Page 4 of Kiss of Smoke

She placed the pistol on an overcrowded end table and came over, flicking on an overhead light.

“You can go fix my door while I look at your girlfriend,” she told Gwyn, giving him an acid look with a flick of her fingers. “And it’d better be as good as new by the time you’re done.”

Gwyn looked at the mangled door without a single hint of abashment, and Carabosse pointed to a tall cabinet in the corner. “Toolbox is over there. Good luck.”

I watched him ruefully open the cabinet and begin digging in a box as she reached under the table and pulled out a medical bag, drawing out the hated forceps.

“Wait!” I couldn’t sit here and watch her tweeze away at the debris in my cuts without a distraction—and it was going to kill me to sit here anyway while I knew Robin and Jack were out there combing the ruins in the dark. “Can we put the news on? Please?”

Carabosse fixed me with one of those looks that could stop a Gentry Fae cold in their tracks, but she sighed and crossed the room, turning on an ancient human television that crackled to life.

“I can’t pretend I wasn’t obsessively watching it before you kicked my door in,” she complained, adjusting several antennae until the static receded.

Oriande Snowdrop’s face immediately filled the screen, surrounded by scrolling bars of information that passed almost too quickly for my tired eyes to read. The ruins of the palace were a horrific sight behind her, crawling with Garda like ants on a hill.

“Better now?” Carabosse asked acerbically, then turned back to the tweezers. “What did you do tonight, go crawling through hedges?”

There was a sting of pain, and she pulled a thorn out of my calf.

Robin had missed the damage under the long skirts, but with the dress torn to around my knees, I realized my feet and calves had taken a similar battering as my arms. It wasn’t surprising in the least, considering I felt like I’d been hit by a train instead of a Hunter.

“Something like that,” I said absently, my eyes glued to the television. There was no sign of either fixer so far, just Oriande reporting on the mess, her eyes frantic behind her professional demeanor.

To my right, Gwyn swore under his breath as he tried to fit the buckling door back into place.

Carabosse opened her mouth to say something snide, but I raised a hand, carefully lowering myself to the floor and connecting with the earth.

It even made me feel a little better to connect to my magic, temporarily dispersing my pain into the ground and trees as I coaxed the inert wood of the door to grow roots that wrapped themselves in the hinges, pulling the door upright out of Gwyn’s hands.

The little roots laced over the buckled wood in a latticework pattern, and then tightened, holding it in place. They were small enough to fit as neatly as the original hinges.

Gwyn and Carabosse were both quiet for a moment.

“Lovely work,” the human healer finally said, then pointed to the table. “Now sit. You’re not supposed to be working your magic while I’m picking debris out of your legs.”

“Yes, ma’am.” I inched back onto the table, and Gwyn came over to kiss my cheek.

“I’m going to go upstairs and check on your roommates,” he told me. “I haven’t heard anything from up there yet. I’ll also make sure that no…no one is in your apartment waiting for you.”

I met his eyes gravely. I was quite sure he’d meant to say ‘no humans’, which would’ve been quite offensive to the woman who was preventing me from dying of slow blood loss right now. “I promise I’ll stay right here.”

“That’s my girl,” he whispered, tucking a curl behind my ear, then he disappeared through the door that opened for him.

2

A silence fellbetween me and Carabosse as she tweezed several more thorns from my leg, dropping them into a metal cup. They hit the bottom with tiny thuds, rattling around in there.

Oriande’s faint, tinny voice filled the apartment. “—no sign of either Queen Titania or her heir so far, but several survivors have been recovered from the wreckage—”

My chest felt tight, iron bands squeezing around me.

I couldn’t fathom the chaos if both Titania and Tanaquill had been killed. But there was a small, secret part of me that was overjoyed that this was Darkest Night—that my father Noctifer had been in Annwyn, far away from the carnage.

If Stellifer had been up here, surely he had felt the coming calamity and had moved the queen and princess to a safe location.

“They announced a lockdown on TV,” Carabosse said suddenly, right as a sharp twinge of pain ran up my calf. She extracted a rather large, nasty-looking thorn and dropped it in the cup. “Hence the pistol. I won’t lie, I was afraid you were a group of Fae looking to go hunting tonight.”

I managed a half-smile. “We would stop them from coming for you.”

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