Night and Silence

by Seanan McGuire

  I was tired. I was so, so tired. And Gillian was still missing. No matter how tired I was, I needed to go and bring my daughter home.

  “All you ever had to do was tell me to stay away, and I would have stayed away,” I said softly. “You never had to spy on me.”

  “We knew you weren’t going to come to the house again,” said Miranda. “If I’d thought there was any chance you were going to show up on our doorstep, I would have convinced Cliff we needed to move somewhere else a long time ago.”

  “Even as the noncustodial parent, I would have been able to fight that right up until Gillian turned eighteen,” I snapped, before I could think better of it.

  Miranda smiled, slow and broad. “And I would have welcomed a court case. After all, nothing like taking all your inadequacies as a parent in front of a judge to clear the way for my adopting my own daughter.”

  In that moment, I felt it would have been completely forgivable for me to smash her head against the wall until I was satisfied that I’d knocked all thoughts of adoption clean out of her skull. I didn’t do it. I didn’t move. I just stood where I was and glared at her, wishing all those old stories of the fae cursing people with a glance had any basis in truth.

  Miranda’s smile turned brittle before curling up and fading altogether. “I’m sorry,” she said. “That was mean of me. I get petty when I’m under stress.”

  “I never would have guessed,” I said. My teeth were clenched so tightly that it felt like they would shatter and dissolve into dust in my mouth.

  “Gillian is missing,” said Miranda, like I had somehow forgotten. “There was blood. Please. Can’t we put all this behind us? Can’t we agree to settle our differences long enough to find our daughter?”

  The way she kept saying “our” was like claws against my skin, ripping and tearing at me, stealing the air from my lungs. I forced the feeling away and said, “I already promised to help. Where is she going to school? I’ll head over there right away.”

  “Berkeley,” said Cliff.

  I managed to conceal my relief. Any local school would have been good, as long as it was inside the Kingdom in the Mists. I’d cause a diplomatic incident for my daughter’s sake if I had to, but it was better if it wasn’t necessary. Berkeley was the best-case scenario.

  Thanks to an old land agreement, the city was unclaimed territory: Arden was the only noble with any direct authority there, and even she was mostly ignored by the inhabitants. Walther and Bridget were both on the faculty; they could get me the kind of access that would have been exceedingly difficult otherwise. Even better, Cassandra was a grad student there, which meant Arden wouldn’t need to assign someone to keep an eye on me. If she got concerned, she could just ask her chatelaine. All my attention and energy could go to finding my daughter and getting her back where she belonged. That was good. Getting started would be better. My initial shock was starting to thaw, replaced by the horrified conviction that I had very little time in which to find her and bring her safely home.

  “I need to get dressed,” I said briskly. “I’ll call you if I find anything.”

  “If you try to keep things from us—”

  I leveled a flat gaze on Cliff. “You mean like you kept my daughter from me after I was abducted? Fuck you.” The mortal profanity felt good, like honey on my tongue. “Turnabout may be fair play, but some of us have standards. Now I need to get moving, and that’s going to be easier if you’re not standing here waiting for me to pull a miracle out of my ass.”

  “October—” Cliff began.

  “Get out your phone,” I said.

  He stopped talking, a look on his face that made me feel like I’d just punched him in the gut—and it wasn’t a bad feeling, much as I might have wanted it to be; hitting him would have been real satisfying right about then—and pulled a phone out of his pocket.

  “Good,” I said. “Go to contacts.”

  “Done,” he said.

  “Punch this in,” I said, and rattled off my number, pausing when I was done to ask, “Got it?”

  “I do,” he said. “Toby, please—”

  “Good,” I said, cutting him off again. “Text me, so I’ll have your number. Now get out, both of you. We’re wasting time.”

  They walked toward the door, Miranda looping her arm through Cliff’s and giving me a poisonous look. I looked blandly back. I didn’t want the man she was clinging to so fiercely, hadn’t wanted him in a very long time—not since I’d fought my way home despite impossible odds and been told I was no longer welcome, that home was no longer mine to claim. Anyone who could reject someone they had claimed to love so conclusively wasn’t for me.

