May and Madden were waiting for us there. Madden was back in his seemingly-human form. I couldn’t decide whether that was a good sign. May elbowed Madden as we approached, and he swung his head around to face us.
“Hey,” said May, once we were close enough that she wouldn’t need to shout. “Did you find anything?”
“Not enough,” I said. “You?”
“There’s a second trail,” said Madden. He rubbed the back of his neck with one hand. “It’s not . . . it’s not very strong. I don’t track,” he glanced around, and lowered his voice before continuing, “humans that well. They use such strongly scented soap that they all wind up smelling basically the same unless I can get a good starting whiff to work from. But I found it.”
“Okay.” I looked back and forth between them. “What are we waiting for?”
“It’s better if you see,” said May. “Come on.” She started walking. I stared at the back of her head, confused. Then I followed her. I couldn’t think of anything else to do.
We walked down Durant to a smaller, residential street and turned, going another block or so before we turned again. The houses grew smaller and deeper set into their gardens as we walked, the trappings of suburbia melting into a wall of green. I hurried to catch up to May, falling into step beside her.
“What aren’t you telling me?” I asked.
She shook her head. “We’re almost there.”
“Dammit, May—”
“I need to know what you see, and I need to know you’re not just repeating what I told you would be there.” May gave me a pained sidelong glance. “Believe me, I’m not thrilled about this either, all right? Please. I need you to be patient. Can you be patient, just for a few more minutes?”
I took a deep breath, forcing myself to calm. “A few more, but that’s it,” I said.
“That’s all I’m asking. Was Jocelyn there?”
“Gone. She left a note. I think she had something to do with Gillian’s disappearance. But I still don’t think the sachets were her doing. There wasn’t any trace of them in her things, only Gillian’s, and no one in their right mind fills their own living space with poison.”
“Maybe.” May stopped so abruptly that I almost tripped in my haste to do the same. She waved a hand, indicating the house in front of us. “What do you see?”
I turned and saw . . . a house. It was small and plain, with smooth plaster walls and a half-roofed porch overhung by a vast magnolia tree that didn’t seem to care how far out of its own climate it was. There was a huge picture window—and that was where the problems began. When I looked at the window directly, it was smooth and perfect. But out of the corner of my eye, it was a cobwebby mass of cracks, all of them radiating out from a hole the size of a fist. I blinked. The window was intact once more.
“What the—?”
“So you see something wrong?”
I eyed May. “Don’t you?”
“I can’t make it past the bayberry bushes.” She pointed to a pair of ornamental shrubs halfway up the path. “I just stop and forget what I’m doing. Madden can’t even get that far.”
“Quentin?” I turned to my squire. “What do you see?”
“It’s a house,” he said. He sounded frustrated and unsettled. Taking a half-step back, he said, “I don’t like it. Is this where we’re supposed to be? I don’t like it.”
I focused more fully on the house. This wasn’t a normal illusion: there was no glitter in the air, no place where the normal became abnormal, or vice-versa. It was just . . . wrong, subtly so, with little flickers at the corner of my eye revealing the edges of the problem, but not the problem itself.
“Did the trail lead here?” I asked.
“It does,” said Madden.
“Does it go inside?”
“I think so.” He grimaced. “I can’t go inside. I try, and it doesn’t happen. So maybe it’s yes and maybe it’s no, but I think so.”
“Right,” I said, and started down the narrow pathway toward the house.
I had barely reached the bayberry bushes when an invisible force field started pushing me back. It was like I was walking into a wall of cling film somehow pulled tight across the universe itself, refusing to let me go any farther.
“I think not,” I hissed. Pulling the knife from my belt, I ran it across my opposing palm. Pain flared up, sharp and reassuring and familiar in a way that made me think maybe everything was going to be all right. I raised my hand and slapped it against the resistance in the air, forcing my way forward—and to my profound relief, the invisible force yielded, allowing me to take one step, two steps, three steps past the line of the bayberries.
The resistance shattered, and suddenly I could see the house for what it really was: a decrepit, fire-gutted husk. The picture window was more void than glass, leaving shards to glitter across the ash-blackened porch. The front door was still there, but it was standing ajar, held on by a single hinge. I took another step forward, testing to be sure nothing would stop me, and turned to look back at the others.
They were standing where I had left them. Quentin’s hand had gone to his hip, where I had no doubt he was carrying a concealed weapon of some kind. May looked mildly alarmed, and had her hand on Madden’s shoulder, keeping him where he was. Madden . . .
Madden was growling, canine-style, his lips drawn back from his teeth in what would probably have been a terrifying display if not for the human disguise he wore. As it stood, the sight was strange.
“Toby, if you’re there, we would really appreciate it if you would say something,” called May. Her voice was shaking.
“I’m here. Can you hear me?”
May relaxed. Quentin’s hand dropped away from his hip. Madden kept growling.
“We can hear you,” May said. “What the hell?”
“There’s some kind of repulsion charm mixed with an illusion covering this place up.” I took a step back toward the bayberry bushes and paused. “I had to bleed to get through, but maybe I’ve weakened it. Can you try to come here?”
