Page 8 of Kiss of Smoke

When the metal ladder leading out of the Undercity was near, I slowly allowed my consciousness to slide away from the golem, carefully disentangling myself from the connection. I wanted to leave no part of myself behind here.

By the time I was back in my body, aware of Gwyn pulling a sobbing, shaken Oriande out of the manhole, the golem had merged back into the Undercity walls, once more nothing than a mass of living roots.

I filled my lungs, blinking as my consciousness struggled to adapt from the primal senses of the plants to my normal mode of seeing. Small, dark spots played across my vision as I breathed in and out, looking at the pavement below my hands.

Several shoots had risen from the cracked asphalt around my fingers. I sucked out their energy and pulled it back into myself, refusing to waste even a drop of precious magic now for trees that would never be able to grow here.

“They said they needed my soul!” Oriande was crying, her voice distant. “They needed more souls!”

I made the effort to sit up and look at her, my limbs as heavy as bricks.

Her lovely face was marred with scratches, but she was more or less fine. I was too tired to even feel pleased by that.

“We have to go,” I said, and then Gwyn was helping me up, paying no mind to the crying reporter.

I leaned on him heavily as he helped me onto the bike. He touched my cheek gently, then turned to Oriande, who was in her cameraman’s arms and babbling a mile a minute.

“You need to follow us,” he told them. “The Left Hand will want a report from you.”

Oriande swallowed, her eyes wide and glazed in the floodlights, but she nodded stiffly. “We’ll be there. I…I need a moment to pull myself together.”

You’re telling me, I wanted to say, but I was too tired to form the words.

I wanted to be safely in Robin’s house when the inevitable exhaustion hit me like a sack of bricks. It had taken everything in me to create the golem and send it back to sleep.

At this point, I’d probably dug a mile past the bottom of the barrel. There really was nothing in me left to give.

Gwyn sat astride the bike in front of me, then jerked his head towards Thornwood. “We’re heading that way. We’ll fly low and you can follow.”

The cameraman threw open the back door of the van, practically throwing the broken camera in, but he was careful as he helped Oriande up into the back.

She winced as she moved, trying to preserve what was left of her ripped-up clothing without losing her dignity.

I felt for her. She looked like she’d taken a hard slap of reality to the face. Maybe she was used to always reporting on the fringes of things, untouched in the eye of the storm, rather than being a part of the spectacle herself.

But the Souls were utterly mad, grabbing a Gentry woman off the street like that. It was almost unthinkable…but after tonight, my definition of ‘unthinkable’ was going to need a serious overhaul.

The cameraman slammed the doors shut and booked it to the driver’s seat, starting the van with a roar and tearing around until he was behind us. I couldn’t help but notice that he gave the manhole cover a very wide berth.

“They’re ready.” I patted Gwyn, then gripped him tightly as he took off down the street, rising twenty feet above the chaos but still moving slowly enough for the TV crew to follow us.

Flying reporters and gawkers dove out of the way as Gwyn headed towards Thornwood.

From the look on the Hunter’s face, he wasn’t slowing down for anyone. The risk of being splattered across the rack of horns on his bike seemed to be a very real danger, judging from the speed with which Fae threw themselves aside.

They became a distant memory as we left Main Street and dropped lower, approaching the gates of Thornwood. Every reporter was clustered around the ruins of the palace.

The cat-like Fae who always manned the security booth was pale under his fine dusting of fur.

“What’s going on out there?” he asked, his hand trembling as he scanned my card. Even his whiskers were twitching with agitation.

“A clusterfuck,” Gwyn said shortly.

Oriande’s van rolled up behind us, and I pointed back at them with my thumb. “They’re with us. They need to speak with Robin Goodfellow.”

The van’s brilliant lights illuminated the Fae’s slit pupils. He blinked at them, then hit the button that made the gates slide open.

“Not arguing with that,” he muttered. “I don’t get paid enough for this.”

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