  I didn’t want the man, but I’d always wanted the child. I’d always loved the child. And Miranda had been part of keeping that child away from me. I was grateful to her for making sure Gilly grew up with a mother, even if it hadn’t been me. That was where my gratitude ended.

  That was where my hatred began.

  Cliff looked back when they reached the door. “I’ll text you with her residence hall information,” he said. “Please, bring her home. I know I haven’t been fair to you, I know there’s nothing I can do to make that better, but please . . . bring her home.”

  “I will,” I said.

  Sunlight lanced into the hall when he opened the door. I stepped back involuntarily, away from the burning brightness. Only dawn has the power to destroy illusions, but the one I was wearing hadn’t been made to stand up to any real scrutiny. It would look wrong in direct sunlight. It would look like the lie it was.

  Cliff looked at me in confusion as Miranda’s eyes narrowed in something that felt like contempt. Then they were gone, stepping out into that terrible daylight.

  It took everything I had not to slam the door behind them. I sagged, pressing my forehead to the wood and closing my eyes as I released my ragged illusions. They dissolved into the smell of cut grass and copper, and I sobbed, struggling not to let myself collapse. I couldn’t. There wasn’t time. I could have this, this stolen moment of tears and terror, but soon enough, I’d need to get moving. Gillian was out there somewhere, lost and scared, and while I couldn’t say for sure that it was because of me, because of who and what I was, I couldn’t discount it, either. Not yet.

  I pushed away from the door and started for the stairs, wiping my eyes as I went, trying to look less like I was on the verge of collapsing. It wasn’t easy. Dimly, distantly, I realized that I wanted Tybalt more than anything else. He was supposed to be here, giving me something stable to hold onto when the world was dropping out from under my feet. I couldn’t be angry with him for being hurt by what my mother had done, but I could miss his solidity.

  When had he gone from being an adversary to becoming my surest port in the storm? And how was I going to hold on now that he was slipping away, buried under his own terror and the weight of what it meant to love me? My mother would always be a part of who I was, just like I’d always be a part of who Gillian was. No matter how far we run, we never get away from family.

  I plodded up the stairs, relaxing slightly when I reached the cool, shadowy upstairs hallway. May’s door was closed. That was normal. Jazz was usually the first one up, thanks to her diurnal nature and desire to maintain a real job, and she closed May’s door when she left, to keep the cats out. Cagney and Lacey mostly preferred to stay in my room these days, resting their tired bones in the piles of pillows and on the laundry that always wound up strewn on the floor, but when Tybalt came to visit—rare as that felt right now—he always kicked them out, saying that while a cat might look at a king, there were some things he’d prefer his subjects not observe.

  I didn’t want to do this. I wanted to leave a note and let her sleep. She could wake up in the afternoon with the problem already solved and Gillian safely back in Cliff and Miranda’s arms . . . and I knew that wasn’t going to work. She would never fo
rgive me. She would be right not to.

  Carefully, I eased the door open, revealing a pirate’s trove of casual treasure. Putting my magpie Fetch in a room with a woman who had a literal raven’s eye for shiny things had resulted in a bedroom that looked like it was halfway through the process of transforming into a thrift store. There were two separate dressing tables, one on either side of the room, both covered in jewelry boxes and wire stands glittering with necklaces. Glass, precious stones, it didn’t matter: what mattered was that they were beautiful. Silk sheets covered the ceiling, playing peek-a-boo with strands of twinkling white lights, so that it felt like they were trying to recreate the foggy heights of Muir Woods in their bedroom.

  May was a curled comma in the middle of the bed, her arms wrapped around what I assumed was Jazz’s pillow. I paused for a moment, looking at her without illusions or disguises. Her face was mine, blunted by a façade of mortal blood she had never truly possessed: whatever else she might be, my Fetch was a pureblood through and through. But she remembered being me, and more, she remembered being a girl named Darice—Dare—who’d died when she was young enough to be my daughter, who had considered me her hero.

