Night and Silence (October Daye)

by Seanan McGuire

  “Well,” said May, after a long pause. “You’ve pissed off the Queen who’s actually in charge of us and convinced a Queen who isn’t that she should help us out. That’s . . . pretty true to form. You’re still you. I just checked.”

  “Ha fucking ha,” I said. “Come on. We need to get out of here before the owner comes back, and we need to find another trail. One that actually gets us there. Quentin?”

  “On it,” he said, and wove his hands through the air, chanting the lyrics to some old sea shanty while the smell of steel and heather rose around him and burst, covering us all in the veil of his recast don’t-look-here.

  We walked to the false wall together, Madden returning to all fours and pressing his nose to the ground as he looked for a replacement trail. I looked back only once, as we reached the exit. The little house was standing again, balanced on the edge of the porch, with its blank picture window eyes fixed on us, watching us go.

  We stepped into the brick. The house, and the garden, and the impossible courtyard disappeared, and we just kept on walking.

  EIGHT

  GILLIAN’S CAR WAS GONE when we got back to campus. The police had probably towed it away to some impound lot for further study, and while I’d been anticipating its absence, expecting it and seeing it were very different things. I paused, taking a moment to catch my breath, before approaching the caution tape. It was still in place, campus security standing watch to make sure the students who loitered nearby, craning their necks for a glimpse of something forbidden, respected the fragile barrier.

  We were less on the “respect” train than the “bring Gillian home” express. We ducked under the caution tape without hesitation, trusting Quentin’s don’t-look-here to protect us. Madden sniffed his way around the site while I gathered chunks of bloody glass from the ground, following the siren song of my daughter’s pain. Some of the pieces had barely a drop clinging to their surface, but I found them all the same. I couldn’t have missed them if I’d tried.

  By the time Madden came back to the rest of us, my pocket was full of glass and my fingers had been nicked six times, forcing me to do some quick juggling to keep myself from bleeding on the ground. Strictly speaking, the campus was such a jumble of bodies and their associated fluids that it was almost certainly a forensic dead end: I could bleed everywhere, and it wouldn’t necessarily point any fingers in my direction now that the car was gone. However, I preferred to be careful when I could.

  “Well?” I asked Madden, voice pitched low. The student body hadn’t spotted us yet. I wanted to keep it that way. “Did you find a second trail?”

  He hesitated before wagging his tail, once. So he’d found something, but he wasn’t completely sure it was right or useful. That was fine. We could figure it out when we got there, and it wasn’t like we had anything else to go on.

  My phone rang.

  “Shit,” I muttered. Heads began to turn, and eyes began to focus as nearby students heard the sound. Empty air normally doesn’t come with cell service. “Everybody move.”

  Quickly, we ducked back under the caution tape and hurried away from the crime scene. A few people tracked us, confused expressions on their faces, but most continued looking at the place I’d been when my phone began to ring. Magic has its uses.

  My phone was still ringing. I pulled it out and swiped my thumb across the screen without checking the caller ID. No one has my number who shouldn’t—literally. I’m not sure my number even exists. I got it when Devin gave me a phone, and I’ve held onto it through a dozen of April’s “upgrades.” I’ve never seen a bill. If there’s a mortal cellular company that has my business, I don’t know about it.

  “Hello?”

  “Is this a bad time?” Walther sounded weary, like he’d been pulled out of bed far too early for any civilized man. Given that it wasn’t even noon yet, I couldn’t fully blame him.

  “No, it’s not. Bridget got ahold of you?”

  “Dragged me out of a department meeting with a story about a student in distress. I’d kiss her if she weren’t married, not my type, and glaring at me.” He audibly yawned. “Okay, I’ve had like, five cups of coffee and this is as awake as I’m getting. Are you still on campus?”

  “Yes. Do you need me?”

  “That depends. How’s your nose?”

  I paused for a moment, focusing on breathing. “A little stuffy, but mostly okay. My eyes itch more than anything. Quentin still sounds congested, and so does May.”

  “Got it. Yes, I need you. You should all come to my office as soon as possible.”

  “Why?”

  “Allergy medication.” He hung up with a click. I lowered my phone, staring at it. Something about his tone—

  “Okay, everyone, come on; we need to hurry.” I shoved my phone back into my pocket and started walking faster.

  Quentin gave me a sidelong look. “Why?”

  “Because Walther didn’t tell me to.”

  His eyes widened. “Oh,” he said, and matched me step for step.

  Walther is a lot of things. “Overly dramatic” doesn’t make the list. If anything, he has a tendency to downplay bad situations, acting like there’s nothing to worry about when there’s really everything to worry about. He already had the allergy medication ready for us. That told me it was something we needed to take.

  “Drop the don’t-look-here when you have a clear opportunity to do so,” I said. Quentin nodded and, when we were briefly shielded from the rest of campus by the side of a building, snapped his fingers and let the spell go. There might be cameras. If there were, we wouldn’t appear out of nowhere, more go from an unfocused spot on the film—or whatever cameras used these days—to a focused one.

  May jumped when the spell dropped, shooting me a sharp look. “What’s going on?”

