Page 66 of The Unkindest Tide

I turned back to Mathias. “Sorry about that: my fiancé is pretty protective. But that means your husband will be walking with a very impatient, very highly-strung King of Cats, and a hero of the realm, and her personal squire. He’ll be as safe as we can make him.”

“Your personal squire, the Crown—”

“Okay, I really need you to stop saying that,” I said. “Please. Quentin is with me on a blind fosterage, and if news of his parentage gets out in the Mists, or news of his location gets out back in Beacon’s Home, it could endanger him and force his parents to call him home. I’m not done training him, and even though it would mean a serious reduction in my grocery bills, I’ve gotten fond of the little jerk. So do me a favor and stop endangering my squire.”

“Or the King of Cats will eat me?” asked Mathias.

“No, but you’ll piss me off, and I’m pretty sure that’s worse.”

“She’s right,” said Quentin. “It’s way worse. I would prefer the flesh wounds.”

“I can’t tell whether I’m being insulted or you’re being flattered,” said Tybalt.

“Again, go with ‘both’ and move on,” I said, keeping my attention on Mathias. “You need to let René go with us. I will do my utmost to guarantee that he stays safe.”

“Let her,” said Liz. “She has a remarkably good track record, all things considered. She almost never comes back with unexpected corpses.”

“That’s not encouraging,” said Mathias . . . but he let go of René’s arm. The other man rose, turned back, and bent to press a kiss to Mathias’ forehead, lingering there for a long moment.

“I’ll come back to you,” he said softly, voice so low and intimate that I felt almost like I was intruding. Only almost. Their farewell was important; so was the dead woman.

“See to it,” said Mathias.

René nodded and walked over to join the rest of us. There was nothing left to say, and so we simply left. We had work to do.

SIXTEEN

THE BEACH WAS STILL deserted. I paused, frowning.

“René, your sister—you lived with her at some point, right? After you’d both received your skins?” Most fae have extremely low birthrates, a consequence of being functionally immortal. If we bred the way humans do, we would have overrun the world centuries ago, leaving no room for anything else. Sometimes I think that might have been better. Most of the time, I think we would have just come up with different ways of ruining absolutely everything.

René nodded. “Her skin was worn by our mother; my skin was worn by our grandfather. There’s a tradition in our family of marrying kin who were never offered a skin of their own. That way, we never lose sight of the fact that mortality comes for us all. That’s why I had to leave for Beacon’s Home when I fell in love with Mathias. He wasn’t clan leader yet—he wasn’t even sure he was in the running—but he couldn’t come to live with me, because by my clan’s rules, we couldn’t have been married. We were both Selkies, and that simply wasn’t done, especially not by the old chief’s son.”

“Okay, the family history is nice, but irrelevant to my actual question. Can you describe the scent of your sister’s magic? In as much detail as possible, please.” I’d never had the chance to smell Isla in the act of spellcasting. The scent might linger on her sealskin, but I wouldn’t know that for sure until I found the person who’d stolen it.

“Chicory and phlox,” said René. “It’s a lot like mine. Here.” He held out his hand, brow furrowing as he whistled a few notes of a song that sounded distinctly similar to the sort of weird maritime folk that Quentin sometimes decided to blast in the middle of the day. That’s the real connection between folk music and the fae: it’s easier to whistle than heavy metal.

The smell of chicory and cypress filled the air as the space above his palm transitioned from perfect clarity to cloudy gray, finally becoming a black-and-white image of a younger Isla, laughing as she spun on the bare toes of one foot, her other foot held out at a stabilizing angle. She wasn’t particularly graceful. Selkies never are. But there was a joy to her that had been absent the one time I’d seen her alive, a lightness that spoke to the way she saw her place in the world.

“Everyone thought I was going to take over when Mom passed her skin along,” said René, eyes on the spinning specter of his sister. “I’d been a Selkie for almost five years before Isla was chosen. I’d carried myself with dignity and pride. But then Mathias happened, and there was no way for us to be together and me to lead the clan, so I stepped aside, and Isla had to change her plans.”

“That sucks,” said Quentin softly. His eyes were on the spinning Selkie woman, and I didn’t know how to read the expression on his face. We’d been together long enough that I could usually tell what he was thinking, but now . . .

He had a sister in Toronto. Penthea, second in line for the throne. If he chose to step aside for some reason, he’d be doing to her what René had accidentally done to Isla. For the first time, I saw why his parents might be concerned about his attachment to the Mists. After all, we were the ones with the power to turn a prince’s head.

“Yeah.” René closed his hand. The dancing figure of Isla disappeared as he looked at me. “Did that give you what you needed?”

“I guess we’re going to find out,” I said, and closed my eyes, taking a deep breath.

What felt like hundreds of magical traces struck me at the same time, and I staggered. Tybalt was there to catch me and hold me up, one hand under my right arm and the other clamped around the curve of my waist, supporting and stabilizing me. I clutched at his arms, eyes still closed, and breathed in again, even deeper this time.

The magical assault on my nose and lungs was actually, physically painful. I swallowed, forcing myself to keep going. This shouldn’t be so hard, I thought, reeling under the assault. This is what I was made to do.

The Dóchas Sidhe. Faerie’s bloodhounds—literally. We’re more attuned to blood than any other kind of fae I’ve ever encountered, and that includes both the Daoine Sidhe and the Baobhan Sith. We can bend it to our desires, shifting a person’s body along the scale between immortality and the grave, and since magic is a function of the blood, we can track individuals by the scents they leave behind as they walk through the world. But there was so much, and it was so thick—

Not letting myself think too hard about what I was about to do, I closed my teeth on my tongue, wincing against the bright bolt of pain that followed. The wound was already healing by the time I unclenched my jaw, flesh knitting back together with a distracting, tingling itch. Hot blood filled my mouth. I swallowed as much as I could, hoping it would be enough to prevent me from needing to do that again. I’ve gotten over a lot of my issues with blood—it helps that I’ve been covered in the stuff so many times at this point that I’d never get out of bed if I hated it like I used to—but it’s always better when I can avoid bleeding more than absolutely necessary.

The world seemed to slow as the blood reached my stomach, amplifying my magic in an almost indescribable way. How it can work when the blood is my own doesn’t make sense; I shouldn’t be able to use my magic to fuel my magic. But it does work, and that’s what matters, especially when I need to find the place where an innocent woman died.