“Yes,” said May and Quentin, in unison. They looked at each other.
“Yes,” May repeated, with more force. Quentin looked like he was going to protest. She raised a hand to stop him. “I’m functionally unkillable, remember? You, however, are not, and the last thing we need right now is to add your pissed-off parents to the mix. So I don’t actually care if you think it’s your duty as her squire to help her with whatever the hell is going on here. I’m going to take the hit. Got me?”
Quentin wilted. “Got you,” he said, sounding every inch the sullen teenager.
“Good,” said May, and started down the path toward me. She made it as far as the bayberry bushes before she stopped dead, her feet suddenly seeming rooted to the stone. “Okay. I can’t go any farther.”
“Stick out your hand.”
She did. I reached out and grabbed it, yanking her toward me as hard as I could. Her feet remained rooted in place. She cried out, high and pained. I let go before one of us fell.
May took a step back, rubbing her injured wrist with the opposing hand. “Unless you want to tear down the entire spell, we’re not getting me through.”
I looked at the burnt-out husk of the house behind me. “There’s no way,” I said. “This place has been on fire, the window’s broken—there’s just no way. It would attract way too much attention if I pulled the enchantment down.”
“So don’t,” said Quentin. “Just . . . please be careful. If we have to wait out here, we will, but I don’t want you getting hurt.”
The shell was sealed with blood magic. Of everyone now waiting on the path, Quentin was probably the only one with half a chance of getting through it if he really tried. He didn’t heal like I did. I didn’t want him cutting himself if there was any other option available. I’d been able to teach him so much about
being a good knight and more importantly, about surviving. I couldn’t teach him how deep it was safe to drive the knife because, for me, there had never been a limit.
“I’ll be careful,” I said. “I have my phone. If the police show up to hurry you along, call me, and I’ll come to wherever you are.” Not out of the question. The police in Berkeley could be overenthusiastic about keeping the residential neighborhoods free of what they considered to be “riffraff.”
“So call me,” said Quentin.
I blinked. “What?”
“Right now. Call me.”
It made sense. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and selected his number, dialing. His phone began to ring almost immediately. He produced it, answered, and raised it to his ear.
“You hear me?” he asked.
“Twice,” I said, into my own phone. His shoulders relaxed. “I’m going in now. Wish me luck.”
“Open roads,” he said, and hung up.
There was nothing more for us to do outside. Turning on my heel, I walked away from my friends and toward the waiting house.
The closer I got, the more superficial the damage appeared. The fire had been bad enough to blacken the paint and warp the remaining glass in the window panes, but it didn’t seem to have done much in the way of structural damage. I felt a pang of déjà vu as I stepped onto a porch I wasn’t sure would hold me for the second time in a day. This one was brick and plaster, not rotting wood, and it didn’t so much as shift beneath my feet.
A gentle push moved the door out of my way and I was inside, walking into a charred maze of damaged furniture and fallen plaster. The roof seemed to have mostly held, but the ceiling had partially collapsed, revealing beams and insulation. If not for the spell keeping intruders of all species out, there would have been raccoons living up there, taking advantage of the shelter from the weather and the lack of human occupants.
Moving into the center of the room, I took a shallow breath to acquaint myself with the scents of fire damage and mildew, filing them away as inconsequential elements of the atmosphere. Then, bracing myself, I inhaled as deeply as I could, sifting through every scrap of scent, looking for something—anything—that would tell me who had spun these spells, who had brought Gillian to this place. Anything.
The air seemed to chill. No, not really: it wasn’t getting colder, but it smelled like it was colder, like the winter wind rolling across the surface of the sea. The scent of rowan wood was interlaced with that chill, the one feeding into the other, the tree blighted by a winter that would never, could never end. I gasped, and the air it brought into my lungs intensified both scents, until I was no longer sure I could keep my balance, until the urge to drop to my knees and weep was so strong that I could barely stand it.
“No,” I said to the empty room. It was too small to carry an echo, but I felt like it should have, like it should bounce my voice back to me, magnify it, make it big enough to fill the world. “No, this isn’t possible.”
But when I breathed in again, the scent remained unchanged. Cold, and rowan, and the sea. It wasn’t possible. It couldn’t be possible. It was.
I pulled out my phone. Walther picked up on the second ring.
“Hello?”
“Walther, does your sister have a phone?”
There was a long pause as he processed that question. Finally, he said, “Yes, Marlis has a phone. Also, hi. Also, what does my sister have to do with anything?”
“I need you to call her. I need you to ask her whether your family still has their sleepers safely imprisoned.”
“Why are you—”
“Do it.” I hung up and stuffed the phone back into my pocket before turning, slowly, to look at the room around me. I didn’t want to be here. I didn’t want to be doing this, didn’t want to be searching this place like this was an ordinary case on an ordinary day. I wanted to scream. I wanted to run. I wanted my daughter back, and I wanted none of this to be happening, and I couldn’t have any of the things I wanted. Maybe I never could.
