Dame of Owls Read Online Free Page B

enough that they might even find a waypoint. This was good Spring territory, and there wasn’t enough time to hope for anything better. At least she could breathe easily again.
                  She could see that Chris was tired by the smudges under his eyes and the tight lines around his mouth, but he still had yet to flag or complain. Unwinding her makeshift bandage and discarding it among the bracken, Sid reached out and took Chris’s hand. It was very warm, and dwarfed hers as he clasped her palm.
                  “Keep hold of me,” she told him.
                  Chris nodded, and she wondered if he trusted her or was simply plotting again. She hoped not; she was on the edge of exhaustion herself.
                  With her free hand, Sid reached up and pulled a necklace out from underneath her shirt. The Owl was a simple charm made of silver, with chips of obsidian for its eyes. A plain enough declaration of her house, suitable for a knight in the field.
                  “By the authority of the lady of my house, Ruby of the House of Owls, I seek passage home.”
                  No one knew what pact the Queens had forged with the Thoroughfare’s keepers, but it had held for eons. Sid stepped forward, pulling Chris with her, and the world melted away.

Part II
                  Chris suffered a moment of gut-wrenching nausea, compounded by the feeling that his feet were treading on something not-quite-solid, before Sid tugged him back into the forest. Or, really, a forest. It was superficially alike to the one they’d left behind. There were trees. There was Sid, her fingers like ice in his hand.
                  There were no crickets. No owls. No breeze. Distilled silence, so thick it might have been dripping off the tree branches.
                  There was, at least, a moon, and moonlight casting silver highlights onto Sid’s black curls. Chris had believed her about the guy she’d shot, about the unicorn, about this place. He had not, until just now, really believed what she had to say about herself.
                  From the moment she’d walked into the bookstore she’d seemed so solid. Briefly kind of a dork, but the sort of woman who could look at a criminal record and not run screaming into the night. Chris didn’t pretend to be any kind of reformed bad boy. He’d never set out to be bad in the first place. Things had just sort of fallen into his lap, and without ambition or focus he’d rolled with the punches and the bad ideas. He could explain that, given a few minutes over coffee.
                  Sid looked like she had enough focus for a whole platoon. She was short, but she’d met his eyes without hesitating. And if her full lips and soft face hadn’t been enough to convince him to roll with her awful flirting, her pale green eyes would have done it. And her fine-boned hands, and her strength. Even in her jeans and hoodie she looked like a Fury, a dark Valkyrie. Fae.
                  Well.
                  She let go of Chris’s hand, and warmth started seeping back into his palm. She didn’t leave any blood behind.
                  “Are you feeling all right?” he asked.
                  She held up her hand to show him shiny, freshly scarred skin. “I can’t say I’m happy, but I’m whole. Now remember: no eating, no drinking. No screaming, it just attracts attention. Come on.”
                  As they walked, Chris could just barely see movement out of the corner of his eye. Something almost-human, but. Gray? Dark, somehow, and blurred. He recalled Sid’s instructions not to scream.
                  “What lives here?” He asked, hardly above a whisper.
                  “We call them the Spring and Autumn Courts. This is Spring’s land. They favor the Winter Court, stories