Page 20 of Night and Silence

“It’s a collection of herbs specifically designed to repel the fae,” I said grimly. May and I exchanged a look. “There’s no way she would have known how to make this without someone showing her.”

“Lovely,” muttered May.

“Yeah,” I agreed, and went back to rooting through the dresser while Quentin wrapped the sachet in foil.

There was a sachet in every drawer. By the time I closed the last one, my nose was running and my eyes were burning, like the allergy attack I’d never particularly wanted to have. Even worse, my natural tendency to heal from every little thing didn’t seem to be kicking in. If I wanted to go playing with unfamiliar magical items, I could just pay the consequences.

I was wiping my eyes and trying not to sneeze again when Jocelyn came thundering up the stairs, a denim jacket clutched in both hands. She stopped in the doorway, eyes going wide before her face fell in sudden, sympathetic sorrow.

“Oh, I didn’t even think,” she wailed. “She’s your daughter and I was just talking about how amazing you are, not how much you must miss her and how scared you must be. Well, don’t you worry. I’ll take you right straight to where they found her car. You can find out everything you need to know.”

“Here’s hoping,” I said uneasily. She must have taken my red eyes and runny nose as the aftereffects of weeping. Good. Better that than having her figure out the truth. Her blood was thin enough that the charms hadn’t been bothering her, and I didn’t want her to suddenly realize what they were or what they were supposed to have been doing.

There was nothing in the room to indicate who might have taken Gilly. I didn’t like those sachets, and I desperately wanted to know where they’d come from, but they didn’t feel malicious to me. Whoever had made those for Gilly had been trying to keep the fae away from her. Did that mean she had been in danger? Or did it just mean that she was going to a school where a certain amount of magical thinking was innate in the student body, and someone had managed to get lucky?

I needed to talk to Bridget. If anyone would know how many of the students had decided they needed to put up wards against Tinker Bell, it would be her.

Jocelyn continued to beam, smile only wavering for an instant when she saw Quentin slip the foil-wrapped sachet into his pocket. “What’s that?” she asked suspiciously. “I don’t think I’m supposed to let people take things.”

I refrained from pointing out that she probably wasn’t supposed to let people into the room, either, or leave them alone while she ran off to get her coat. It wouldn’t do us any good to alienate the closest thing we currently had to a lead. “My lunch,” I said. “The dog was getting way too interested in it, and he needs to keep a clear nose.”

As if on cue, Madden walked over and stuck his nose against the crotch of her jeans in classic canine fashion. Jocelyn laughed shrilly and bent to start patting his head. While she had clearly been able to see through the illusions that made him look like a Golden retriever, she gave no indication she suspected him of being anything other than some kind of fancy fairy dog. The education her mother had given her on the fae had clearly skipped over a few places. Most people aren’t that comfortable petting the Cu Sidhe.

I nodded toward Quentin while Jocelyn was distracted, signaling him to come forward. He grimaced but did as he was bid, stepping up and putting his hand on Jocelyn’s shoulder.

“Hey,” he said. “Lead the way?”

Jocelyn blushed and dimpled as she turned to do exactly that. Quentin followed. I picked up Madden’s leash and looked to May.

“Don’t-look-here and keep searching,” I said tightly. “I’ll text you with our location.”

May sighed. “I thought you might say that,” she said. Raking her fingers through the air, she gathered two handfuls of shadows and muttered something under her breath in a language I didn’t know. The air rippled, folding around her. As soon as I looked away, I knew I’d lose track of her. Don’t-look-here spells don’t make people literally invisible. They just make them . . . difficult. Difficult to see, difficult to care about seeing. As long as May didn’t break anything or otherwise call the kind of attention to herself that couldn’t be ignored, she’d be fine.

“See if there’s anything else around here like those sachets,” I said. “I don’t like them. Something’s off about this.”

If she answered me, it was quiet enough and far enough behind the spell that I couldn’t make it out. I turned and followed the others down the stairs.

They had just reached the bottom—and more importantly, Jocelyn was just starting to look put out over my absence—when I got there. She relaxed at the sight of me. “I was afraid we’d lost you!” she said chirpily.

“I’m difficult to lose,” I replied. “Lead the way.”

Voices around the side of the house alerted me to the location of the missing police as we stepped off the porch and onto the lawn. Jocelyn made a shushing noise and motioned for us to follow her away from the house, waiting until we were a good distance down the sidewalk before she said, “I sort of didn’t tell anyone you were here. How did you get in, anyway?”

“Magic,” I said.

Predictably, her eyes lit up. “Oh, wow. Oh, gosh. I can’t wait to tell Mom I met you. Did I tell you she used to know you, when she was my age? She—”

Jocelyn kept chattering as we walked down the sidewalk, Quentin and I looking carefully in all directions, Madden keeping his nose pressed to the ground like he could sniff out all of Berkeley, like he could solve any mystery if he breathed in deeply enough. I understood the feeling. More and more, my magic was leading me by the nose, telling me what I needed to know as long as I was careful not to catch a cold.

Of course, right now, my nose was so stuffed up from inhaling that weird herbal mix that I was sort of impressed I could still breathe at all. Gillian had been turning herself into a big walking allergen.

Allergen . . . “Hey, Jocelyn,” I said casually, interrupting her explanation of this one time her mother had been in San Francisco and saw a real kelpie, “do you have allergies?”

Jocelyn wrinkled her nose. “I never used to, but they’ve been really bad this semester,” she admitted. Then she brightened. “Why? Are there some sort of magic flowers that bloom once a century getting pollen everywhere? That would explain everything.”

The way she talked about Faerie was almost endearing. She had the sort of wide-eyed wonder I hadn’t possessed since I was a very small child. It was definitely exhausting. Only the fact that we were at UC Berkeley—a campus which I knew for a fact hosted multiple live-action roleplaying games every week, as well as meetings of the Society for Creative Anachronism—kept me from slapping my hand over her mouth and reminding her, in no uncertain terms, that Faerie is supposed to be a secret.

Letting her chatter didn’t hurt anything. Anyone who heard her would assume she was talking about something that didn’t exist. Trying to convince her to shut up would draw a lot more attention to us. And maybe if I kept telling myself that, I’d be able to believe it. The habits of secrecy had been so ground into me, for so long, that this felt like I was breaking the rules, even though I wasn’t saying anything forbidden.