Work Text:
Tybalt was so going to have my ass for this, but in my defense, all I'd done was open a door. On a quest that should have been easy, and I had even made sure no enemy was behind the door, lurking: no magic scents, no blood, no sounds or movement. Enough times having an assassin lurk in back seats and behind doors had seen to that.
And yet, when I stepped through the door, there was a sickening weave and dip — then a disorienting sensation like a Tuatha portal — followed by an unfamiliar room and a very dead body. Nausea burbled up, and I swallowed. It had been a long time since the transition between the mortal world and Summerlands had done that to me.
Beside me, Quentin groaned theatrically. “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore,” he said.
“You’ve never been to Kansas,” I said automatically, even as I sniffed the air, and was promptly bowled over the unfamiliar scents.
“My mom’s from there,” Quentin protested, and then, “Toby!”
I staggered. Not the Summerlands. Dirt, humans, animals… The unfamiliar magics roiled over me, churning and acrid and too many at once to differentiate. And utterly wrong. Beyond that, I could smell blood, coming from the dead body. It threatened to knock me utterly on my ass. Quentin grabbed my arm, and I pinched my nose, halting the influx of information, and steadied myself.
“I have no idea where we are,” I finally said. “I think we’re still in the mortal world, though.”
But why the strange transition?
Also, there was still a dead body.
“Check the rest of the room,” I told Quentin.
I crouched next to the body. Whoever they had been in life, I wasn’t sure if they’d died a natural death. Blood had dried all over their temple and on the floor; their ears were rounded and human, and their facial features were soft and mortal. If the night-haunts had already come, they could have still been fae, but something felt… off.
I had a hard time believing that we’d happen to stumble over a mortal body after whatever — portal — had taken us from one locale to the next. I breathed in again: this time, the vibrant magical scent of heather smoke and cloudberries assaulted my nose. Tuatha? One of the Tuatha firstborn had some sort of burning heather signature – something I’d found out from the Luidaeg when Chelsea had started ripping open doors. Oberon help us, had we found an even more overpowered changeling than Chelsea had been?
Quentin moved through the room, peering at scrawled notes. “I can’t read these. They’re in a really weird language?”
“Describe weird.”
“Mostly uses our alphabet but — I don’t recognize it. It’s not English or French.”
I’d just dipped a finger into the blood pool and was about to tell Quentin to watch my back when the door burst open rather abruptly.
Well, crap.
Heretics.
Foreign heretics, with strange garments and stranger tongues.
The woman remained crouched over the body of the Court socialite when the guards arrived, blood on her fingers, one of which was halfway to her lips. Jordan’s lip curled in a sneer. Barbarian heretics. This was what the Rat’s tolerance would allow to fill their street, swarm like the vermin they proclaimed as their god.
“You’re under arrest,” the guard said, and the pale woman in her unseemly — trousers? squinted, eyes flashing to the body and then back to the guard. (Jordan did not know the guard’s name; it was unimportant — if only the Motherhood had full license to deal with these heretics! The guards would not be required. These blood-drinking barbarians would burn.)
She said something with a frown, words bearing a surface similarity with the language of Archenhold, but ultimately foreign and unintelligible — and crossed her arms.
When the cuffs came out, both took a step back — exchanged looks — then bolted, the guards yelling in pursuit.
They would be found. Murderers and heretics could not hide for long.