  “We’re going to see Walther.”

  Her eyes hardened, but she only nodded, recognizing how exposed we were now. Placing her fingers in her mouth, she whistled shrilly. Madden’s head whipped around, and he came bounding back to us.

  “Okay, here’s the deal,” I said. “Walther needs to see us. Madden, can you find this trail again if we leave it here? Or do we need to split up?”

  He whined once, but then he bobbed his head and fell in next to May.

  “Okay,” I said, feeling a wash of relief. If Walther had something to unclog our noses and make our eyes stop itching, that was good. That could only help Madden be better at doing his job and finding my daughter. Leaving him out could be seen as an insult to the crown—and after our little jaunt into the courtyard-that-wasn’t, I didn’t think Arden was that thrilled with me. Maybe she’d decide I was too much trouble and she didn’t want my fealty after all. And maybe pigs would fly.

  I snorted. May glanced in my direction, one eyebrow raised.

  “Something funny?”

  “Pigs are flying,” I said.

  Quentin snorted as well, and May rolled her eyes.

  “You are both twelve,” she said, and walked a little faster. I didn’t try to call her back. She knew the way to Walther’s office as well as I did. Really, the only one of us who didn’t was Madden, and since he was playing the faithful hound and sticking at May’s heels, there was no need to worry about losing him.

  People think searching for something—a knowe, a cheating husband, a child—is always a linear process. You start here, you go there, you find the things you’re looking for and bring them safely home or back to their owners. Then you get paid and walk into the sunset, confident in a job well done. I blame television. Fitting something into an hour means cutting the wrong turns, the digressions, the complications. It’s an easy first act, a twist in the second act, and a resolution in the third.

  The reality is more complicated. Finding someone is legwork and research and watching the clock, always, always watching the clock, because time is never on your si
de. There are no acts, no commercial breaks, and no guarantee that when the search grinds to a halt, the person you’re trying to find won’t already be floating in a ditch.

  Gillian had been taken. Fact. Gillian had been taken by someone who may or may not have used magic in the process. Normally, it would have been clear, but she’d been taken before dawn, which meant any minor spells had already been crisped to ash, while the major ones, eroded but intact, would be drowned in the soupy swamp of magical signatures that wreathed the campus. My sensitivity to magic is a good thing, especially in my line of work, but it could also be a liability in a place like this, where there was just too much to confuse the issue.

  Gillian had been taken and stripped naked, and her clothes had been left in a place so secret it made queens pale to hear that people were inside it, a place I’d never heard of before. Devin should have been running a damn farmer’s market out of a garden like that one. So who could have known it was there, and been willing to use it to throw me off the track like that?

  It wasn’t a comfortable question. It confirmed fae involvement as nothing else could have, and only the fact that the scent of oranges had never so much as put in an appearance kept me from being sure that Simon was behind it all. That, and the fact that I knew him. Lost or not, I knew him, and I couldn’t believe he’d do this to me.

  Then again, maybe I was being naïve. After all, he’d been willing to do this to his own brother. Why not me? But he couldn’t have cast a single spell without leaving the scent of rotten oranges behind, and I wasn’t finding any oranges. Just the strangely present scent of cinnamon, which didn’t connect to anyone I could think of.

  The chemistry building doors stood open, propped to let the morning air inside. Students lounged on the steps, some eating late breakfasts, others chatting with their friends until it was time to go to class. A few cast curious looks in our direction. I tensed before realizing their attention was mostly focused on Madden, who was, after all, a very handsome dog. I relaxed. I’ve always been more of a cat person, but that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate the camouflage of a good dog.

  Walther’s office door was also open, thanks to a hefty brick that served as a makeshift doorstop. I still knocked. It was only polite. Walther poked his head out a moment later, stress showing in the tightly drawn skin around his eyes. It faded when he saw us. Not enough: there was still a shadow there I didn’t like, something that seemed more concerned than it needed to be.

  “Toby,” he said. “Quentin, May. Please, come in.” He didn’t greet Madden. That made sense: Madden was a dog, after all.

  Bridget was already in the office, sitting in the chair Walther used for visiting students, a paper coffee cup in her hand and a concerned look on her face that almost exactly mirrored Walther’s. She waved, saying, “I’m glad you could make it.”

  “When Walther calls, we come,” I said.

  Walther shut the door, removing his glasses. “Good.” He placed them on a convenient shelf as he started for his desk. “Stay right there.”

  Tylwyth Teg tend to fit a certain mold: golden hair, sharply pointed ears, and eyes of piercing blue too bright to be concealed by any simple illusion. Walther’s glasses were designed to draw attention away from his eyes, and they generally worked, keeping his students from asking if he wore colored contacts. He was on the short side, with narrow shoulders and the quick, hurried posture of a scientist who was constantly afraid something in his lab was about to catch fire.

  Once at the desk, he opened a drawer and withdrew four small plastic syringes, each filled with a virulently purple liquid that sparkled from within, like he had ground a pixie into dust and suspended it in the solution. “Each of you needs to drink one of these.”

  “What are they?” I asked, already reaching for one. Quentin and May did the same, while Madden shifted into his human form, shook himself, and took the last of them.

