NINE

THE OFFICERS WERE GONE from the residence hall when Quentin and I got there. Several girls I assumed lived there were out front, hammering boards over broken windows with the resigned air of people who thought they were too good for basic, menial tasks. Only a few of them looked at us as we walked up the path to the front door, and no one moved to stop us from going inside or even ask who we were there to see.

“Nice security,” I commented. Cliff was going to get an earful about this once Gilly was safely home, that was for damn sure. Maybe I didn’t have any authority over her life at this point, but I could certainly make my feelings known. She needed to be living somewhere with a front door that locked. Maybe a doorman would be a step too far—in addition to being prohibitively expensive—but dammit, she deserved some sort of protection.

Quentin made a disgusted snorting noise. It was nice to know someone was on my side in this.

We reached the top of the stairs, walked to the room Gillian and Jocelyn shared, and stopped dead, both of us staring. Quentin found his voice first. He had fewer layers of shock and self-recrimination to work through.

“What the hell . . . ?”

Gillian’s side of the room looked exactly the same as before. May’s search, intensive as it had no doubt been, had left no traces. That was good. She lacked the muscle memory to do things like drive or fight, even if she could close her eyes and relive my lessons, but she knew how to toss a room without getting caught. Jocelyn’s side of the room, on the other hand . . .

The bed was stripped. All her personal items were gone, from the books on the headboard to the small display of pictures on the wall. Even the desk was bare. I suddenly felt like I was choking, and it was no allergic reaction this time. She was gone, my daughter’s roommate was gone, and I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t breathe.

Slowly, I stepped into the room, Quentin standing frozen behind me. The acrid scent of the herbal sachets lingered in the air. I realized I had no idea what Jocelyn’s magic smelled like, or whether it was even strong enough to have a scent at all. The presence of so many hostile herbs had prevented me from sniffing it out while she was here, and now . . .

Now she was gone, and our chances of finding Gillian might well have gone with her.

“Oh, are you Jocelyn’s mom? She told us you’d be coming by to make sure she hadn’t forgotten anything.”

I turned. A harried-looking human woman was standing in the hall, a clipboard in one hand, like something out of a college recruitment catalog. She flushed when she saw me staring.

“I’m Chloe, I’m the residence director,” she said, almost apologetically. “I’m sorry. It’s been a hell of a day.”

My anger and confusion fell back as a mask of professionalism snapped into place. This woman might have answers, at least to the question of where the hell Jocelyn had gone. “I heard one of your residents went missing.”

“Not from here, thank God.” Her flush faded, replaced by a shocked pallor. “I’m sorry. That sounded bad.”

“That’s the second time you’ve apologized,” I said, trying to sound gentle. I probably didn’t succeed. Hopefully, I at least sounded like I understood why she might be tense. “Have they found the girl?”

“Not yet,” she said. “Gillian was parked on campus when someone snatched her. No one noticed for hours because we’d had some vandalism here—wait. Didn’t Jocelyn tell you all this?” Her eyes narrowed. “Can I see some ID?”

“Absolutely.” I pulled a chunk of broken glass out of my pocket, intentionally slicing my fingertips on its edges, and murmured, “Baa, baa, black sheep, have you any wool? Yes sir, yes sir, but you can’t have any, fuck off.”

The smell of grass and copper swirled around us as a spike was hammered into my temple, the pain from before flaring up twice as brightly. Chloe’s eyes went briefly unfocused. When they sharpened again, she was smiling.

“Sorry about that, but you know how it is,” she said. “You can’t be too careful where student safety is concerned.”

A funny sentiment, considering that Quentin and I had just walked in. I shoved my hands into my pockets, hiding the blood on my fingers, hiding how tightly clenched they were. “Safety is the highest priority,” I said. It was a struggle to keep my voice from wavering from the pain in my head. “Jocelyn was very upset about the disappearance of the Marks girl. She was a good roommate.”

“Everybody loves Gillian,” said Chloe. “I’m just sick at the thought of something like this happening here. We’re going to set up a buddy system until she’s found, to make sure the rest of the residents are safe. Please tell Jocelyn that when she decides to come back, I will be happy to personally be her buddy. Nothing is going to happen to any of my other girls.”

“I appreciate that,” I said neutrally. The spell I’d used to make her see an ID she would accept had also made her suggestable. That was a good thing, as long as I didn’t push it too hard. “Did you have any sign that this was coming? Suspicious people hanging around the house, neighborhood kids throwing rocks, anything?”

Chloe looked uncertain.

Screw it. I’d push as hard as I had to. “If I’m going to allow Jocelyn to return to school, I need to know she’s going to be safe.”

“It seemed like nothing.”

Jackpot. “What seemed like nothing?”

“Someone kept cutting the house internet. I know, that sounds silly, and at first we thought it was just our ISP being awful—it happens, people assume the Bay Area will have this incredible, super-fast service, and really, we’re on decaying DSL lines and nobody wants to pay to upgrade them—but it kept happening, and one of our computer science majors managed to uncover an ongoing denial of service attack against us, specifically. Someone was flooding our Wi-Fi.”

“All the time?” I didn’t understand half of what she was saying, but I could tell Quentin did. He was frowning, looking thoughtful, not confused. He could explain this to me later.

“No.” Her expression turned sorrowful, sheepishness and regret and hindsight warring for dominance. “Only when Gillian was home. Now, after the fact, it feels like . . . well, it feels like someone was trying to make sure she’d stop studying in the house. Maybe they were trying to get her to Wheeler Hall. I don’t know.”

