I swallowed. “Oh?”
“You will mend fences with Etri,” Mab said. “In the conflict that is coming, the svartalves are necessary allies. They are my armory, and thanks to your actions, they refuse to speak to me or my court, or to the allies I have chosen for the fight, much less arm any of us. That will not do. Fix it.”
“How the hell am I supposed to do that?” I asked her. “Etri is old-school. Thomas killed one of his closest henchmen. Even assuming Etri is willing to bargain, he’ll want a life in recompense.”
“Then provide it,” Mab said in a soft, sharply edged tone. “This matter falls upon you. Rectify the situation.”
“Or what?”
“There is no ‘or what.’ You will do it. This task is more necessary and needful than anything you are capable of imagining. If I must seize your mind and walk you like a puppet through negotiation and give you over to Etri’s service in repayment for the life-debt, I will do so.” She regarded me over the rims of her glasses, her eyes a poisonous shade of green. “Or some other life connected to yours.”
The dull void of emotions I felt thanks to my essential weariness vanished in a sudden boiling flash of rage.
“Did you,” I asked very quietly, “just threaten my daughter?”
“There would be a certain amount of justice in it,” Mab said. “Blood for blood.”
“You try it,” I said, “and I will empty Demonreach’s cells and give every single one of the things in it your address.”
Mab let out a low laugh. It was cold and it was cruel. “You would unleash a black tide upon humanity itself, should you do that.” She settled back into her own seat, relaxed and confident. “Do not assume you can predict the outcome of such an act. Far better for both of us and for tens of millions of your precious mortals that we work in tandem with one another.”
I ground my teeth. “Even if I wanted to pacify Etri,” I said, “I’d have no idea how to go about it.”
“I have great confidence in your base cunning and ingenuity,” Mab replied. “You will think of something. Or else.” She pushed her sunglasses back up on her nose. “That,” she added, “was a threat.”
“Okay,” I said. “So you want me to addict myself to the personification of heroin, and pull off a major diplomatic coup between supernatural nations at the same time.”
“Yes,” Mab said, her tone very, very faintly exasperated. “At any point did I stutter?”
“If you did, I might have missed it,” I said. “I wasn’t listening as closely as I usually do.”
Mab pressed her luscious lips together and shook her head. “I suggest, Sir Knight,” she said, “that you pull yourself together as quickly as possible. I know you suffered loss. But there is no time to waste upon your mourning.”
“It doesn’t work like that for mortals, Mab,” I said quietly. “It hurts until you’re done hurting. You heal as fast as you heal. I just need time.”
“You haven’t been exactly mortal in quite a while, my Knight,” Mab said in a low, firm tone. “There are too many lives at stake for you to fall to the ground weeping. And not even I can readily summon extra secondsfrom the void. Thereisno time. Get up and fight. Or I will find someone who can.”
The carriage passed into another deep, cool shadow, and when it came back out into the bloody sunset shafts of light again, I was alone.
God, I felt tired.
“Pick up the pace,” I growled at the Redcap.
He didn’t speak to me. But he nodded and flicked the reins, and the not-horse began to trot faster.
I closed my eyes and summoned images of my daughter to raise like a shield against nihilistic despair. Honestly, I wasn’t sure I cared enough about me to work all that hard to keep myself alive.
Maggie was a different story.
She needed her father.
How the hell was I going to handle this one?
Chapter
Four
Three days later, I’d finished my workout in the bare-essentials gym on the second floor of the castle, and Will and I were talking with the parents of the families currently staying with me—four couples and a harried single mother whose husband had gone missing during the fighting and hadn’t turned up. Two of the families had sick kids who weren’t getting better like they should have. The single mother was the one with a diabetic child. All of them were worried.
