Page 27 of Night and Silence

I snapped back into my own body with a gasp, turning to stare at my companions. There was blood on my lips, hot and sticky and almost entirely my own. I spat the sucked-clean cube of glass into my palm and used the back of my other hand to wipe my face.

“She was alive when they took her,” I said, voice barely shaking. I wanted to be proud of that. I couldn’t muster the energy. Gillian’s pain echoed through every nerve in my body, reminding me of how much she had suffered. How much she could still be suffering. She didn’t heal like I did. Any injuries she’d incurred during her abduction would remain, sketched on her skin like a memoir of trauma.

“Good,” said Bridget firmly. “That means you have time to find her. Is there anything I can do to help you?”

I started to refuse, then paused, considering her offer and my options. “That sachet,” I said finally. “Can you take it to Walther and have him see what he can make of it? It’s better if none of us tries to carry it.”

“Of course,” said Bridget. “I’ll call you as soon as I have answers.” She sounded relieved. Belatedly, I realized we’d dumped all this on her without warning. She cared about us; she wanted to help; she was so far out of her depth that she couldn’t find it with a map. Being given a task to perform that got her away from the rest of us must have seemed like a blessing.

I turned. “Madden . . . ”

“I have Gillian’s.” He bobbed his head, doglike, eyes on me. “Between the room and the blood, I have her scent. If we go back to where the car is, I can follow it. Now that we know she’s alive, I can follow.”

I wanted to cry. I wanted to throw my arms around him and thank him forever. I settled for nodding. “Then we go. Bridget, call me.”

“I will,” she said. “Open roads, October. And good luck.”

Hearing such a traditional farewell from human lips was strange, but not unpleasant. “Kind fires,” I said, and moved for the door, the rest of my motley little band trailing behind me, leaving Bridget to the remains of her morning. Madden dropped back onto four feet before he left the room, choosing efficiency. The makeshift leash and vest May had crafted for him didn’t reappear.

Before I could point out that unleashed dogs were probably against school rules, Quentin waved a hand and muttered something under his breath, flooding the hall with the scent of steel and heather. The weight of the don’t-look-here fell across us like a shroud, making my ears itch. I shot Quentin a glare. He responded with a silent, exaggerated shrug.

It was a good move. It was the move of someone who knew how close I was running to the limitations of my magic and wanted to be sure I wouldn’t incapacitate myself before we knew what we were up against. It’s a little scary sometimes how well Quentin knows me, how prepared he is to risk himself to protect me from my own decisions. He’s been my squire for a long time. I didn’t want him in the beginning. Now, I have no idea what I’m going to do with myself when he moves on.

Definitely not take on another squire. When Quentin—and by extension, Raj—were done with me, I was done with taking responsibility for random teenagers. They were an impossible act to follow, and so I wasn’t going to try.

We made our way through the cool, quiet halls and back to the faculty door, which didn’t require a key from this side. We didn’t pass anyone. That was nice, if a little eerie. It was the middle of the morning, easing on toward noon. The human world was never more awake than it was right now. They should have been everywhere, and instead, we walked alone, isolated, a few feet to the side. It was like Gillian’s disappearance had shifted the entire campus a few feet out of true, making it a twilight place even with the December sun beating relentlessly down.

Madden was the first one out the door, bounding ahead with his nose pressed to the ground and his tail held low behind him, like this was too serious a situation for wagging. It was odd. I was so accustomed to going through life escorted by cats that it was hard not to read that motionless tail as a sign of happiness, and he had no business being happy right now. None of us did. Not with Gillian missing.

No one looked our way as we moved down the path back toward the crowd of students and police surrounding Gillian’s abandoned car. Madden trotted forward, nose still to the ground, sniffing and searching as he spiraled first in, toward the vehicle, and then out, away from it. Finally, he stopped, raised his head, and looked back toward the rest of us. It wasn’t clear whether he could see us, or whether he was tracking the place his nose told him we were. It didn’t really matter.

