Page 61 of The Brightest Fell

Which meant there was really no point in being delicate, if I was going to wreck the whole thing anyway. “This may sting,” I said, and reached toward Madden, hooking my fingers in the air like I was preparing to do macramé. The spell should have been too far away for me to touch, but it responded to the gesture like it had been trained, surging toward my hand.

I yanked.

The spell unraveled in the smell of smoke and roses, filling the air around us until it seemed like the smoke alarms would start screaming, telling everyone in the next room that the building was on fire. No such thing happened. Instead, Madden gasped, clutching his chest as if in sudden pain, and turned wide, surprisingly canine eyes on me. His human disguise was slipping. Not as badly as mine had—his ears were still round and his hair was still blond, rather than red and white—but still. That was worrisome.

“Are you okay?” I asked, shaking my hand in a vague effort to wipe away the last of August’s magic. It was clinging like bad perfume, refusing to let me go. “Madden, talk to me.”

“I—you—she was here.” He had the presence of mind to lower his voice when he clearly wanted to shout. Every line of his body was tense; everything about the way he looked at me screamed dismay and violation. “The redheaded woman, the one who smells sort of like you but different, she was here. She came the same time you did. When you were looking for Arden? Remember?”

“I remember,” I said gently.

I remembered a woman in a white peasant blouse with hair that was an odd shade of silvery-red, like something that came from a bottle rather than growing from a human head. She’d been in the bookstore, making a purchase, sizing up Jude, the general manager. At the time, I’d assumed she was an ordinary customer, maybe one with an understandable if unlikely to work out crush on a pretty bookseller. There hadn’t been anything about her that screamed “fae” . . .

But she’d held the door open a fraction of a second longer than she had to, giving me time to make it inside despite the don’t-look-here that should have concealed me from her. At the time, I’d written it off as luck. Maybe it had been something more.

“She came—I think she came because she was looking for a place to hide. She followed the magic. Jude and Alan . . .” Madden’s cheeks flushed red with shame. “They’re good people, you know? Real good bosses. They’re not assholes at all. But they’re humans. They’ve already been pixie-led.”

Which was another way of saying he and Arden had done their share of messing with Jude and Alan’s heads when they felt they had to, using magic to cover up the small slips that inevitably happen when humans and the fae were existing in close quarters. “It wouldn’t have been hard for her to piggyback on the spells that had already been used on them,” I said grimly. “Madden, what did she do?”

“She . . . made them think she belonged here. That she’d always belonged here. They know Arden left, but they think she was a seasonal hire, that it was August who was supposed to be in the store. She doesn’t do any work, she doesn’t know how, but she’s always here.” Madden shuddered. “She made it so I couldn’t say anything about her being here, or anything about it being wrong. I wanted to.” He paused, eyes widening in horror. “She made me lie to Arden. Am I . . . is that treason? For a seneschal to lie to a queen?”

“Not when you’re being magically compelled. You didn’t have a choice,” I said, hurrying to reassure him. “There was nothing you could have done. Where is she now?”

He raised a shaking hand and pointed at the basement door. Of course. The Borderlands basement was where terrible things waited to happen to me. Sometimes those terrible things later turned out to be friends, but that didn’t make them any less terrible while they were happening.

“Okay,” I said, and grabbed the lingering traces of August’s magic from the air, twisting them into a don’t-look-here as fast as I could before throwing it over myself and Simon. I didn’t bother with a new human disguise. It wasn’t like anybody would be able to see it.

Madden kept his eyes focused on me so he wouldn’t lose track of where I was. When I was finished casting, he wrinkled his nose and said, “That spell smelled like one of hers.”

“Makes sense,” I said. “I mostly used her magic to cast it. Is the basement door unlocked?” Don’t-look-here spells aren’t true invisibility. Picking a lock would probably be unusual enough to get us noticed, if anyone happened to be looking.

“It should be,” said Madden. He grabbed a fistful of air, expertly patching his human disguise. When he was done, he looked exactly like he had when we first came in. He glanced uncomfortably at the doorway. “Be careful, okay? I can’t come down to save you. Not while I’m in the middle of my shift.”

“We’ll be fine,” I said. “She probably didn’t mean any harm. She’s been missing for a long time, and needed a place to stay while she figured stuff out. Arden leaving made a hole. She filled it.” That didn’t explain why she’d been playing house in a science fiction bookstore instead of finding our mother or presenting herself to the queen, but those were questions we’d be able to answer shortly, when we found her. Assuming she didn’t attack us on sight or anything else unpleasant like that.

“Okay,” said Madden. “Please let me know you’re okay when it’s all done.”

“I will,” I promised.

He nodded—from the nose this time—and walked past us, returning to the café. I stayed where I was, counting slowly to ten, before motioning for Simon to follow me to the basement door.

A good don’t-look-here spell makes you seem like part of the landscape, or like someone else’s problem. As long as we didn’t directly interact with any of the bleary-eyed morning customers on the other side of the rope, they would take no notice of us. Carefully, we crept across the bookstore to our destination. Madden was right: the door was unlocked.

The light on the other side was off. Turning it on would definitely be a big enough change in the environment to attract attention. Silently thanking Oberon for fae night vision, I eased my way through the door and onto the steps beyond, descending a few paces before I turned and beckoned Simon to follow.

He hesitated. For one terrible moment, I expected him to slam the door, turn, and run. Instead, he stepped through and closed the door behind himself, casting us both into darkness. It was strange. Being shut in a dark stairwell with Simon Torquill should have given me pause, or maybe a mild panic attack. All I could actually feel was relief. We had both made it this far. With as strong as the traceries of magic were upstairs, we didn’t have all that far to go.

The basement had no windows, and the seal on the door was remarkably good: no light was making its way in. Fae eyes are good, but they’re not that good. “I’m going to turn the lights on,” I whispered, voice barely more than a breath.

Simon didn’t respond, but there was a faint shifting sound, as if he had braced himself. Good. Having sensitive eyes is sometimes as much a curse as it is a blessing. I reached past him and clicked the switch. Light sprang into being, filling the basement with a soft white glow.

I was looking directly at Simon’s face, pale and pinched, his eyes squinted tightly shut. He cracked one of them cautiously open before his face went slack, caution forgotten utterly as he opened both eyes in silent, staring shock.

I started to turn. That was a bad idea. Changing positions meant that the fist caught me square in the nose, sending me reeling backward.

Right.

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