Page 27 of Be the Serpent

Disappear in a parking lot, and suburban shoppers will crush you into a ball of tinfoil before you have a chance to realize that you’ve made a mistake.

My ears itched with the weight of the illusion I inexplicably couldn’t dispel. I scratched idly as I turned the car toward the freeway onramp, trying not to think too hard about what my inability to undo my own spell meant. I’ve been caught flat-footed by the inability to cast before; as a changeling, my magic is limited, and as a descendant of only Oberon, I don’t get any of the ease with illusions that comes to descendants of Titania. Maeve’s children didn’t get the illusions either, but their magic moves through water, making them more protean. While I, or a Daoine Sidhe like Quentin, would use a shield of something that didn’t really exist to hide ourselves, a descendant of Maeve might actually change the shape of their exterior form.

Fae are always fae on the inside. Even I can’t turn someone human unless they have mortal blood from the beginning for me to work with. But the outside can look like basically anything, given the right magic.

So my magic being unreliable was nothing new. It getting stuck actually working, though; that was a little weird. I tried to focus on the road.

Stacy waited until we were on the highway before she spoke again. “Where are we going?”

I glanced at her. She was holding her purse in her lap, hands folded atop it, looking out the windshield with an absolutely placid expression on her face. She’d been placed under a powerful compulsion charm, forced to leave her house, stranded in a grocery store with no idea why or what she was supposed to do there. She’d come to, only to find her best friend the chaos magnet standing over her, saying her husband and children were inexplicably not at home. She should have been worried. She should have been at the very least confused. And instead, she was perfectly calm.

I very badly wanted to check her for traces of unfamiliar magic before they’d had a chance to fade away. Whatever had been done to her must have been done from close up, or the smell would have been all around her like a cloud of cheap perfume. But given that the last time I’d tried to identify the spell she’d been under, I had promptly passed out on the Safeway floor, it seemed better to keep driving and not risk losing consciousness while I was operating a motor vehicle.

“Muir Woods,” I said.

“Oh. That’s nice.” Stacy smiled, settling in her seat. “You say Mitch and the kids are there? Cassie works there, you know. She really likes our new queen.”

“Queen Windermere is doing an excellent job so far,” I said. “She’s definitely an improvement over the last one.”

“I think the last one doesn’t count, since we found out she was an imposter,” said Quentin.

“Still held a throne for like a hundred years, and she was only the third person to be in charge of the Mists,” I countered. “She’ll definitely be in the history books, or she would, if we wrote them. The Library will keep a record of her.”

“Queen Windermere is Tuatha, isn’t she?” asked Stacy.

I glanced at her, blinking. “Yes, she is. That’s an odd question.”

“I was just thinking, most Tuatha don’t go looking for crowns. They leave that sort of thing to the Daoine Sidhe. Oberon wanted his children to be heroes. He told them they should be heroes. So why does a Tuatha want to be our queen?”

“I think mostly because her father was our king, and she loved him a lot and wants to take care of the kingdom he cared about,” I said. “And why he was king, well, from what I understand, his father founded the kingdom, back when the fae were first fleeing to North America to get away from one another. So maybe there just weren’t any Daoine Sidhe around who wanted to do that much paperwork.”

“Odd,” said Stacy, and yawned, putting her head against the window. “I’m tired now. Wake me when we get to Muir Woods, okay, Tobes? I’m going to get a little bit of sleep while I still can.”

“Sure, Stacy. You rest.” I met Quentin’s eyes in the rearview mirror. He looked as concerned as I felt. But without a way to identify whatever spell she was under, there wasn’t much else we could do. I kept driving.

It was edging toward rush hour, but we weren’t quite there yet, and the roads between Daly City and Mill Valley—the human city closest to Muir Woods—were relatively clear. It would have been worse earlier in the day, when tourists would have been streaming over the bridge to see the redwoods.

Quentin and I rode in silence, letting Stacy sleep. It was honestly something of a relief. I didn’t know what to say to her. I’d been intending to tell her about Jessica, to prepare her as much as I could for what we were about to find, but I hadn’t been able to figure out how to begin, not when she was so clearly disconnected. It was almost like she’d been drugged.

The parking lot was halfway empty when we got there. I pulled into a space and leaned over to shake Stacy awake with one hand. She lifted her head almost immediately, turning to blink blearily at me. “Are we here?” she asked.

“We’re here. Come on, I’ll walk you up. Quentin, can you get the car?” Under the circumstances, I didn’t trust myself to cast a don’t-look-here and not lose the car forever.

“On it,” he said, and started chanting a sea shanty under his breath as I got out and moved around the back of the car to help Stacy with her door. I made sure to focus on the car itself the whole time, since a good don’t-look-here would mean losing track of it as soon as I took my eyes away. The smell of heather and steel rose in the background, then burst . . . and nothing changed.

I blinked, looking purposefully away, and then back again. The car remained exactly the same. “Quentin?”

He got out. “Yeah?”

“Can you see the car?”

He turned purposefully away, scanning the trees, before turning back and looking directly at what he shouldn’t have been able to see. “Yeah, I can. Toby, what the hell?”

“I don’t know. Maybe you cast the spell wrong?”

He gave me a withering look as I helped Stacy out of the car. “It’s a don’t-look-here. I’ve been casting those on my own since I was five. I didn’t cast it wrong.”

“Well, I felt the magic, so I know you pulled it. Try again.”