Page 19 of Be the Serpent

“Not counting Jessica, yes. The intruder stabbed Anthony, and she didn’t have time to pull the blade out before he got away. He was able to get Andrew to the backyard while she was . . . ” I paused to take a breath. “While she was murdering Jessica.”

“Her blood told you all this?” asked Quentin. “How close to her death did you get?”

“I rode her blood as far as I could,” I said. “It’s not the same as keeping her from dying alone, but it was all I had. She wasn’t in pain at the end. She barely felt the knife go in. Simon, when the woman you used to work for faked her own death, she was able to edit the memories in the blood she spilled so I wouldn’t see what had actually happened. Do you know any magic that would let someone do that?”

“My keeper was rightly proud of her ability to manipulate blood, saying blood was the foundation of all magic, and her mastery over it proved she was more valuable to Faerie than any other of her mother’s descent,” said Simon, in the measured, careful tone he always seemed to adopt these days when he couldn’t avoid talking about Evening. It was like he was worried that saying the wrong thing would summon her from the bier where she lay elf-shot and make her everybody’s problem again.

He knew her better than anyone I could think of except for the Luidaeg. If he was worried about that, so was I. “Part of her pride was in the fact that no one else could do what she did,” he continued. “Not her descendants, not her siblings, no one’s hands but hers. Is there . . . ” His voice hitched with obvious horror, but he forced himself to continue, asking, “Is there any chance . . . ?”

“No,” I said, without hesitation. “I smelled the woman’s magic while I was inside the house. Roses, yes, but roses are so damn common in Faerie that they might as well be a default setting. Instead of flashing twelve o’clock, we smell like Grandma’s perfume. These weren’t the right kind of roses. They weren’t hers. And there was no snow. If it had been her, there would have been snow. When it’s her, there’s always snow.”

“Hence the name,” said Quentin.

Simon looked only slightly mollified. “Did you catch anything else?”

“No, I was sort of focused on the dead kid,” I snapped, and immediately felt bad about it. I glanced at the house. “I could go back in. The night-haunts will have come and gone by now, and someone should be there when Mitch gets home. We know where all the kids are, thank Maeve.” I almost wished I didn’t. I would have been happier believing Jessica was missing, rather than dead and gone forever. I paused. “But I don’t know where Stacy is. I’m guessing the car in the driveway is hers, since Jessica remembers her being home before the attack, but she isn’t here.”

“Was she—?” asked Quentin.

I shook my head. “No. All the blood in the house belonged to the kids, and she hadn’t done any magic large enough to make an impression. She almost never does.” Stacy’s more human than most changelings, being only about a quarter fae. As with many thin-blooded changelings, the fae blood she did have was so attenuated that I had difficulty fully catching hold of it and had never fully identified her lines of descent. Her parents had both died when we were children, leaving her in the care of her grandparents, both pureblooded Gwragen whose dislike of changelings had kept them from inquiring too deeply into our activities during the day.

I paused. I hadn’t thought about Stacy’s grandparents in years. My own official relationship to Simon made some things make a lot more sense, like how two purebloods could have a changeling child—which Stacy’s mother must have been, for her to be as human as she was. Either one of them could have had an extramarital affair and chosen to claim their daughter, bringing her home to be raised as their official child until she became old enough to be inconvenient and needed to be swept off to the side with the rest of the changeling riffraff.

That might also explain why Stacy’s grandparents had never seemed particularly upset, on the rare occasion when the topic of their daughter had come up; she’d been an embarrassment to one of them and an unwanted burden to the other.

There are a lot of things I don’t much like about Faerie. The way it chews up and destroys its changeling children makes the top of the list.

Regardless, Stacy’s fae blood being as thin as it was meant that she’d never had much in the way of magic. She could manage basic illusions and a small amount of the hearth magic that Hobs, Brownies, and the like used to manage noble households, but nothing on the level of what a full Hob could achieve. Come to think of it, Mitch was the one with Hob heritage; she was part Barrow Wight, and . . .

And I didn’t know what else. That was weird. Regardless, I focused more closely on the house. “Come on,” I said. “We should make sure it’s safe before Mitch gets here.”

“Don’t worry, Simon, I’ll protect you,” said Quentin amiably, as we started moving toward the door.

“That’s very generous of you, young squire,” said Simon.

“Dean would be pissed if you died and he wasn’t here to watch,” said Quentin.

“Quentin,” I said, aghast. Simon, on the other hand, actually laughed. He sounded honestly amused, too, not like he was trying to pass my squire’s rudeness off as an attempt at humor.

Quentin frowned at him, verging on a pout. “What’s so funny?”

“I understand your anger better than you might think,” said Simon. “Had someone done to my Patrick, or to Di, what I did to your swain, I would find myself in a terrible temper. The fact that it was intended as a temporary measure does not change the fact that it was an assault, and would it not cause trouble among both our households—and imply a tighter bond than I think you may wish to be tied with—you would be well within your rights to claim offense against me.”

“Oh, great, there’s two of you,” I muttered to Tybalt. He laughed.

It felt odd to be laughing and joking as we walked toward the place where an honorary member of my extended family had died, but sometimes laughter is the only thing that keeps you from crying. Jessica needed me to find the woman who had killed her. I hadn’t been fast enough to save her, and that was the only thing I could have done better up until now.

Time for us to wait for her father to come home. I wanted to call him, but right now he existed in a world where all five of his children were alive. I wanted him to stay there even more than I wanted to pull him into my world. He’d get here soon enough, and once he did, there would be no going back for him.

The smell of blood and roses was heavy in the still air of the house. I led the others down the hall to the front room. The real Jessica was gone, replaced by a perfect human replica crumpled exactly as she had been. I knew it wasn’t the actual corpse, which made it easier to look at the carnage. Simon, oddly enough, seemed to share that ease, while Tybalt moved to look out the window and Quentin made a choked sound before heading off to check the kitchen.

Simon and I circled the body, careful to avoid the edges of the bloodstain. “Whoever killed this girl went to far greater extremes than were necessary,” he said.

“Yeah, she wasn’t a big kid, and she wasn’t armed, except for a book of poetry that should be right over”—I looked around, finally spotting the heavy book Jessica had been toting on the floor near the front door—“there.” Retrieved, it was even heavier than it had seemed in her hands, the pages carrying the faint clove and pine resin scent of her magic. I sniffed them, trying to commit the scent to memory. She wouldn’t be spinning any more spells, not after this.

Simon watched quizzically, but didn’t comment, just waited for me to walk back over to him before he said, “The knife remained when the boy was stabbed. There’s no knife in the girl.”

“No. It wasn’t here before the night-haunts, either, but I felt it go in while I was riding her blood.”