FOUR

THE DRIVE TO BERKELEY was quick. It would have been quicker, but Arden had insisted on speaking to me directly after May called and woke her, and since I was the one driving, we’d been forced to pull off to the side of the road. Quentin’s don’t-look-here spell would keep the human police from noticing and potentially ticketing me, but I didn’t trust myself to carry on a conversation and steer the car at the same time.

At least the delay had been profitable. We pulled into the on-campus parking lot to find Madden waiting for us, his lanky frame propped casually against a pay station. He was wearing the glittering outline of a human disguise that simultaneously bleached and darkened his normally red-and-white hair to an even shade of blond. It had also dialed his canine-golden eyes down to a more human-normal brown, but there was no mistaking his broad shoulders, or the way he occasionally sniffed the air, checking for signs of our arrival.

Despite everything that was happening, it was hard not to smile at the sight of him. Madden had the kind of energy that could make things seem less hopeless, even when they shouldn’t have been.

Quentin’s spellwork was good enough that Madden couldn’t see the car, but he saw us when we emerged and came bounding over to present me with a parking slip. “Here,” he said. “Prepaid for the whole day. Arden didn’t want you to worry.”

“That’s very kind of you,” I said, trying to ignore the way my heart sank.

When I’d asked for the loan of Arden’s seneschal, I hadn’t been thinking in terms of debts incurred or fealties observed. I’d just been looking for a bloodhound. Trouble was, Madden worked for the Queen, and things weren’t that simple. Arden hadn’t been on the throne long enough to have fully internalized the rules of royalty, but she was catching on fast, and something as small as accepting a parking pass could have repercussions for me later. Like, say, the next time she wanted to talk about shifting my fealty from Duke Sylvester Torquill of Shadowed Hills directly to her.

“Why didn’t you call your liege when you needed help?” was a reasonable question, but the answer was big and complicated and frustrating. The last time I’d asked Sylvester for help, he’d released his elf-shot brother, Simon, into my custody so I could find my missing sister, who happened to be Simon’s daughter. It had been a gesture of infinite trust, since Sylvester had good reasons—quite a few of them—to want Simon asleep and suffering for as long as possible. And I’d turned right around and screwed it up by allowing Simon to escape, with his memories twisted by the loss of all the gains he’d made in the days since he’d given up villainy in favor of redemption.

Sylvester loved me as a daughter. He always had. He trusted my skills as a knight; had been, in fact, the first person to put that sort of faith in me. And I had rewarded his faith, over and over again. It was just that sometimes it . . . well, it took a while. I didn’t feel like I could ask him for another favor until I’d managed to put my life back together to the point where I could go after Simon, return what had been taken from him, and fix things. Sweet Oberon, there had to be a way for me to fix things. I wasn’t going to let down the man who’d never given up on me.

At the same time, I couldn’t blame Arden for wanting to recruit me. She was building a household intended to control a kingdom, and she needed the best people she could get. I just needed her to accept that I was never going to be among them.

Madden watched as I placed the parking slip on the dashboard, watched as May and Quentin got out of the car, both of them sparkling with the soft haze of their own human disguises. May had tweaked hers to make her look less like my twin sister and more like a distant relative, or maybe just a person with one of those faces, frequently mistaken for someone else. Quentin fit right into the collegiate setting: the right age, the right level of awkward formality, even the right footwear. If we needed someone to talk to students without being flagged as an investigator, the job would be his. Which left . . .

“All right, Madden, you’re here to help us follow Gillian’s trail,” I said. “Can you do that in your current shape, or do you need to be on four legs?”

“Four legs work best for something like this, and I can get in anywhere I need to be, but I don’t know what your daughter smells like,” he said. He paused before adding uncomfortably, “Before Ardy asked me to come here, I didn’t realize you had a daughter.”

“She’s human.”

He frowned, opening his mouth like he was going to ask a question. Then he caught himself and shook his head. “It’s none of my business. Do you have anything of hers?”

“Not yet, but we can get something when we visit her dorm,” I said. “I’d still like you to be able to pick up on any trails that might be around there.”

Madden looked at me carefully. “Do you think one of us did this? You said she was human.”

How to explain my family, my relationship with my daughter, without wasting time I no longer felt we had to spare? There wasn’t an easy way to do it. I shook my head.

“She wasn’t always entirely human, and when she was very young, people knew she was mine,” I said. “She’s been taken before by people who wanted to hurt me. It could happen again.” Last time, it had been Rayseline Torquill.

I went cold.

Raysel was asleep; she hadn’t done this. But before she had kidnapped my daughter, she’d been working with Oleander de Merelands as part of a complicated plan to kill her parents and convince me that I was the one responsible. Oleander—who was dead now, and the world would forgive me if I wasn’t losing any sleep over that—had been cruel, and ruthless, and willing to do whatever it took to achieve her goals.

She had also been Simon Torquill’s lover.

Simon, who knew I had a child. Simon, whose own fall from grace had begun with the loss of his daughter, who he believed was still missing. Losing his way home had stripped all knowledge of August’s return from his mind, since knowing she was safe would have given him too much to hold onto. Simon, who knew that the best way to hurt a parent was through their children.

