Night and Silence

by Seanan McGuire

  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 h
ave 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 wan
ted 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.”