Page 29 of Night and Silence

There was something blue tangled in the branches at the edge of the nest. I barely had time to register the color before I was running, yanked forward by some intangible instinct. The little house ignored me in favor of continuing to strut away. That was a good thing. I had absolutely no idea how to fight architectural poultry.

Then I was at the nest, shoving my hands into the twisted branches and pulling out a pair of blue jeans with the knees ripped out. There was more fabric beneath them. I grabbed it, yanking until a red Berkeley sweatshirt came loose, followed by a full set of underthings. There was even a pair of shoes, shoved all the way down at the bottom. I stared at them for a moment before looking at the sweatshirt in my hands.

The fabric was dark, the same shade of red that I favored for my tank tops, because it hid the blood so well. A sob rose in my throat. I choked it down as I raised the sweatshirt to my nose, sniffing. I wasn’t Madden. I couldn’t follow a trail across a city. But when there’s blood, I will always be able to find it. It calls to me. When the blood is so closely kin to my own . . .

My nose was still stuffy from the mysterious sachets we’d found in Gillian’s room. This close, it didn’t matter. The smell of my daughter’s blood struck me hard, almost sending me reeling back. I grabbed the edge of the nest with my free hand and breathed in deeper. The blood carried no magic, no memory, nothing but the irrefutable knowledge that my daughter had been hurt, and I hadn’t been there to stop it.

“Toby?”

I turned. Quentin was a few feet behind me, an anxious expression on his face. Madden was walking in a slow spiral, his head bowed and his nostrils flaring as he tried to recover the scent without shifting back to his canine form. Only May hadn’t moved. She was still looking around the courtyard in silent wonder, drinking in the sight of a secret that the Bay Area had apparently been able to keep even from the night-haunts.

Not just from the night-haunts. There were no pixies. I forced myself to breathe in and out, slow and easy, as I scanned the trees. There were no pixies, no bogeys, none of the other small and wonderful monsters that made Faerie a healthy ecosystem. The only things I could see moving were the bumblebees flitting from flower to flower—apparently as unconcerned about the actual season as the fruit-heavy trees—and the chicken-legged house, which was now pecking at the dirt. It didn’t have a beak. “Pecking” consisted of tapping its roof against the dirt over and over again, like a foraging bird.

I looked back to Quentin. “Yeah?”

“I . . . I don’t like to say this, and please don’t get mad at me, but . . . ”

“She was never here.”

His eyes widened in shocked relief. “How did you—?”

“First, I’m the one teaching you, remember? If I couldn’t reach that conclusion before you did, I’d be a pretty lousy teacher.” Or a distraught mother holding her daughter’s bloody clothes in her hands. That was also a possibility. “But no. There’s too much blood and there’s not enough blood, and the only way that isn’t a contradiction is if she was never here.”

The clothing woven into the nest was too deliberate a clue, and there was no way the house could have disrobed her. Someone who had known about this strange and secret place had laid a false trail to bring us here, and they had stripped Gillian naked and left her clothing as a red herring. I gave the sweatshirt in my hand another bleak look.

“She was never here,” I repeated.

SEVEN

“MADDEN.”

He turned, looking almost relieved to have something to focus on apart from trying to pick up a nonexistent trail. I thrust the sweatshirt at him.

“Someone stripped Gilly and put her clothes here for us to find.” Probably someone who assumed I would be following the blood trail, or that Tybalt would be sniffing her out for me. For all that he liked to remind me that he wasn’t a bloodhound, he had a remarkably good nose. Not as good as Madden’s, but good enough that laying a false trail was only sensible. “They were smart enough to do it without magic: I’m not getting any spell traces. Can you see whether you can find any other scents on this? Anything at all?”

“Okay.” Madden strode over to take the sweatshirt, adding as he did, “I have to call Ardy once I’m done. She needs to know what we found.”

Berkeley is unincorporated territory, but the crown still has authority there. It’s still part of the kingdom. I started to nod and froze, eyes widening. “Oh, sweet Titania, have I always been this stupid?” I asked.

“What?” asked Quentin.

“Hang on,” I said, and dug my phone out of my pocket, pulling up my recent contacts. Raj was third from the top. I tapped his name and waited.

The Summerlands are outside the range of most cell towers. For a long time, one of the advantages the human world had over Faerie was the reliability of cellular phones. Then April O’Leary, the cyber-Dryad ex-Countess of Tamed Lightning, got annoyed by her inability to call her friends whenever she wanted and started upgrading everyone’s phones. At this point, they function across the Summerlands and even in the Court of Cats.

The phone rang three times before Raj picked up. “Hello?”

“Raj, I need you to come to Berkeley, find Shade—wake her if you have to—and bring her to University Avenue, between the organic gluten-free bakery with the bread braids in the window and the artisanal chocolatier.”

There was a long pause. Then: “I’m hanging up and going back to bed.”

“No, you’re not. You want to act like you’re my squire until it’s time for you to become king? This is where you live up to the title. We found something that shouldn’t exist, and Madden is going to call Arden, and she’s going to swoop in and claim it for the Divided Courts. If you want the Court of Cats to have any say in this new mystery, you need to get Shade and get your fuzzy butts to University Avenue. Call me back when you’re here.”

I hung up. When I lowered my phone, Madden was staring at me, a hurt expression on his face.

“Why did you do that?” he asked.

“Because Shade is the local Queen of Cats, and by terms of the treaty between Oberon and the Cait Sidhe, she has as much claim to this place as Queen Windermere does,” I said. “I’m not trying to take it away from Arden. I’m trying to make sure we don’t have a diplomatic incident that could have been otherwise avoided. Did you find anything on the sweatshirt?”