But even when he’d been so deeply embroiled in his villainy that he’d been willing to attack his own family, he’d done his best to make sure none of those attacks would be fatal ones. Even when he’d transformed me into a fish, he’d done it to save me from the far worse fate that his mistress had intended for me. I believed he would lie, and cheat, and kill to get what he wanted. I also believed that he still loved my mother. He wouldn’t hurt her grandchild.

Unfortunately, Simon wasn’t the only one who knew Gillian existed. Anyone who’d been in or around the false Queen’s Court before my disappearance could easily have met her.

“Too many people know about her,” I concluded, shaking the chill away and focusing on Madden. “Can you shift before we go in? Having a dog with us from the start will be less unusual than suddenly acquiring one.”

“Especially if you’re willing to wear a vest,” said May.

“Sure,” said Madden, and stepped away, moving into the shadow of the car. It was close enough to the wall that no one could have easily seen him, even if his outline hadn’t blurred and melted as soon as he was behind cover. When he emerged, it was on four legs, with a plumed tail waving wildly behind him. The illusions he’d been using to look human were still intact, as transformed as the rest of him: instead of projecting a genial, ordinary man, they projected a genial, ordinary dog, a Golden Retriever that was maybe a little large for the breed, but nothing to attract any real attention.

“May?” I asked.

“On it.” She removed a pair of hair ties from her wrist and pulled a scarf out of her pocket, walking over to kneel in front of Madden. With her free hand, she scooped a few pine needles and some shards of bark off the pavement, only hesitating for a second before she grabbed a broken chunk of a green glass bottle.

“Was a farmer had a dog, and Bingo was his name-o,” she chanted, beginning to weave the pine needles into a chain connected to the hair ties at either end. “B-I-N-G-O, and Bingo was his name-o.” She wrapped the scarf around the glass and chain, tapped it twice, and shook the whole thing free. It crackled and stretched as it moved, until she was holding a long leather leash attached to a collar from which the appropriate tags jingled. That explained the glass: nothing better for faking metal.

The scarf had become a black vest with “working dog” stitched on the sides, and a helpful pictogram advising people not to pet. Madden stood patiently while May put the vest on him, although he flattened his ears in displeasure when she fastened the collar around his neck.

“It’s still braided pine needles and bark,” she said, holding the leash as she straightened. “If you pull too hard, it’ll break. Keep that in mind and try not to pull unless you’re trying to get away.”

Madden made a noise of acknowledgment. I rocked onto my heels, vibrating with the tension of wanting to get this over with, wanting to get this done.

“Come on,” I said. “This way.”

Knowing Walther and Cassandra—and growing up in the Bay Area—means I’ve spent enough time on the UC Berkeley campus to be familiar with its general layout, if not with all the little details I would have learned if I’d been a student or a full-time resident of one of its charming captive creeks. There are fae who live on campus, the wilder kind who swear fealty to no liege lord and mostly want to be left alone. I made a mental note to seek some of them out and ask whether they’d seen anything. It was unlikely. “Unlikely” has never been a good enough excuse to leave an avenue unexplored.

We walked from the parking lot lengthwise across the main school, passing groups of students, tables asking us to sign petitions or join clubs, and other people who looked like they were just passing through, taking advantage of the clean, safe, car-free passageway provided by the campus. It was strange seeing all this by the light of day. Most of the time, if I was in Berkeley, it was dark, and there were few people around.

Some of the students—not all, not even most, but enough to be noticeable—walked ringed in the glitter of their own human disguises. They nodded at us as we passed, but they didn’t do anything to draw attention from mortal eyes. UC Berkeley, like Golden Gate Park, is neutral territory, claimed by none of the two-penny nobles or ravenous monarchs who divide and subdivide the Bay Area. Education is for everyone, royal or radical or in-between.

Quentin looked around with open curiosity as we walked, drinking everything in. I nudged him with my elbow. He jumped, glancing guiltily at me.

“You could enroll, you know,” I said. “I’m sure April would be happy to fake whatever paperwork you needed.” April O’Leary is a friend of ours, a cyber-Dryad whose command of computer systems means she can make almost anything real, at least on paper. When it comes to false IDs or digital paper trails, she’s the girl to see.

Besides, she owes me. Her mother, January, had been dead, and now she wasn’t, thanks to my willingness to help them out. If Quentin asked for something as simple as a high school transcript and a valid mortal ID, April wouldn’t hesitate to help.

“Maybe,” he said uncomfortably. “I have a lot to do. I don’t know if it would be a good idea for me to take that kind of time.”

“Think about it.” As Crown Prince of the Westlands, Quentin was expected to learn as much as possible about the continent he’s eventually going to rule. Going to college would certainly be an educational experience. His parents might not like what it taught him, but hey, his parents probably didn’t like most of what he was learning from me, and they hadn’t taken him back to Toronto.

We reached the edge of the campus, where it spilled into the tree-lined avenues of the city itself. Small neighborhood stores warred for space among the satellite campus buildings and the dorms. We kept walking.