  “I told you.” Walther’s mouth was a thin, grim line. “It’s allergy medication.”

  “Walther—”

  “Just drink it, okay? I’ll explain after you drink it.”

  I gave him a suspicious look before raising the syringe to my mouth. It had no needle, just a small circular opening that seemed perfectly designed to slip between my lips. I drove the plunger home, and the sticky-sweet taste of pomegranate, pear, and what I suspected was artificial grape flooded across my tongue. That was the pleasant part. The kick followed half a beat behind the flavor, and suddenly everything was burning. I coughed.

  “What did you do, mix fire ants and whiskey?” I wheezed. The burning sensation in my throat wasn’t fading.

  The burning sensation in my eyes, on the other hand, was gone. I stopped coughing in my surprise and realized I could breathe through my nose. Everything was clear. Everything was fine. Better than fine: everything was normal.

  “Not quite, but you’re probably not as far off as you wish you were,” said Walther. He plucked the syringe from my hand. May and Quentin were still coughing. He took their syringes as well. Madden had yet to consume the contents of his. Walther stopped, eyeing him. “You need to swallow it if you want it to work.”

  “I don’t know what sort of people you’re accustomed to working with, Master Alchemist,” said Madden, with a glance at me to make it clear that he knew exactly what kind of people Walther normally dealt with, “but I don’t drink things that haven’t been identified.”

  “I told you, it’s allergy medication,” said Walther. “You’re not an alchemist. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain exactly what it is to you. But you need to take it, and soon, or the allergic reaction you’ve been having since you touched that damn sachet is going to keep getting worse. There’s a point past which I won’t be able to help you.”

  Madden’s eyes widened. “We’ve been poisoned?”

  “In the sense that an allergic reaction is your body treating something that should be harmless as if it were poisonous, yes, and this is why I don’t ever want to be a court alchemist, because when I give you something, you’re supposed to drink it.” Walther sighed. “Don’t argue with me about it, don’t try to make me explain things I’ve never had to explain before, do as you’re told and drink it before I have to tell your liege, ‘I’m sorry, but he needs to be put into a magical coma while he recovers from being stupid.’”

  “And here I thought you were a teacher,” said May.

  “I teach chemistry. It’s similar to alchemy, but it’s not the same. If it were the same, humans would be turning lead into gold all willy-nilly, and I wouldn’t need to brew half of what I spend my free time brewing.” Walther looked at Madden. “The person who cured elf-shot is telling you to drink. So drink.”

  Madden drank.

  “Mother of flowers preserve and protect me from the world,” said Walther. He snatched Madden’s syringe. “Toby, you were right. It was a marshwater working. You were also wrong, because it was the kind of marshwater work I don’t think anyone’s used for centuries. Old, deep, nasty stuff. The Scots kale was the key. It’s still sold at farmer’s markets and the like—good source of iron, humans are weird—but nobody uses it in charm work anymore.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “It smells like a boiled fart for most of the drying process, and there are other plants that work just as well. No one’s going to use Scots kale if they have any alternatives.” Walther dropped all four syringes into a plastic bag and sealed it. “This one was designed to repel the fae, first off, and to blind them and stop up their senses, second off. So that burning in your eyes and stuffiness in your nose would have kept getting worse, and worse, and worse, until either something flushed it from your system or you temporarily lost one or more senses entirely. I’ve been dealing with changelings for weeks who were having this exact allergic reaction, and none of them could tell me what they’d touched. I’m betting that if we mapped their
movements, they’d all touched your daughter.”

  I stiffened. “Maybe reword that a little bit.”

  “Sorry.” Walther shook his head. “I mean, they’d all come into contact with your daughter. She’s . . . imagine the entire fae population of this school is allergic to peanuts, and she’s been washing her clothes in peanut butter every morning. She could kill someone if she’s not careful. Do you have any idea where she might have gotten this recipe?”

  I stiffened further, until it felt like my spine had been replaced by an oak tree, rigid and unyielding. “You think Gillian did this?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know what to think . . . but no one fae made this stuff.” He held up his hands for the first time, showing me the vivid red rash covering his fingers. “It itches like poison oak. The herbs and vegetable components were blended perfectly, and then they were left under at least three full moons to cure. This is master class charm work. It’s nasty and it’s vicious, and I don’t think even a thin-blooded changeling could have done it without hurting themselves so badly that someone would have heard about it. If only the night-haunts.”

  It was hard to stop myself from looking at May. The connection between Fetches and the night-haunts isn’t widely known, and they don’t really want it advertised.

  “No.” I shook my head. “This isn’t my daughter’s work. There’s no way she could have learned how. I didn’t teach her. Her father has no idea the fae exist. Someone did this.”

  “Why?” Madden turned to me, frowning as he spoke. He looked more solemn than he had since this day began. Now we weren’t just looking at my missing child: we were looking at a threat to the kingdom, something that used magic so old and so small that there was no way to see it coming. I would have sympathized with his obvious dismay if it hadn’t made me want to scream. “What possible reason would someone have to wreathe your child, who isn’t fae at all, in charms designed to keep the fae away from her?”