  Dare was the reason May existed. Without those memories to urge her on, the night-haunt she had been would never have been willing to activate Oberon’s ancient binding and have herself called as a Fetch. It should have been the end of her. Instead, it had become a new beginning. I was grateful. I would always be grateful, just like I’d always be sorry that I hadn’t been able to save her.

  I sat on the edge of the bed, leaning over to gingerly shake May’s shoulder. She made a soft mumbling noise and burrowed deeper into the covers.

  “May,” I said. “It’s me. I need you to wake up. Come on. We don’t have time.”

  May opened her eyes. Rolling onto her side, she pushed herself up onto one elbow and squinted at me. “Toby? What time is it?”

  “Way too damn early,” I said. I stood. “Get up and get dressed. You just missed Cliff and Miranda. There was an incident at Gillian’s school last night. The campus police found blood in her car. I need to wake Quentin, and we need to get moving. I thought you might want to come with us.”

  May’s eyes widened for a moment. Then they narrowed, a look of steely determination sliding into place. “There’s no might about it. I’m coming with you. How dare you even imply I wouldn’t.”

  I blinked. “I didn’t think—”

  “No, you usually don’t. And I’m usually pretty forgiving of that, since I know how your head works. I know how easy it is for you to get swallowed up in that swamp you call ‘logic.’ But no. I am not sitting this one out.” She rolled out of the bed and onto her feet, eyes wild, teeth all but bared. “She’s my daughter, too. I’m helping you bring her home.”

  “Okay.” I raised my hands, palms outward, trying to defuse the situation before it could get out of hand. “That’s fine: that’s why I woke you. We’ll leave a note for Jazz, and . . . that’s fine. I’m going to go get Quentin. All right?”

  “Go,” she said.

  I went.

  Quentin’s door was slightly ajar. He didn’t mind the cats, and when they weren’t with me, they could usually be found with him, hogging the covers and somehow managing to force my adult-sized squire onto a strip of mattress about six inches wide.

  There was no response when I knocked. I pushed the door open, choosing a small invasion of privacy over trying to wake him by making enough noise to rouse the dead. Assuming I even could wake him that way. If Cliff hammering on the front door for as long as he had hadn’t been sufficient to wake Quentin up, I wasn’t sure any amount of noise would get him out of bed. I sort of envied that. Sleeping deeply is a gift.

  Enough light slipped around the edges of his curtains to illuminate the room, showing the hockey pennants and posters on the walls and the scattering of laundry on the floor. I didn’t judge. Quentin has been keeping his room cleaner than mine since the day he moved in, which is pretty impressive for a kid who grew up in a literal palace, with servants to cater to his every whim. Most people would take “it’s okay to be a slob” away from that. Quentin took “somebody has to clean up the mess, and it might as well be me.” It’s things like that that make me convinced he’s better than I ever deserved to have in my keeping.

  There was a tank atop the dresser just inside the room, filled with tiny hippocampi, brightly-colored fae creatures with the lower bodies of impossible fish and the upper bodies of horses. The stallion circled his mares, eyeing me suspiciously. The reason for his caution became clear when I looked closer: there were several foals at the middle of the herd, their equine bodies no larger than my thumb. Almost everything that lives is willing to die in the defense of its young.

  I turned away from the tank and started for the bed. The cat draped atop the blankets over Quentin’s hip raised its head and looked at me. I blinked.

  My cats, Cagney and Lacey, are Siamese. This cat wasn’t mine. The shadows were deep enough to turn most colors to gray, and for a moment, my eyes sketched stripes where no stripes existed, telling me the cat on Quentin’s hip was a burly tabby, telling me things were getting back to normal.

  The cat blinked enormous yellow eyes and yawned, showing me all its fine, sharp teeth. All his fine, sharp teeth. I sighed.

  “Hi, Raj,” I said in a low voice. “Didn’t know you were sleeping over.”

  Raj licked a paw before looking down the length of his nose at me, his entire body forming a question of what the hell I thought I was doing there. I shook my head.

  “It’s a long story,” I said. “Can you hop off, please? I need to wake Quentin.”

  Raj stretched with as much insolence as a cat could show and slid off of Quentin, landing on the mattress and continuing to watch me through wary eyes.