According to Cliff’s text, Gillian was in off-campus housing, not a dorm but not one of the sororities either. A residence building rented by a coalition of students, probably from an alumnus or one of the satellite schools. It gave them a place to live without forcing them to share space with as many people as they would have encountered in a proper dormitory.

The trade-off was worse security and more isolation—good when it came to privacy, bad when it came to anyone seeing what happened when, say, the whole place was vandalized. Madden whined, scenting trouble a beat before we came around a bend in the sidewalk and saw the stately old Victorian house with the caution tape around the outside of the yard and the police cars parked along the sidewalk. Their lights were off, and their sirens were no longer screaming, but that didn’t matter. The sight of them was enough to knock the breath out of my body and leave my skin feeling suddenly too tight. May put a hand on my arm, supposedly to steady me, but really to steady us both.

This was a crime scene. A crime had been committed here. A crime that had involved my daughter, my child, who was now missing.

I hit the base of the driveway and kept walking, faster all the time, until it felt like I was barely on the slow side of breaking into a run. A man on the porch saw us coming and moved, presumably to tell me I couldn’t be here.

Like hell I couldn’t. I grabbed a 7-11 receipt from my pocket and held it up, chanting, “The owl and the pussycat went to sea in a beautiful pea-green boat.”

The scent of cut grass and copper lanced through the air, sharp and bloody, accompanied by a bolt of pain behind my temples. It passed quickly, but I took it for the warning it was. I hadn’t slept, I hadn’t eaten, and flower magic isn’t my strong suit. There’s nothing of Titania in my bloodline, and illusions come through her. I can do blood magic until I run out of blood, but flower magic wears on me fast and heavy.

The man’s eyes became unfocused as my spell slammed into him. He looked at the receipt, not seeing it yet, waiting for me to tell him what it was.

“October Daye, private investigator,” I said, not bothering to name the people with me. The spell would cover them as well, but it was better if I didn’t try to define more than I had to. Magic works best when it’s allowed to be a little fluid, to fit into the cracks in the world. “I’m here about the disappearance of Gillian Marks.”

The vagueness fled the man’s face, replaced by a vague distaste. “Ah,” he said. “Our little runaway. Her father called you?”

In a manner of speaking. “Yes.”

“Her room is on the second floor.”

He was being more accommodating than I had any right to expect. Either my spell had hit him substantially harder than anticipated, or Cliff had already managed to piss off the entire investigative team. After the scene he’d made back at the house, I honestly wasn’t sure which seemed more likely. Maybe both.

“Appreciated,” I said, and stepped around him, the rest of the group following at my heels. Madden kept his nose pressed to the ground, sniffing his way through the house. Even without context for the scents, he’d be able to find and follow them later.

Speaking of scents . . . halfway up the stairs, out of sight of the men downstairs and whoever might be waiting upstairs, I stopped, closed my eyes, and breathed in deeply, looking for traces of magic. Then I coughed, catching myself against the wall with one hand before I could topple over.

When I opened my eyes, all three of my friends were looking at me with open concern. Quentin spoke first.

“What the hell?” he asked.

I shook my head. “I should have realized—we’re on a college campus.”

May and Madden frowned, confused. Once again Quentin, bless him, figured it out right away. His eyes widened.

“Oh,” he said. “The fairy brides.”

I nodded.

Going to school—high school, college, even elementary school, although that’s more likely to be as a librarian or preschool teacher than as a student—is one of the classic ways for purebloods to figure out what’s changed in the human world while they were spending a century in quiet contemplation as a linden tree. It’s an environment where people are supposed to be a little culturally “off,” a little outside of the norm. People go to college to reinvent themselves. For the fae, that can sometimes be literal. The term for that kind of exposure to the mortal world is “playing fairy bride,” regardless of the genders of the people involved. I’d been a fairy bride when I was with Cliff. Quentin had been a fairy bride when he was attending a mortal high school.

Based on the layers upon layers of old and faded magic lingering in this stairwell, Berkeley had enough fairy brides to buy out a David’s Bridal and still need a good source of silver slippers. Every imaginable scent seemed to have been dropped here at one point or another—and since this was a women’s residence hall, those scents were mixed with a healthy quantity of mortal perfume, body spray, and deodorant. It was like being assaulted by a farmer’s market and a Macy’s makeup counter at the same time.

“Do you smell oranges?” asked May tightly.

I knew what she meant immediately. Simon Torquill—our most likely suspect—smelled of smoke and rotten oranges. At least he did now. When he’d been a better man, acting for himself and the good of his family rather than at the command of Evening Winterrose, his magic had smelled like smoke and mulled apple cider. It was a much more pleasant combination. I breathed in again, more shallowly this time, before shaking my head.

“Yes and no,” I said. “Someone around here likes orange blossom essential oil, but there’s no magic in it, and it doesn’t match Simon. He wasn’t here.”

That didn’t mean he wasn’t responsible, only that he had another way in, or had hired someone to do his dirty work for him. If he had come under cover of darkness, using a charm he hadn’t crafted to hide himself, he could have been in and out without leaving a single trace of his magic behind.

