Page 39 of Night and Silence

“I’ll be careful,” I said. “I have my phone. If the police show up to hurry you along, call me, and I’ll come to wherever you are.” Not out of the question. The police in Berkeley could be overenthusiastic about keeping the residential neighborhoods free of what they considered to be “riffraff.”

“So call me,” said Quentin.

I blinked. “What?”

“Right now. Call me.”

It made sense. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and selected his number, dialing. His phone began to ring almost immediately. He produced it, answered, and raised it to his ear.

“You hear me?” he asked.

“Twice,” I said, into my own phone. His shoulders relaxed. “I’m going in now. Wish me luck.”

“Open roads,” he said, and hung up.

There was nothing more for us to do outside. Turning on my heel, I walked away from my friends and toward the waiting house.

The closer I got, the more superficial the damage appeared. The fire had been bad enough to blacken the paint and warp the remaining glass in the window panes, but it didn’t seem to have done much in the way of structural damage. I felt a pang of déjà vu as I stepped onto a porch I wasn’t sure would hold me for the second time in a day. This one was brick and plaster, not rotting wood, and it didn’t so much as shift beneath my feet.

A gentle push moved the door out of my way and I was inside, walking into a charred maze of damaged furniture and fallen plaster. The roof seemed to have mostly held, but the ceiling had partially collapsed, revealing beams and insulation. If not for the spell keeping intruders of all species out, there would have been raccoons living up there, taking advantage of the shelter from the weather and the lack of human occupants.

Moving into the center of the room, I took a shallow breath to acquaint myself with the scents of fire damage and mildew, filing them away as inconsequential elements of the atmosphere. Then, bracing myself, I inhaled as deeply as I could, sifting through every scrap of scent, looking for something—anything—that would tell me who had spun these spells, who had brought Gillian to this place. Anything.

The air seemed to chill. No, not really: it wasn’t getting colder, but it smelled like it was colder, like the winter wind rolling across the surface of the sea. The scent of rowan wood was interlaced with that chill, the one feeding into the other, the tree blighted by a winter that would never, could never end. I gasped, and the air it brought into my lungs intensified both scents, until I was no longer sure I could keep my balance, until the urge to drop to my knees and weep was so strong that I could barely stand it.

“No,” I said to the empty room. It was too small to carry an echo, but I felt like it should have, like it should bounce my voice back to me, magnify it, make it big enough to fill the world. “No, this isn’t possible.”

But when I breathed in again, the scent remained unchanged. Cold, and rowan, and the sea. It wasn’t possible. It couldn’t be possible. It was.

I pulled out my phone. Walther picked up on the second ring.

“Hello?”

“Walther, does your sister have a phone?”

There was a long pause as he processed that question. Finally, he said, “Yes, Marlis has a phone. Also, hi. Also, what does my sister have to do with anything?”

“I need you to call her. I need you to ask her whether your family still has their sleepers safely imprisoned.”

“Why are you—”

“Do it.” I hung up and stuffed the phone back into my pocket before turning, slowly, to look at the room around me. I didn’t want to be here. I didn’t want to be doing this, didn’t want to be searching this place like this was an ordinary case on an ordinary day. I wanted to scream. I wanted to run. I wanted my daughter back, and I wanted none of this to be happening, and I couldn’t have any of the things I wanted. Maybe I never could.

Before Arden took the throne in the Mists, before I learned that queens could be kind—self-interested, yes, but still kind—a woman without a name had called herself our queen, had worn the crown and wielded her power like a cudgel, using it to crush anyone who would oppose her. She had been a puppet with no real claim to the position she held, put in place by Eira Rosynhwyr after the death of King Gilad. She was a mixed-blood, Siren and Sea Wight and Banshee all blended together in a soup so confusing and intoxicating that no one had asked how a Tuatha de Dannan king could have been her father until it had been too late to take the title away from her with anything short of a war.

Everyone’s magic is unique. No two people have the exact same mixture of scents, the exact same balance between them. That’s how I can use it as a way to track down the source and caster of a spell. Like blood, magic is unique. I had smelled this magic before. It belonged to the false Queen of the Mists.

And that wasn’t possible, because she was elf-shot and sleeping away a century in the Kingdom of Silences. Her former lover, Rhys, had been their pretender king, and I had helped to depose him, too, leaving them both to spend a hundred years in an enchanted slumber where they couldn’t hurt anyone.

Of course, I had also helped Walther develop a treatment for elf-shot. If she was free, if she had somehow woken up and escaped, I had no one to blame but myself.

I took a shaky breath, forcing myself to calm down, and breathed in again, finding the source of the scent. Holding it firmly in my mind, I followed it deeper into the house, stepping over the worst of the charred places, passing the burnt-out bathroom and what might have been a nursery once, going by the streaky pastel colors that still remained on the walls.

At the back of the house, almost untouched by the flames, was the master bedroom. It was still fully furnished. Mold had blossomed on the bedclothes and the bookshelves, painting them in a dozen soft shades of green. I barely noticed. I was too busy staring at the bed, struggling to breathe through the adrenaline and fear. It felt like my heart had come loose and was ricocheting around inside my body, never quite finding its rhythm.

Gillian was lying in the middle of the bed, sound asleep.

TEN