“Go,” I murmured.

His ears perked forward. Then he turned and trotted purposefully away from the crime scene, past Wheeler Hall, toward the rest of the campus. We followed, sticking together so we wouldn’t lose sight of each other, moving around the humans who, oblivious to our presence, went about their day.

Madden reached the edge of campus and stopped. My heart lurched until I realized he was only pausing because the traffic wasn’t in his favor. Crossing a busy street as a dog is never particularly safe. Doing it as a mostly invisible dog? Seemed like a good way to become roadkill. Still, I walked a little faster, and May and Quentin matched my pace, until we were waiting on the curb next to Madden.

He glanced our way, eyes not quite focusing, and sniffed the air before barking softly.

“Yeah,” I said. “We’re here.”

The light changed. We crossed the street, still hidden by the don’t-look-here. Madden pressed his nose to the ground again, reorienting himself, and then trotted forward faster, leading us onward, away from campus and into the busy urban streets.

Berkeley is like San Francisco only in the sense that it’s a Bay Area city, blessed with good weather and tolerably decent public transportation as long as you’re only moving from city center to city center. The buildings are designed to stand up to earthquakes, or at least the newer ones are; older buildings tend to fall down a bit more easily, and the people who own them somehow never feel like investing in repairs is a good use of their money. That’s where the resemblance ends. San Francisco is a city built on hillsides, in the shadow of the sea. Berkeley is surrounded by hills, and extends up into them, but for the most part, it’s a flat territory.

Berkeley, unlike San Francisco, has space. It’s a city that knows how to sprawl, how to give a store the floor space to carry as much as it likes without turning into a maze of aisles that collide and contradict. It’s also a city that devotes a surprising amount of that space to tiny connecting roads and boulevards that are more like alleys with delusions of grandeur. Madden led us toward Shattuck Avenue and then farther down, to the vast artery of University Avenue. When the city planners were deciding whether to build “up” or “out,” they chose the latter. Berkeley sprawls.

The cars were more frequent on University, sometimes ignoring the pedestrians they could actually see. People pushed up and down the sidewalk, a jarring density of humans. I’ve lived in cities for my entire adult life. I hadn’t realized, not consciously, how much switching to keeping fae hours had insulated me from their populations. That wasn’t good. That was pureblood thinking, and it needed to stop.

My thoughts were chasing themselves in circles, a sure sign that I was terrified. I’ve always found the very human tendency to take solace in the trivial and mundane to be . . . not soothing, exactly, but useful. It’s hard to dwell when I can’t focus. And it wasn’t like there was anything else I could do. Madden was following the trail, and no matter how deeply I inhaled, I couldn’t find any trace of it. The person who’d taken Gillian had also taken the time to stop the bleeding.

I should have been grateful for that, glad my little girl hadn’t been carried through the streets of Berkeley with an open wound. All it made me feel was useless. Like I hadn’t been able to raise her, and now I couldn’t even be the one to find her.

May glanced my way and reached out to take my hand, giving it a reassuring squeeze. She didn’t say anything. Attracting attention would only have slowed us down. No one was going to look at us and demand to know how we’d suddenly appeared in the middle of the sidewalk—don’t-look-here spells are subtler than that—but as it was, when we walked toward people, they got out of our way. They created space for us to occupy. We wanted that to last.

We’d gone about three blocks when Madden stiffened, raised his nose from the ground, and barked before breaking into a run. Several pedestrians turned to watch him go, a few exclaiming at the sight of the unleashed dog racing down the street. I didn’t hesitate. I ran after him, dragging May with me, Quentin following close on our heels.

Madden didn’t slow or look back to see whether we were keeping up with him. He just ran, until we reached a blank brick wall stretched between two buildings. Too blank: every other wall in sight had been plastered with advertisements or tagged by graffiti artists. This was just brick, a tempting target for every form of urban embellishment. So why hadn’t it been tagged?