I hated to be so paranoid. I didn’t see where I had another choice.

“For magic, I’ve got . . . pine pitch, maple syrup, parsley, some kind of apple blossom, cardamom, and cinnamon. A lot of cinnamon. Nothing clear enough to point to a specific person.” I started walking again, swallowing the urge to sneeze.

Some of the scents were almost familiar, although none were complete enough for me to identify. I had probably encountered their owners in social situations, at Shadowed Hills or in Arden’s court or even back in the halls of Home. Not all of Devin’s kids had been magically weak, and it wasn’t unthinkable that some of them could throw a spell far enough to leave a trail behind. But they were tangled and layered on top of each other, and in the absence of anything that I could tie to Simon, I didn’t have a trail to follow. It was better, for the moment, to keep moving.

Almost all the doors at the top of the stairs were closed. The one second from the end stood open, revealing an unmade bed with a girl in a UC Berkeley sweatshirt sitting atop it, head in her hands. There were no police in sight. I spared a moment to wonder where they had all gone before stepping forward and rapping lightly on the doorframe, trying not to sound too aggressive. The last thing I wanted to do was startle the poor kid.

“Excuse me,” I said. “Is this Gillian’s room?”

The girl gasped, jerking her head out of her hands and sitting bolt upright. Her hair was purple, clearly dyed if the brown roots were anything to go by, and her skin was pale, save for the hectic blotches of sunburn across her nose and cheeks. Either she was very fond of using glitter gel to accent her eye makeup, or she was wearing fairy ointment. The latter was confirmed when her eyes flicked to Madden and she gasped again, scrambling to her feet.

“Are you—I mean, is this—are you her?” she squeaked.

I lifted an eyebrow. “Right pronoun, at least for me, but I need more than that to answer one way or the other. Is this Gillian Marks’ room?”

“Yes,” said the girl. She was still staring at me like she thought there was a good chance I might decide to eat her. Not my companions, although she kept giving Madden little sidelong glances: just me. “You’re really her. You’re Gillian’s mother.”

Oh. “Yes,” I said. “Are you her roommate?”

To my shock and dismay, the girl dropped to one knee like she was getting ready to swear fealty in some medieval court. May, who had to share at least some percentage of that dismay, gaped at her. Quentin, who was more accustomed to people bowing to him, snickered.

The girl raised her head. “My name is Jocelyn Lewis, and I am yours to command,” she said solemnly.

“Uh,” I said. “Or not. I don’t really need any vassals today. What I need is for you to stand up and tell me what happened here.”

“When she said her birth mother’s name was October, I thought she had to be pulling my leg, but then she said she’d dodged a bullet by taking her father’s last name, and I realized she meant you, she was your daughter, the only child of a hero of the realm, and she somehow chose human, you let her choose human, you hid her away so she could live her life even though she didn’t want to be immortal.” Jocelyn continued staring at me, starry-eyed. “I never knew a hero could be so good.”

“You have fans,” said Quentin, a note of malicious glee in his tone. “You have fans who keep track of what you’re doing, and some of them share a room with your daughter.”

“Shut up,” I said. “This isn’t the time.”

He sobered immediately, regret sweeping the glee away. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right. I . . . it’s fine.” We were all running on not enough sleep and way too much adrenaline. Jokes and prodding at each other was how we stayed sane. Usually. Right now, in this strange place with this strange woman—this strange girl, and sweet Oberon, I had never been that young—kneeling in front of me, I just wanted to get things done. “Please, can you get up? I need answers, and this isn’t helping.”

“I am so sorry.” Jocelyn finally got to her feet and sat back on the bed, eyes huge within their surrounding rings of fairy ointment. “I just never expected to see you in person. You’re a legend.”

This was getting more uncomfortable by the second, and it wasn’t helping me find my daughter. “Were you here last night? Do you know what happened? Anything that maybe you couldn’t tell the human police?”

May let go of Madden’s leash. He began sniffing his way around the edges of the room, focusing on the bed Jocelyn hadn’t been sitting on. It wasn’t hard to guess why: the process of elimination told me the second bed had to belong to Gillian. It was unmade, sheets and blankets twisted in a lover’s knot by her nighttime thrashing. A corkboard hung on the wall above it, dozens of snapshots tacked up with brightly colored pins. There were pictures of Cliff, either by himself or with Gillian and Miranda. There were pictures of Miranda, staged the same way. One, of Miranda with her cheek resting against the top of Gillian’s head while Gilly laughed and hugged her, seemed specifically designed to be an arrow through my heart. I looked at it, and it ached. That should have been me in the picture. That should have been me with my arms around my child.

“I, um. My mother was . . . is . . . a changeling. A Gwragen.” Jocelyn stumbled over the word like it wasn’t something she said very often. Thin-blooded, then, probably weak enough never to have been offered the Changeling’s Choice. Her own children would be merlins at best, if not entirely mortal. “I sleep at night, like a human.” The self-loathing in her voice made my stomach clench.

