Page 60 of The Brightest Fell

“Maybe so, but I haven’t seen him making any effort to break this one,” I said. “We’ve been following August’s trail since the bachelorette party.”

Understanding flooded Madden’s features. “That’s why none of you have been answering the phone!” he said. “Ardy was starting to get really worried. I think she was going to swing by tonight.”

“The new Queen in the Mists makes house calls?” Simon looked genuinely amused by the idea. “How quaint.”

Madden growled.

“Let’s play a fun game,” I said. “It’s called ‘don’t bait the man who’s going to help us.’ Here’s how you play. Simon, stop being you.”

“Would that I could, milady,” he said.

There was genuine regret in his voice, enough that Madden and I both paused.

Madden recovered first. “Well, that got dark fast,” he said. “What do you need?”

“We’ve been following the Babylon Road for days,” I said, pulling the candle from my pocket and holding it up for him to see. “Long trip, long story, need a shower bad. Our last stop dropped us out on Valencia, and I lost the trail. I need to try to find it again, and then I’m probably going to need to cast a don’t-look-here, because the candle is sort of conspicuous.”

“So you need privacy and maybe me to help you sniff somebody out,” said Madden. “Got it.”

I offered him a wan smile, closed my eyes, and breathed in deeply, looking for the thin ribbon of August’s magic.

Instead, the smell of smoke and roses punched me in the nose, thick and cloying enough that I gasped and staggered backward, dropping the candle. Simon was there to catch me, the line of his body so similar to Sylvester’s that some deep-buried instinct said safe and allowed me to go limp. He still grunted with the effort of keeping me from hitting the floor.

“Toby?” Madden sounded alarmed. As well he should. The smell of my own magic was hanging in the air: cut-grass and copper and the faint, ashen scent of a spell that had been released too quickly, more charred away than dismissed. I might not be visible from the street, but anyone who came over to the bookstore side looking to surreptitiously use the bathroom was going to get an eyeful of pure, unadulterated Dóchas Sidhe.

“Sorry.” I got my feet back under myself, coughing a little as I stood. This time, I breathed more shallowly. The scent of August’s magic was just as strong. I turned to Simon. His eyes were wide; he was staring at me. I stared back.

“She was here,” I said. “August was here. Madden. Have there been any fae around recently that you don’t know? She’d have shown up . . . I don’t know, sometime in the last year. Red hair. Might have a funny way of talking, like she doesn’t really know what words mean anymore.”

Madden shook his head. “No, no one,” he said.

I paused.

Madden is Cu Sidhe, a fairy dog, in the same way that Tybalt is a fairy cat. With the shapeshifters, there’s always a little bleed between their fae and animal natures. They seem oddly human in animal form, sitting up like people or using their paws to grasp objects like they’ve forgotten about their lack of opposable thumbs. They seem a little bit animal in human form. Tybalt’s tendency to curl his tongue when he yawns, for example, or the way he sometimes looks at me through sleepy, half-closed eyes, utterly feline, utterly content.

Cu Sidhe have different mannerisms naturally. They’re a different breed of beast. With Madden, one of the big tells that he isn’t quite human is the way he moves his head. Humans—and people shaped like them—usually rotate from the chin, shaking or nodding in a way that’s difficult to describe with other words, but which reads as “normal.” Madden shook and nodded his head from the nose first, more like a canine than a man. It was a small thing, not enough to betray his fae nature under any ordinary circumstances. There are entirely human people out there with stranger affectations.

But he was shaking his head from the chin. This wasn’t right.

“Madden, do they still sell lemonade next door?” I asked carefully.

He brightened, looking relieved to be back on familiar ground. “Oh, sure,” he said, with a bob of his head—a bob that originated, in the canine manner, with his nose. “Do you want me to get you some? Sugar’s good when you’ve had a shock.”

“No, I’m good,” I said. “Have you seen an unfamiliar redheaded woman around here recently?”

Again, he shook his head; again, the shake started with the chin, human-style. “No, no one,” he said.

Simon looked between the two of us, eyes narrowing as he caught on. “Interesting,” he said. “October?”

“Give me a second.” I focused on Madden, squinting as I looked for signs that he was under some sort of a spell.

Illusions often manifest as a glitter in the air, but this wouldn’t be an illusion; illusions can’t make a person act in an abnormal way. Illusions can’t make people lie. Illusions are lies, pretty and static and unchanging. So there was no glitter, and that made sense, because this wasn’t an illusion. This was something else.

The first time I’d seen someone else’s spell, I hadn’t been able to understand what I was looking at, because seeing magic meant I could manipulate it, and manipulating magic wasn’t part of the Daoine Sidhe skillset I’d been raised thinking was my own. Dóchas Sidhe turn out to work a little differently. So I squinted, and I squinted, and finally, there it was, a hairline web of knots and tangles in the air around Madden. It was made of a thousand tiny threads, smoky gray and pale, pale red, so that they should have been pink and yet somehow weren’t.

“What do you see?” asked Simon, his voice so close to my ear that I nearly jumped.

“Something,” I said. The spell was intricate and delicately woven. This was a masterpiece. Anything I did to it would damage the work of someone who had more power and more experience than I could dream of having.