Page 21 of Night and Silence

“Not quite,” I said. “I did smell something a little funny in your room, near Gillian’s desk.”

“Oh.” Jocelyn’s face shuttered itself, expression becoming unreadable. “She doesn’t do drugs, if that’s what you’re asking. She doesn’t do anything. She goes to class, she studies with her friends, and she refuses to talk about anything worth talking about. You know, I asked her about bringing you to campus to see our classes once, and she said she didn’t want anything to do with you? Like anyone could mean that about a hero!”

My stomach clenched again. I was suddenly grateful for the burning in my eyes. It made it harder for me to tear up.

Quentin cleared his throat. “Maybe talking like that about Toby’s daughter when she’s missing isn’t really very nice, you know? Do you think you could, I dunno, cut it out?”

“Oh.” Jocelyn paled. “I’m sorry. I . . . I intended no offense.” If we hadn’t been walking, I’m pretty sure she would have dropped to her knees in her hurry to placate me.

The more time we spent with this kid, the more I wanted to shake her mother. It was one thing to encourage a thin-blooded changeling to learn more about her own heritage. I had no objection to that. It was something else altogether to teach her just enough to mess her up and then leave her to figure out how to interact with the world. Some of the mistakes Jocelyn was making could get her killed if she made them around the wrong people.

Not for the first time, I genuinely regretted the decisions I’d made in the aftermath of Devin’s death. He’d been a terrible person. There was no question of that. He had abused the trust of the kids in his care, all of whom had deserved better. I had deserved better. Dare had deserved better. But by Oberon’s eyes, at least he’d given changelings a place to go and be with people who understood. He had kept them safe from everyone but himself, and that had made him a monster, but it wouldn’t have been able to happen if there hadn’t been a need for the so-called “safety” he provided.

I should have done more to fill the void left when he’d died. I should have been there. All of us changelings who made it to adulthood with our hearts intact should have been there. And we hadn’t been.

“None taken,” I said. “Breathe.”

A faint trickle of color came back into Jocelyn’s cheeks. She kept walking.

The route she’d chosen took us across a different slice of campus than our walk to the residence hall. Trees blanketed the path, their fallen leaves making our footing treacherous. I inhaled the good green scent of them, trying to chase those awful herbs from my nose. We came around a curve, and the lazily flashing lights of campus police cars ground my heart to a stop.

Gillian’s car—a solid, dependable-looking sedan, the sort of thing it made perfect sense to send to college with a young woman living away from home for the first time—sat at the middle of a square of caution tape. That was a good thing: it hadn’t been towed or impounded yet. It was also surrounded, first by the officers who were examining it, and then by a ring of onlookers.

“Hell,” I muttered, coming to a stop. “This is a problem.”

The residence hall had been the site of vandalism, but not kidnapping. There had been no blood on the glass there, no reason to suspect foul play. Gillian’s car, on the other hand . . .

This was a real crime scene, not a mere nuisance, and there was no way the police were going to let us anywhere near it.

Jocelyn pointed at the building beyond the car. “That’s Wheeler Hall,” she said. “That’s where the English Department is. Gillian likes to study in their computer lab. She says it’s more peaceful than studying in our room.” Her tone made it clear that she disagreed with this decision.

I swallowed my first response, which was to point out that she could have just told us to go to Wheeler Hall and spared us this entire awkward walk. I also swallowed my second response, which would have been considerably less polite. In the end, I forced a shallow smile and said, “Everyone learns differently. You’ve been very helpful. We appreciate it.”

She beamed and seemed to be waiting for something. I exchanged a glance with Quentin. He shrugged.

I looked back to her, studying her expression more carefully. For all that she was smiling like a child who’d just ridden her bike without the training wheels for the very first time, there was a calculation going on behind her eyes.

“Yes?” I said finally.

“Aren’t you going to thank me?” she asked. The calculation in her eyes grew stronger.

Understanding dawned. “No,” I said. I didn’t bother keeping the disgust out of my voice. It belonged there. “I’m not in your debt, and I’m not accepting any responsibility for you. You are not my vassal. This was a mean trick, and you should be ashamed of yourself for trying to play it.”

Faerie’s relationship with gratitude is . . . well, complicated. When so many of your citizens can be bound by a careless word or a casually given promise, saying something as simple as “thank you” becomes dangerous. So it’s forbidden, or at the very least, discouraged. We don’t thank each other. We praise. We say: “that was a nice thing to do.” We flatter. We avoid the direct and inescapable display of gratitude. Naturally, this has caused some people—almost all of them either humans who’ve discovered the existence of Faerie or changelings who’ve been shoved so far to the outskirts that they lost the shape of their own heritage—to decide that saying “thank you” acknowledges an inescapable debt between the one who says it and the one who receives it.

Jocelyn’s smile guttered out like a candle in a stiff wind, and the calculation in her eyes surged to the forefront, eclipsing everything else. “It was not a mean trick,” she said mulishly. “I only want what I’m owed. That’s all. Gillian’s been sharing a room with me for months, and this is the first time I’ve even seen you. I should have been her best friend by now. We should have been sitting in your kitchen telling stories and learning important things, not standing in this mess, with these,” the sweep of her hand encompassed the paths and buildings around us, and the mass of gawkers who thronged around the caution tape, “people.” There was a sneer in her voice on the last word.

People. Oh, oak and ash, people. Jocelyn wasn’t saying anything that was actually forbidden—she sounded like an ordinary college kid being weird rather than anything more dangerous—but she was going to get there, now that she was angry, and I didn’t know what to do about it.

From the stricken look on his face, neither did Quentin. His eyes were getting wider and wider, and he was staring at Jocelyn like she was a nightmare he’d never considered could be real. Madden whined, pressing against my leg.

Jocelyn’s eyes narrowed, her lower lip pushing out into a pout. “You owe me,” she repeated.

“That strikes me as unlikely, Miss Lewis, but if you’d like to come see me during office hours, we can discuss the school’s mechanisms for settling grievances.” The new voice was female, haunted by the ghost of an Irish accent, like the speaker had been in California for so long that even her vowels were applying for citizenship.

My shoulders, locked tight with stress and fear, relaxed just the smallest bit, and I turned, a weary smile on my face. “Hi, Bridget,” I said.

“Didn’t expect to see you here this morning,” she replied, giving me a quick nod while most of her attention remained fixed on Jocelyn. “Miss Lewis? Don’t you have something else you should be doing? Something elsewhere?”