“There’s nothing wrong with being human,” I said, fighting to keep my voice gentle. I needed her help. I needed her to talk to me. Snapping at her for being distracted while my daughter was missing wasn’t going to help anything. “Gillian is human, and she’s amazing. You know that.”

Jocelyn nodded, sniffling gratefully.

I pushed back another jet of irritation. “If you sleep at night, does that mean you slept through the whole thing? Was she here when you went to bed?”

“No. She was going to be out late, studying with friends. I don’t think she likes me much.” Jocelyn wrinkled her nose. “I don’t understand why she never wants to talk about you. I mean, I know she doesn’t know anything about Faerie, but I never said anything that would have broken secrecy. I just wanted to hear about you. What kind of person you are, what it’s like to be your family.”

The clenching in my gut got worse. This wide-eyed girl had tried to make Gillian talk about me, even after she had clearly been rebuffed. “I see,” I said, abandoning the effort to keep the chill from my voice. “Do you know where she studied? How many people would have been with her? Do you have any of their names?”

Jocelyn’s eyes got wider and wider until, finally, she burst into tears. “You’re m-m-mad at me!” she wailed.

I winced. The human police might not be up here, but they were still in the house. If they came upstairs and found us interrogating Gilly’s roommate, they would probably be suspicious at best, and angry at worst. “Please, calm down,” I said.

“Let me,” said Quentin. With a wry half-smile, he added, “I’m nobody, remember?”

Numbly, I stayed where I was as Quentin crossed the room and sat on the bed next to Jocelyn, putting one hand over hers. He might look human at the moment, but he was still Daoine Sidhe, among the most beautiful and most enthralling of the fae. He turned the full force of his attention on the girl, and for a moment, I thought she might swoon.

Literally. She seemed like the swooning type, all fluttering hands and overplayed fragility. How Gillian had been able to share a room with her for more than an hour without breaking her nose, I might never know.

No. I shoved the thought away, refusing to let it take root in the fertile soil of my fear. I would know, because I would ask her when I found her. That would be my payment for bringing her home. I couldn’t ask her to let me be her mother again, couldn’t make her let me into her life, but I could ask why she hadn’t punched this simpering child the minute she’d refused to let the topic of Gillian’s family drop.

“Hey,” said Quentin, all teen idol earnestness. “I know this is probably overwhelming, and I get that you’re scared. I’d be scared, too. But we need your help. We need to know where Gillian would have gone.”

“I know you,” sighed Jocelyn dreamily. “You’re Quentin, her squire. You’re in the Mists as part of a blind fosterage, but everyone knows you just have to be noble. I mean, nothing else makes sense, not with her being a hero and you being so handsome.”

May and I exchanged a look.

Quentin, for all that he seemed increasingly uncomfortable, nodded. “That’s right, I’m Quentin. It’s a pleasure to meet you. But look, we’re really worried about Gillian, and we need to find her as soon as possible. Is there anything you can tell us about where she would have been last night? Anything at all?”

The dreamy look in Jocelyn’s eyes turned calculating. “I might be able to show you, if you took me with you to find her. I promise I won’t be underfoot. I know how things work. I can be helpful. I can be useful. You’ll see.”

Madden, who had been snuffling at the space under Gilly’s bed, pulled his head out and made a small woofing noise. He didn’t like this idea.

Yeah, well, neither did I. But if that was what we had to do to get this girl to show us where Gillian and her friends would have been before the incident, I was going to go with it. “Do you know where they found her car?” I asked.

“It was near where her study group meets,” said Jocelyn. She stood, pulling her hand away from Quentin’s with obvious reluctance. “Let me get my coat and we can go. You won’t leave without me, will you? Promise you won’t leave without me!”

“Sure,” I said. “We promise.”

She beamed, bright as a Christmas tree, and ran out of the room, leaving the four of us alone. May and I exchanged another look. Quentin rose, wiping his hand on the side of his leg.

“I don’t know whether to be terrified or impressed,” he said. “Are all changelings like her?”

“You know better,” I said mildly. “There’s no such thing as ‘all’ when you’re talking about people.”

His cheeks reddened. “Sorry,” he said. “I guess I do.”

“Apology accepted,” I said. “Now come on. We have maybe a minute to search this place without anyone watching us. Go.”

I moved toward Gillian’s side of the room, feeling simultaneously like I was invading her privacy and like I was finally entering a place I’d been standing outside for years. Her clothes were stuffed into a rickety dresser that looked like it had been purchased from one of those flatpack outfits, put together with a wrench and a lot of swearing. Cliff had never been the handy one in our relationship. He had probably bled all . . .

Bled all . . .

There was blood in Gilly’s car. There was blood in my daughter’s car. The police had found blood, and the blood was probably hers, and she hated me, and I was going to need to roll her memories across my tongue in order to see what she had seen in the moments before she bled. I would need to slide myself into her, into all the things she’d never wanted me to see, all the thoughts she’d never wanted me to share.

Under those circumstances, going through her dresser wasn’t an invasion of privacy. It was a normal thing a frightened parent might do. What I was planning to do when we got to her car . . . that was an invasion of privacy. It was unforgivable. And I was going to do it anyway.

