic. You had your helping hand, and now it's time for you to finish the job," she said, abandoning that window too.

"What are you looking for?" I demanded, throwing the drapes aside. I'd never get a straight answer out of her if she was constantly distracted anyway. And why were my drapes closed? I always had them open to let in the moonlight.

On the opposite side of the diamond-paned glass, a blue-eyed barn owl screeched. Memory flared—I did not like that owl. Catching sight of the two cats, its white chest feathers puffed out in alarm. With another screech, its talons clawed at the sky as its tawny wings beat a hasty tempo. Not in attack, but in escape.

"It's getting away!" Sawyer cried.

" Aperio! " Ame shouted, the window unlatching and bursting open. She launched through it a second later, paws flung wide.

The barn owl screamed as the cat's paws caught its wings and her teeth sank into the back of its neck.

"Ame!" Sawyer lunged for the windowsill, but I snatched him out of the air, hugging him tightly to my chest. It was a fifty-foot drop to the alleyway below.

Ame's momentum had combined with the owl's, the two of them rocketing across the alleyway and onto the roof to the adjacent building. Shingles broke loose from the impact, and while Ame scrambled with her back paws, she couldn't find purchase. They slid off the roof amongst a shower of shingles, a last-minute shove of her rear legs altering their trajectory.

The cat landed on the ground with the owl pinned beneath her, neither seeming the worse for wear. Except the owl wasn't moving. It was—

"It's unconscious," Ame called, her voice tinny from the distance far below us. "I'm going to take this little spy somewhere safe and dark for the time being. Free your magic, Meadow Hawthorne! Redbud needs you."

Taking the owl up once again in her jaws, the cat bounded off in what remained of the night.

Spy? She'd said it with such conviction that, once again, and not for the first time, I felt like I was playing a game of rummy with an incomplete deck. Something was missing.

Still, I dumped Sawyer onto the bed and yanked the window closed, as if launching oneself out into thin air was catching. I latched it and backed away, trying to process the events of the last fifteen minutes and coming to one conclusion.

"I don't like her." Something told me I never had.

"She's still right, though," Sawyer admitted begrudgingly. "You need to free your core."

"I do. But first things first." I glanced down at myself, taking in the smears and smudges on my dress and noting the general stink of unwashed skin and hair. "A bath." I snatched up the little tomcat who was just as filthy as I was. "And you're coming with me."