Page 36 of Be the Serpent

“It’s bad that I almost find that a relief, right?” I muttered. Finding out that my brother wasn’t into pain as a part of his love life was more than I’d really wanted to know.

We can’t always get what we want. Simon sighed. “I know,” he said, looking away. “I’ll do it all the same, to protect my family. If I go quietly, she may not claim August.”

“So she went out of her way to destroy oracles, and the house smelled like roses, but not her roses,” I said, trying to get us back on track before this got any more awkward. “Not Maeve’s roses, either, or Amandine’s. Why are so many people in Faerie rose-scented? Was someone trying to cut corners on the toy line?”

“There’s a playset I’d like to see,” said Arden. “A modular Muir Woods, complete with royal household, and maybe a Madden with actual transforming action.”

“You’d get in trouble because all the kids would want a Queen of Faerie doll with fancy dresses, not jeans and sweatshirts,” I said.

“Like you’re one to talk,” said Quentin, and laughed nervously.

It felt weird to be laughing this soon after Jessica’s death. Which reminded me. I turned to Arden. “You have a Bannick on staff at this point, right?”

“Not on staff as such,” said Arden. “Your friend Danny, the taxi driver? He knows a lady. She comes by when I need someone to do some deep cleaning.”

“Okay, so we call Danny before Mitch and Stacy leave here,” I said. When Arden looked surprised, I shrugged. “Jessica died in the living room, and she didn’t die cleanly. There’s a lot of blood. The night-haunts have been and gone; they left a manikin behind, but the body’s already been consumed. We’re going to need someone to clean the place if we don’t want Mitch and Stacy dealing with the stress of a human murder investigation on top of everything else.”

Human wisdom would assume one or both of Jessica’s parents had been complicit in death, especially without anything to point at somebody else. I wasn’t terribly worried about the physical evidence I and the boys would have left behind; with the exception of Simon, we’d all been there before, and I was pretty sure Simon’s fingerprints weren’t going to show up in any human database. We’d be fine. They wouldn’t be.

Arden nodded, slowly. “That makes sense. It doesn’t sit right with me, though. Someone should know what happened to her.”

“And someone will,” I said.

The door to the receiving room slammed open and a blond man in a brown tweed jacket and jeans raced into the room, bringing the smell of ice and yarrow blossoms with him. His magic was still high, crackling in the air around him like he’d just been threatened in some way, and he nearly fell over as he came skidding to a stop in front of us, hands clenching and unclenching as he stared first at Arden, then at me. His eyes, blue enough to look like a special effect out of a Hollywood movie, were wide and unfocused, unseeing. He knew we were here. He knew who he was looking at. He might not fully understand what that meant.

“Where is she?” he demanded, voice peaking and cracking on the last word. “Where’s Cass?”

“Walther, hey,” I said, holding up my hands placatingly. “Did someone call you? Are you okay?”

“Cass,” he repeated. “I want you to take me to her. I want you to take me to her right now!” He was yelling by the time he stopped, and his hands were no longer clenching; instead, he had balled them into fists, although at least he wasn’t threatening to hit me. Yet. I had the feeling that was next on the agenda if I didn’t get him to her before he had to escalate.

“She’s with her family,” I said.

He blinked slowly, eyes seeming to focus for the first time. “All of them?”

“Not all of them,” I said, grimly. “I’m guessing she called you?”

He nodded.

“We weren’t fast enough for Jessica,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

Walther blinked again, eyes filling with tears before he turned his face away. “She was just a kid,” he said.

“I know. She was a good kid.”

“She’d finally stopped wetting the bed. She was excited about finishing middle school and going to a real high school.”

All the Brown kids were homeschooled with a group of other changeling kids until they reached high school age and went to the local school system in order to learn how to move in the human world. Having a diploma at the end didn’t hurt, either; Cass had been able to use hers to go to college, which had put her in the position to meet Walther outside my sometimes-ridiculous sphere of influence. Karen was a year away from graduation, and still plugging gamely away at her classes, even as it got harder and harder for her to stay awake as much as she needed to.

“Toby . . . what happened?”

“We still don’t know,” I said. “Someone threw a compulsion spell over Stacy and got her out of the house, then jumped the boys when they came home. Jessica had been in her room. She heard the noise and came out to intervene, and the woman . . . she hurt her, Walther. She hurt her real bad. Jessica Brown has stopped her dancing. She’s with the night-haunts now.”

“So she bled,” said Walther. “You had access to her memories. You must have seen what happened. You have to know.”

“But I don’t,” I said. “Whoever hurt Jessica, they didn’t show up in the blood memories. I could smell their magic—it was a woman, and I heard what she said while she was killing Jess. But I never saw her face.”

“Did—?”