Gillian’s clothes were neatly folded—surprisingly so for a college student; even Quentin didn’t keep his dresser quite that organized—and smelled oddly herbal. I leaned closer, taking a deep breath, and coughed as I recoiled. May and Quentin turned away from their own investigations to stare at me. Madden flattened his ears with an inquisitive whine. I coughed again, signaling for them to stay where they were, and dug into the clothes.

I found what I was looking for at the bottom of the drawer, wedged into the far corner, where it was unlikely to get accidentally dislodged in the process of pulling out a pair of socks. It was a small mesh sachet, tied off with red-and-white ribbons, packed with herbs that made me want to drop the whole thing. Touching it made me feel dirty, slimy, like I had no business being here.

Breathing as shallowly as I could, I lifted the sachet and took another sniff. Grudgingly, my magic sorted through the individual components, naming and labeling them. Fennel and kingcup and St. John’s wort; gorse and dill and kale. I blinked at the last one. “Kale?” I muttered and took one more sniff. Scots kale, to be specific, an old, almost heirloom strain.

“What is it?” asked May.

I dropped the sachet on the floor. Relief washed over me as soon as I wasn’t in contact with the disgusting thing. Sadly, relief didn’t come with a decongestant. “It’s a marshwater charm,” I said, voice thick with sudden snot.

May’s eyes widened.

“What?” asked Quentin. “It’s not wet.”

“Marshwater charms are a class, not a specific description,” I said, wiping my hand on my pants and glaring at the sachet. We needed to take it with us. I could see that. But I did not want to touch it again. “A lot of changeling tricks are considered marshwater. Small, simple, mostly self-powering if you put them together right.”

“Like alchemy,” said Quentin.

“Surprisingly, yes,” I said. I looked around the room until I spotted a piece of tin foil in one of the trash baskets. “Get the foil. I don’t want any of us touching this thing.”

“But what is it?” he asked.

“It’s a collection of herbs specifically designed to repel the fae,” I said grimly. May and I exchanged a look. “There’s no way she would have known how to make this without someone showing her.”

“Lovely,” muttered May.

“Yeah,” I agreed, and went back to rooting through the dresser while Quentin wrapped the sachet in foil.

There was a sachet in every drawer. By the time I closed the last one, my nose was running and my eyes were burning, like the allergy attack I’d never particularly wanted to have. Even worse, my natural tendency to heal from every little thing didn’t seem to be kicking in. If I wanted to go playing with unfamiliar magical items, I could just pay the consequences.

I was wiping my eyes and trying not to sneeze again when Jocelyn came thundering up the stairs, a denim jacket clutched in both hands. She stopped in the doorway, eyes going wide before her face fell in sudden, sympathetic sorrow.

“Oh, I didn’t even think,” she wailed. “She’s your daughter and I was just talking about how amazing you are, not how much you must miss her and how scared you must be. Well, don’t you worry. I’ll take you right straight to where they found her car. You can find out everything you need to know.”

“Here’s hoping,” I said uneasily. She must have taken my red eyes and runny nose as the aftereffects of weeping. Good. Better that than having her figure out the truth. Her blood was thin enough that the charms hadn’t been bothering her, and I didn’t want her to suddenly realize what they were or what they were supposed to have been doing.

There was nothing in the room to indicate who might have taken Gilly. I didn’t like those sachets, and I desperately wanted to know where they’d come from, but they didn’t feel malicious to me. Whoever had made those for Gilly had been trying to keep the fae away from her. Did that mean she had been in danger? Or did it just mean that she was going to a school where a certain amount of magical thinking was innate in the student body, and someone had managed to get lucky?

I needed to talk to Bridget. If anyone would know how many of the students had decided they needed to put up wards against Tinker Bell, it would be her.

Jocelyn continued to beam, smile only wavering for an instant when she saw Quentin slip the foil-wrapped sachet into his pocket. “What’s that?” she asked suspiciously. “I don’t think I’m supposed to let people take things.”

I refrained from pointing out that she probably wasn’t supposed to let people into the room, either, or leave them alone while she ran off to get her coat. It wouldn’t do us any good to alienate the closest thing we currently had to a lead. “My lunch,” I said. “The dog was getting way too interested in it, and he needs to keep a clear nose.”

As if on cue, Madden walked over and stuck his nose against the crotch of her jeans in classic canine fashion. Jocelyn laughed shrilly and bent to start patting his head. While she had clearly been able to see through the illusions that made him look like a Golden retriever, she gave no indication she suspected him of being anything other than some kind of fancy fairy dog. The education her mother had given her on the fae had clearly skipped over a few places. Most people aren’t that comfortable petting the Cu Sidhe.

I nodded toward Quentin while Jocelyn was distracted, signaling him to come forward. He grimaced but did as he was bid, stepping up and putting his hand on Jocelyn’s shoulder.

“Hey,” he said. “Lead the way?”

Jocelyn blushed and dimpled as she turned to do exactly that. Quentin followed. I picked up Madden’s leash and looked to May.

“Don’t-look-here and keep searching,” I said tightly. “I’ll text you with our location.”