Before Arden took the throne in the Mists, before I learned that queens could be kind—self-interested, yes, but still kind—a woman without a name had called herself our queen, had worn the crown and wielded her power like a cudgel, using it to crush anyone who would oppose her. She had been a puppet with no real claim to the position she held, put in place by Eira Rosynhwyr after the death of King Gilad. She was a mixed-blood, Siren and Sea Wight and Banshee all blended together in a soup so confusing and intoxicating that no one had asked how a Tuatha de Dannan king could have been her father until it had been too late to take the title away from her with anything short of a war.
Everyone’s magic is unique. No two people have the exact same mixture of scents, the exact same balance between them. That’s how I can use it as a way to track down the source and caster of a spell. Like blood, magic is unique. I had smelled this magic before. It belonged to the false Queen of the Mists.
And that wasn’t possible, because she was elf-shot and sleeping away a century in the Kingdom of Silences. Her former lover, Rhys, had been their pretender king, and I had helped to depose him, too, leaving them both to spend a hundred years in an enchanted slumber where they couldn’t hurt anyone.
Of course, I had also helped Walther develop a treatment for elf-shot. If she was free, if she had somehow woken up and escaped, I had no one to blame but myself.
I took a shaky breath, forcing myself to calm down, and breathed in again, finding the source of the scent. Holding it firmly in my mind, I followed it deeper into the house, stepping over the worst of the charred places, passing the burnt-out bathroom and what might have been a nursery once, going by the streaky pastel colors that still remained on the walls.
At the back of the house, almost untouched by the flames, was the master bedroom. It was still fully furnished. Mold had blossomed on the bedclothes and the bookshelves, painting them in a dozen soft shades of green. I barely noticed. I was too busy staring at the bed, struggling to breathe through the adrenaline and fear. It felt like my heart had come loose and was ricocheting around inside my body, never quite finding its rhythm.
Gillian was lying in the middle of the bed, sound asleep.
TEN
SHE LOOKED PEACEFUL, her hands crossed over her chest and her legs stretched out so that her sneaker-clad toes pointed toward the far wall. We could have been in her bedroom or at the residence hall, someplace where she had every reason to lie down for a nap without concern that something would happen. She was dressed in blue jeans and another UC Berkeley sweatshirt, and I was taking a step toward her, hand outstretched, when my phone rang loudly enough to jar me out of my brief fugue.
I stopped where I was and pulled the phone from my pocket, checking the display. Walther. With another longing glance at my little girl, I swiped my thumb across the screen and raised the phone to my ear. “What?”
“Marlis says she’s still there. She wanted to know why I was asking. I told her I didn’t know, but that’s not going to hold my sister long. You know how paranoid they are in Silences. They have good reason to be, but—”
“Whatever they have up there, it’s not the false Queen. She was here. She’s the one who took Gillian.” Gillian, my Gillian, was breathing easily, not in any visible distress. She was asleep, yes, but it couldn’t be elf-shot, or she would have been dead before I reached her. Whatever this was, it would be something reversible, something temporary. I could have her up and back home with her parents before dinner. Maybe saving her twice would be enough to make them let me in. Maybe they’d set a place for me.
They wouldn’t. But oh, it was nice to dream.
“How are you . . .” Walther paused, his breath catching loudly enough to carry through the phone. “Her magic. You found her magic. Did you find . . . ?”
“Gillian’s right here, Walther. She’s asleep. She’s so beautiful, and she’s ri
ght here.”
There were no visible wounds on Gillian’s hands or face. She could have just been taking a strangely peaceful nap in a deserted, fire-devastated house. Even her hair was relaxed, falling in perfect waves across the mold-speckled pillow. Her skin was a few shades darker than mine, a gift from her Italian father, but if she opened her eyes, they would be foggy blue, like mine had been when I pretended to be human, like my own father’s eyes. He lived on in the granddaughter he’d never known, and if there was anything that kept me from mourning the loss of my human blood, it was the fact that it still flowed in her veins. I had given up the greater part of my own mortality in part so that when the time came, I would be able to preserve hers.
I hadn’t seen her in so long, but I knew her. I would always know her. She was my child, she was mine, and I couldn’t imagine anything more beautiful.
“October . . .” Walther hesitated. “Is anyone with you? I’m concerned.”
I couldn’t imagine what there was for him to be concerned about. “There was some sort of repulsion spell outside the house. I got through by bleeding. The others can’t bleed the way I can.” I laughed unsteadily. “Finally, that’s a useful skill.”
“So you’re alone with your daughter right now?”
“Yes. I should wake her up. Her father is so worried about her.” Cliff seemed like a small concern at the moment. More than anything, I wanted to see Gillian open her eyes and smile at me. She hadn’t smiled for me in so long, not since she was so small, and I wanted to know what it felt like to have my adult child see me. I needed to know.
“Toby, hang on. Doesn’t this seem a little easy?”
No. Nothing about this day had been easy. I wanted to hang up. But this was Walther, and he’d been a good ally to me; he was the reason so many of the people I loved were awake, not dreaming their lives away in some forgotten tower. I forced myself to keep the phone against my ear as I said, “I don’t think so.”
Night and Silence (October Daye) Page 16
