Page 28 of Night and Silence

Madden whined, looking back and forth like he was confused. I mimicked the gesture, checking the sidewalk. Too many people could see us. We needed to keep the don’t-look-here going for a few more minutes.

Somehow, I thought it was about to become irrelevant.

“Quentin, keep the spell going,” I said. I let go of May’s hand and my human disguise at the same time. Raising my thumb to my mouth, I bit down hard enough to break the skin. Fresh blood filled my mouth as the smell of cut grass and copper settled all around me.

The brick shimmered. I narrowed my eyes, biting even harder, coaxing more blood from a wound that was trying to heal even as I ripped it open. Blood magic has always been my strength, the one form of magic where I’m as adept as any pureblood. Given enough blood, I can reshape the world.

Gold-and-silver threads shimmered in the air in front of the wall. I reached out with my free hand, making a tugging gesture. Not enough to break them, since the disappearance of a brick wall would probably attract attention we didn’t want. Just enough to . . . move them a little bit. To let me see what they were hiding.

The brick warped, not dissolving, but becoming momentarily translucent. I glanced at Quentin. He was still frowning at the wall, not seeming to see the change. That was fine. That was something I could work with.

“Grab my sleeve,” I said, voice garbled by my mouthful of thumb.

He didn’t argue. He just grabbed hold, reaching out to take May’s hand for good measure. I bit down one more time, getting a fresh gout of blood. Then I pulled my spit-and-blood–covered thumb out of my mouth and started forward, grabbing the scruff of Madden’s neck as I passed him. He yelped but didn’t bite. Thank Oberon for that. I heal fast, but I feel pain like anybody else. I’d rather not walk into a brick wall while trying to keep an angry Cu Sidhe from ripping my arm off.

The wall was still shimmering, still shot through with those gold-and-silver threads. I swallowed the last of the blood and took a confident step forward, bracing myself against the moment when my face impacted with the brick.

It didn’t. My first step carried us past the beginning of the wall, into a charcoal-colored void as disconcerting as it was intentional. Whoever had crafted this spell wanted to be absolutely sure that any humans who happened to blunder into it somehow—say at dawn, when almost all standing spellwork was weaker—wouldn’t feel the need to keep going. Most people don’t like being dropped into formless darkness.

It’s not my favorite thing in the world. But the Cait Sidhe have access to the Shadow Roads, which are basically formless darkness with a side order of freezing cold, and Tybalt took me there with reasonable frequency. This darkness was room temperature. It was going to have to work a lot harder to get a rise out of me. I took another step forward, pulling my people with me through the dark, out the other side, into a place that shouldn’t have been possible.

We were still in the mortal world: the sky was the slate gray characteristic of California winters, and the space where we stood was hemmed in on all sides by tall brick walls. Some of them had windows, and I wondered what the occupants saw when they looked out. An empty, inaccessible courtyard? Or the building on the other side of it, somehow rendered closer than the actual architecture allowed?

They couldn’t see what we saw. They couldn’t see us. If they had, there was no way Faerie would have been able to stay a secret, because this would have been enough, all by itself, to blow the doors right off.

“Whoa,” said Quentin.

“Yeah,” I agreed.

The courtyard was about the size of the surrounding buildings, maybe eighty feet wide by a hundred or so feet deep. It was contained, encysted into the architecture of the block like a worm inside an apple. Plants that had no business growing in the mortal world bloomed everywhere I looked, ignoring the fact that it was December in favor of putting out a riotous assortment of fruits and flowers. A moon-apple tree and a sun-apple tree tangled their branches together, forming a puzzle box lace of twigs and leaves, holding each other up under the weight of their dense harvest of gold-and-silver fruit. A line of goblin fruit bushes grew against one of the walls. I shuddered and looked away, toward the center of the courtyard.

The back wall was the only place where no vines climbed, where no trees grew. Instead, what looked like an old-fashioned human house huddled there, paint peeling and roof flaking, its porch slanted at a dangerous angle. In front of it, the most jarring thing of all waited, silent and motionless.

It was a house in miniature, the sort of house a particularly doting parent might build in their backyard for a beloved child. The walls were straight and sound, the roof was perfect; everything about it was perfect. The front door was large enough for a six-year-old, but not anything much larger. It was settled in the middle of a vast, tangled nest, its feathery chicken legs tucked up underneath its foundations. It had no eyes, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was watching us.

“Quentin, drop the don’t-look-here,” I said tightly.

The scent of steel and heather overwhelmed the perfume of the flowers around us as the spell dropped away. Madden rose on two legs, a man once more as he moved closer to the group. I understood the sentiment. No one sensible would want to be here alone, not with that little chicken-legged house keeping watch.

“This shouldn’t be here,” muttered May. I glanced her way. She shook her head. “I have the memories of a dozen people who’ve lived in this town, and none of them knew anything about this sort of garden.”

“And I used to work for a man who treated secrets like air,” I said grimly. “If Devin had known about this place . . .” I let the sentence die.

If Devin had known about this place, he would have been trading the kids who depended on him to keep them safe for bushels of apples, for the carrots that poked out of the soft earth in front of the berry bushes. Earth carrots come in a lot of colors, but they don’t glitter. There had to be some pureblood, somewhere, who was willing to pay the world for carrots that tasted the way they remembered carrots tasting when they were young and the doors to deeper Faerie were open.

“That house is looking at me,” said Quentin.

“Which one?” asked May.

“Yes,” said Quentin.

His tone was flatly confused, and somehow, that snapped me out of my own frozen contemplation. “Madden.” I turned. “Where is she? Where does the trail go from here?”

“Um.” He sniffed the air, then sneezed. “Too many scents. I’m sorry. I followed her this far, but this is where everything gets sort of fuzzy.”

The little house stood up.

It was a quick, efficient gesture: it just got its feet under itself and pushed off, rising from its nest and revealing the full length of its scaled orange legs. It scratched a few times, like it was reassuring itself of its balance, and then it hopped out of the nest, strutting deeper into the courtyard. We all watched it go, momentarily united in our amazement.