May sighed. “I thought you might say that,” she said. Raking her fingers through the air, she gathered two handfuls of shadows and muttered something under her breath in a language I didn’t know. The air rippled, folding around her. As soon as I looked away, I knew I’d lose track of her. Don’t-look-here spells don’t make people literally invisible. They just make them . . . difficult. Difficult to see, difficult to care about seeing. As long as May didn’t break anything or otherwise call the kind of attention to herself that couldn’t be ignored, she’d be fine.

“See if there’s anything else around here like those sachets,” I said. “I don’t like them. Something’s off about this.”

If she answered me, it was quiet enough and far enough behind the spell that I couldn’t make it out. I turned and followed the others down the stairs.

They had just reached the bottom—and more importantly, Jocelyn was just starting to look put out over my absence—when I got there. She relaxed at the sight of me. “I was afraid we’d lost you!” she said chirpily.

“I’m difficult to lose,” I replied. “Lead the way.”

Voices around the side of the house alerted me to the location of the missing police as we stepped off the porch and onto the lawn. Jocelyn made a shushing noise and motioned for us to follow her away from the house, waiting until we were a good distance down the sidewalk before she said, “I sort of didn’t tell anyone you were here. How did you get in, anyway?”

“Magic,” I said.

Predictably, her eyes lit up. “Oh, wow. Oh, gosh. I can’t wait to tell Mom I met you. Did I tell you she used to know you, when she was my age? She—”

Jocelyn kept chattering as we walked down the sidewalk, Quentin and I looking carefully in all directions, Madden keeping his nose pressed to the ground like he could sniff out all of Berkeley, like he could solve any mystery if he breathed in deeply enough. I understood the feeling. More and more, my magic was leading me by the nose, telling me what I needed to know as long as I was careful not to catch a cold.

Of course, right now, my nose was so stuffed up from inhaling that weird herbal mix that I was sort of impressed I could still breathe at all. Gillian had been turning herself into a big walking allergen.

Allergen . . . “Hey, Jocelyn,” I said casually, interrupting her explanation of this one time her mother had been in San Francisco and saw a real kelpie, “do you have allergies?”

Jocelyn wrinkled her nose. “I never used to, but they’ve been really bad this semester,” she admitted. Then she brightened. “Why? Are there some sort of magic flowers that bloom once a century getting pollen everywhere? That would explain everything.”

The way she talked about Faerie was almost endearing. She had the sort of wide-eyed wonder I hadn’t possessed since I was a very small child. It was definitely exhausting. Only the fact that we were at UC Berkeley—a campus which I knew for a fact hosted multiple live-action roleplaying games every week, as well as meetings of the Society for Creative Anachronism—kept me from slapping my hand over her mouth and reminding her, in no uncertain terms, that Faerie is supposed to be a secret.

Letting her chatter didn’t hurt anything. Anyone who heard her would assume she was talking about something that didn’t exist. Trying to convince her to shut up would draw a lot more attention to us. And maybe if I kept telling myself that, I’d be able to believe it. The habits of secrecy had been so ground into me, for so long, that this felt like I was breaking the rules, even though I wasn’t saying anything forbidden.

“Not quite,” I said. “I did smell something a little funny in your room, near Gillian’s desk.”

“Oh.” Jocelyn’s face shuttered itself, expression becoming unreadable. “She doesn’t do drugs, if that’s what you’re asking. She doesn’t do anything. She goes to class, she studies with her friends, and she refuses to talk about anything worth talking about. You know, I asked her about bringing you to campus to see our classes once, and she said she didn’t want anything to do with you? Like anyone could mean that about a hero!”

My stomach clenched again. I was suddenly grateful for the burning in my eyes. It made it harder for me to tear up.

Quentin cleared his throat. “Maybe talking like that about Toby’s daughter when she’s missing isn’t really very nice, you know? Do you think you could, I dunno, cut it out?”

“Oh.” Jocelyn paled. “I’m sorry. I . . . I intended no offense.” If we hadn’t been walking, I’m pretty sure she would have dropped to her knees in her hurry to placate me.

The more time we spent with this kid, the more I wanted to shake her mother. It was one thing to encourage a thin-blooded changeling to learn more about her own heritage. I had no objection to that. It was something else altogether to teach her just enough to mess her up and then leave her to figure out how to interact with the world. Some of the mistakes Jocelyn was making could get her killed if she made them around the wrong people.

Not for the first time, I genuinely regretted the decisions I’d made in the aftermath of Devin’s death. He’d been a terrible person. There was no question of that. He had abused the trust of the kids in his care, all of whom had deserved better. I had deserved better. Dare had deserved better. But by Oberon’s eyes, at least he’d given changelings a place to go and be with people who understood. He had kept them safe from everyone but himself, and that had made him a monster, but it wouldn’t have been able to happen if there hadn’t been a need for the so-called “safety” he provided.

I should have done more to fill the void left when he’d died. I should have been there. All of us changelings who made it to adulthood with our hearts intact should have been there. And we hadn’t been.

“None taken,” I said. “Breathe.”