  I tried not to think about what it meant for Raj to be coming here to sleep. It wasn’t unusual to find him in the house—he’d basically moved in when Quentin became my squire, claiming that if one of them got to live with me, they should both be allowed to live with me—but normally, he told me when he was going to spend the night. That he hadn’t done so smacked of trying to hide something . . . or trying to hide from me. To keep me from asking him questions he didn’t want to answer. The fact that he was staying in his feline form made me suspect there was a lot he didn’t want to talk about.

  “Yeah,” I said mildly. “Me, too.”

  I stepped over Quentin’s discarded backpack, which I only ever saw him use when he was going to spend the night at Goldengreen with Dean, and shook his shoulder. He grumbled.

  “I’m going on errantry, and I will leave you here,” I said calmly.

  He opened his eyes so quickly that if it hadn’t been for the change in his breathing, I wouldn’t have believed he’d been asleep at all. “You wouldn’t dare,” he said, voice heavy with exhaustion. He sat up, barely seeming to notice when Raj slunk out of the way, and ground the heel of one hand against his left eye. “Toby? What are you doing in my room? What time is it?”

  “We need to go,” I said. I took a step back so that I could address both boys at the same time. “My daughter has been taken. We don’t know whether it was humans or the fae—I’m hoping humans, sweet Titania, I’m hoping humans—but we need to move if we’re going to get there before the trail goes cold.”

  Raj meowed, the sound small and lost in the dark room. I looked at him and nodded.

  “I know you can’t help, and I know Tybalt probably can’t help right now either, and I’m not going to ask how he’s doing, because this isn’t the time and it isn’t fair to you. But, yeah, you can tell him. You should tell him. And tell him I’m going to call Arden and ask if I can borrow Madden.” Madden is a Cu Sidhe, a fairy dog in the same way that Tybalt is a fairy cat. Which meant that his nose could be the difference between finding my daughter and not.

  Quentin
had finished rubbing his eye and was openly staring at me. “Gillian? But isn’t she . . . ?”

  “Yeah, she’s human,” I said. “I’m going to get ready; you need to do the same. May is coming with us. Cliff and his new wife were just here, since clearly if my estranged, adult daughter is missing, it must be because I kidnapped her.”

  The urgency that had flooded my veins when they told me about Gillian’s disappearance was getting stronger, starting to burn. My daughter was missing. I needed to find her. Even if she wouldn’t thank me for it, even if she would just . . . just turn away from me again, I needed to find her. I needed to bring her home.

  I’d been forced to build a life without my child, one where I would always love and worry about her, but where she was no longer in the forefront of my daily thoughts. I had surrendered her to her father in a cave that shouldn’t have existed when I pulled the immortality from her veins and allowed the Luidaeg to wipe the impossible from her memory. Cliff had never done any of those things, had never made any of the choices that would put our daughter out of his reach. He didn’t know how to live without her. He’d never needed to know.

  It was tempting to envy him for being that secure in his position as friend and father to our little girl. But there wasn’t time for envy, either. We had work to do.

  “All right,” said Quentin, and slid out of the bed.

  I nodded. “Good. Meet you in the hall in five minutes. Raj, open roads, and if Tybalt wants to find me, I’ll be in Berkeley.” I turned on my heel and left the room, heading down the hall to my own door.

  We had so much to do and so little time. All I could hope for was that we’d be fast enough to bring my daughter safely home. Anything more than that would be greedy, and so I didn’t even dare to think about it. Just let me bring her home.

  Cagney and Lacey were curled up against my pillow, bodies compacted into the warm spot my body had formed during the short time I’d been allowed to spend sleeping. Spike was a few feet away, stretched out in the narrow sunbeam that had managed to slip through my blackout curtains, its thorny belly exposed to the ceiling. I couldn’t stop myself from smiling, just a little, at the sight. Rose goblins are basically cat-shaped, impossibly mobile rose bushes. When Spike and I had met, it had been the size of a rabbit, or maybe a small cat. Now, after years of fertilizer, water, and all the sunlight it could want, it was nearly the size of a corgi. I didn’t know how big it could wind up getting, but I was looking forward to finding out.