Page 17 of Night and Silence

“Think about it.” As Crown Prince of the Westlands, Quentin was expected to learn as much as possible about the continent he’s eventually going to rule. Going to college would certainly be an educational experience. His parents might not like what it taught him, but hey, his parents probably didn’t like most of what he was learning from me, and they hadn’t taken him back to Toronto.

We reached the edge of the campus, where it spilled into the tree-lined avenues of the city itself. Small neighborhood stores warred for space among the satellite campus buildings and the dorms. We kept walking.

According to Cliff’s text, Gillian was in off-campus housing, not a dorm but not one of the sororities either. A residence building rented by a coalition of students, probably from an alumnus or one of the satellite schools. It gave them a place to live without forcing them to share space with as many people as they would have encountered in a proper dormitory.

The trade-off was worse security and more isolation—good when it came to privacy, bad when it came to anyone seeing what happened when, say, the whole place was vandalized. Madden whined, scenting trouble a beat before we came around a bend in the sidewalk and saw the stately old Victorian house with the caution tape around the outside of the yard and the police cars parked along the sidewalk. Their lights were off, and their sirens were no longer screaming, but that didn’t matter. The sight of them was enough to knock the breath out of my body and leave my skin feeling suddenly too tight. May put a hand on my arm, supposedly to steady me, but really to steady us both.

This was a crime scene. A crime had been committed here. A crime that had involved my daughter, my child, who was now missing.

I hit the base of the driveway and kept walking, faster all the time, until it felt like I was barely on the slow side of breaking into a run. A man on the porch saw us coming and moved, presumably to tell me I couldn’t be here.

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.