A faint trickle of color came back into Jocelyn’s cheeks. She kept walking.

The route she’d chosen took us across a different slice of campus than our walk to the residence hall. Trees blanketed the path, their fallen leaves making our footing treacherous. I inhaled the good green scent of them, trying to chase those awful herbs from my nose. We came around a curve, and the lazily flashing lights of campus police cars ground my heart to a stop.

Gillian’s car—a solid, dependable-looking sedan, the sort of thing it made perfect sense to send to college with a young woman living away from home for the first time—sat at the middle of a square of caution tape. That was a good thing: it hadn’t been towed or impounded yet. It was also surrounded, first by the officers who were examining it, and then by a ring of onlookers.

“Hell,” I muttered, coming to a stop. “This is a problem.”

The residence hall had been the site of vandalism, but not kidnapping. There had been no blood on the glass there, no reason to suspect foul play. Gillian’s car, on the other hand . . .

This was a real crime scene, not a mere nuisance, and there was no way the police were going to let us anywhere near it.

Jocelyn pointed at the building beyond the car. “That’s Wheeler Hall,” she said. “That’s where the English Department is. Gillian likes to study in their computer lab. She says it’s more peaceful than studying in our room.” Her tone made it clear that she disagreed with this decision.

I swallowed my first response, which was to point out that she could have just told us to go to Wheeler Hall and spared us this entire awkward walk. I also swallowed my second response, which would have been considerably less polite. In the end, I forced a shallow smile and said, “Everyone learns differently. You’ve been very helpful. We appreciate it.”

She beamed and seemed to be waiting for something. I exchanged a glance with Quentin. He shrugged.

I looked back to her, studying her expression more carefully. For all that she was smiling like a child who’d just ridden her bike without the training wheels for the very first time, there was a calculation going on behind her eyes.

“Yes?” I said finally.

“Aren’t you going to thank me?” she asked. The calculation in her eyes grew stronger.

Understanding dawned. “No,” I said. I didn’t bother keeping the disgust out of my voice. It belonged there. “I’m not in your debt, and I’m not accepting any responsibility for you. You are not my vassal. This was a mean trick, and you should be ashamed of yourself for trying to play it.”

Faerie’s relationship with gratitude is . . . well, complicated. When so many of your citizens can be bound by a careless word or a casually given promise, saying something as simple as “thank you” becomes dangerous. So it’s forbidden, or at the very least, discouraged. We don’t thank each other. We praise. We say: “that was a nice thing to do.” We flatter. We avoid the direct and inescapable display of gratitude. Naturally, this has caused some people—almost all of them either humans who’ve discovered the existence of Faerie or changelings who’ve been shoved so far to the outskirts that they lost the shape of their own heritage—to decide that saying “thank you” acknowledges an inescapable debt between the one who says it and the one who receives it.

Jocelyn’s smile guttered out like a candle in a stiff wind, and the calculation in her eyes surged to the forefront, eclipsing everything else. “It was not a mean trick,” she said mulishly. “I only want what I’m owed. That’s all. Gillian’s been sharing a room with me for months, and this is the first time I’ve even seen you. I should have been her best friend by now. We should have been sitting in your kitchen telling stories and learning important things, not standing in this mess, with these,” the sweep of her hand encompassed the paths and buildings around us, and the mass of gawkers who thronged around the caution tape, “people.” There was a sneer in her voice on the last word.

People. Oh, oak and ash, people. Jocelyn wasn’t saying anything that was actually forbidden—she sounded like an ordinary college kid being weird rather than anything more dangerous—but she was going to get there, now that she was angry, and I didn’t know what to do about it.

From the stricken look on his face, neither did Quentin. His eyes were getting wider and wider, and he was staring at Jocelyn like she was a nightmare he’d never considered could be real. Madden whined, pressing against my leg.

Jocelyn’s eyes narrowed, her lower lip pushing out into a pout. “You owe me,” she repeated.

“That strikes me as unlikely, Miss Lewis, but if you’d like to come see me during office hours, we can discuss the school’s mechanisms for settling grievances.” The new voice was female, haunted by the ghost of an Irish accent, like the speaker had been in California for so long that even her vowels were applying for citizenship.

My shoulders, locked tight with stress and fear, relaxed just the smallest bit, and I turned, a weary smile on my face. “Hi, Bridget,” I said.

“Didn’t expect to see you here this morning,” she replied, giving me a quick nod while most of her attention remained fixed on Jocelyn. “Miss Lewis? Don’t you have something else you should be doing? Something elsewhere?”

Jocelyn looked back and forth from Bridget to me, eyes wide and mouth hanging open. Catching herself, she closed it with a snap, and spat, “I should have known you were working together to keep me out. I should have known. I hope you rot.”

She spun on her heel and stalked away before any of us could reply, hurrying to get the last word in. We let her. If it meant she would actually leave, she could have the last word, the last sentence, the last soliloquy. I didn’t need it as much as I needed this to be over.

“Well,” said Bridget into the pause that followed. “That was bracing. Now what in the world are you doing here?”

I stared at her, and I couldn’t think of a single thing to say.