I ground my teeth so hard it hurt, and I tasted blood. That was enough to center me, and I took a careful breath before I said, “I feel like someone should have called me, since she was rooming with my daughter.” True enough, as long as the “she” in that sentence referred to Jocelyn.

The fae are great liars. They’ve had centuries to perfect their art. I’ve always found the truth to be more effective, especially when I’m already operating under false pretenses. It’s harder to get caught in a contradiction when you never contradict yourself.

“We honestly didn’t think it was anything dangerous.” There was a defensive note in Chloe’s voice now. I was approaching the end of her patience, even for a parent. “We would have notified all parents if it were.”

“I appreciate your candor,” I said, with a meaningful glance at Quentin. He nodded agreement, so vigorously that for a moment I was afraid his head would pop clean off his shoulders. “If you’ll excuse us, I want to finish cleaning up in here and be on my way. My daughter is very upset about everything that’s happened.” Another truth—or at least I hoped it was. If Gillian was conscious, I had no doubt she was upset.

“I’ll be in the kitchen if you need me,” said Chloe, and retreated. For once, the natural human desire to avoid the fae—even if they didn’t realize that was what they were doing—was working for me, not against me.

I turned to Quentin. “Check under the beds, behind the dressers, anywhere for signs of where she might have gone. If you see anything herbal, retreat and call me, got it? We have five minutes, tops, before that woman realizes we probably shouldn’t be in here unsupervised.”

“On it,” said Quentin, and made for Jocelyn’s bed.

I didn’t want to come into contact with another of those dusty, deadly sachets, and so I turned away from the dressers, toward the room’s single narrow closet. It looked barely big enough to contain my clothes, much less the clothing belonging to two girls in their late teens, when having a different outfit for every occasion still felt like it mattered. And it did matter, for some people. I’d never seen Arden wear the same Court dress twice. I’d never seen my mother do it either. Depending on what they chose to do with their lives, Gilly and Jocelyn might need to have wardrobes large enough to contain worlds, packed with shoes and slip dresses, with silks and satins. Or they might wind up like me, barely filling a single dresser. That’s the thing about time, about youth. It passes, and you become a bit more yourself with every day gone.

Nothing in the closet appeared to have been taken or even disturbed. I frowned thoughtfully. It was like Jocelyn wanted us to know she was gone but hadn’t wanted to go to the trouble of actually leaving. Cautiously, I parted the hanging dresses. I knew when I touched something of Gillian’s by the faint tingle it left on my skin and the acrid scent of dried fennel and kale. I was going to need more of those allergy pills before the day was done.

There was nothing of interest in the closet, and the sachet tucked into the far corner meant that sniffing out Jocelyn’s magic wasn’t an option. I closed the door and turned to her dresser, pulling the top drawer open.

There was a note there, neatly folded atop the balled-up socks and rolled underpants. I stopped, looking at it.

Quentin caught the change. He glanced my way. “Toby?”

“It’s addressed to me.” I poked the paper with one finger. There was no tingle. If Jocelyn had made the sachets, she had been incredibly careful to keep their contents off her skin.

I picked up the note, unfolded it, and read aloud, “‘October, I bet you wish you’d been nicer now, don’t you? I could have told you a lot of things, but you didn’t want to listen. Good luck finding your precious brat. I guess you’re pretty good at losing her. If you decide you want to play nicely, I’ll find you in the place you gave away.’” I turned the note over. “That’s all there is.”

Quentin didn’t say anything.

I sighed, allowing weariness to settle over me for a moment, letting it weigh me down. I was so damn tired. I hadn’t slept, I hadn’t eaten, my daughter was missing, and now it seemed we’d let one of the people responsible for her disappearance slip right through our fingers.

As if on cue, my phone rang. I pulled it out and swiped my thumb across the screen as I raised it to my ear. “Hello?”

“We’re at Telegraph and Durant. Can you get down here? And hurry? There’s something you need to see.” May hung up. Either they’d found something terrible, or she knew we didn’t have time to waste. Either way, we needed to move.

“Come on.” I shoved my phone back into my pocket and tucked the note into my jacket as I turned for the stairs. Quentin followed behind me; thank Oberon, he didn’t ask where we were going, or why we were going so quickly. He just followed, and when I hit the front porch and broke into a run, he did the same.

We raced down the sidewalk, the two of us, and this was such a familiar scene that it ached, because this had never happened before, not really, not like this. It felt like everything was crumbling around me. Gillian was missing, maybe hurt, and Tybalt was shutting me out, and Jocelyn had gotten away. Would I have recognized her as a threat if I’d still been closer to human, if I hadn’t shifted toward thinking of people without magic as harmless? Would I have caught the signs that could tell me she was dangerous, not merely an annoyance, if I hadn’t been distracted by worrying about Tybalt? Was Gillian going to pay the price for my hubris?

We ran and ran, and I tried to let the running become a distraction. If I could focus on the act of putting one foot in front of another, maybe I would be able to find something that would let me fight through this terrible situation to the other side.

A corner loomed ahead of us. We turned, running two more blocks, and there was Telegraph Avenue, artery of the city, running straight and clean from the highway to the quad where the clocktower loomed. We turned again, weaving through crowds of students, parents, and tourists, passing street vendors both human and otherwise as we made our way toward Durant, a cross-street that connected the surrounding residential neighborhoods with this bustling commercial chaos.

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.