Page 17 of Sleep No More

“Do you not worry about curses?”

Li Qin shrugged. “I weave luck. If any of these things were actually cursed, I’d feel it, and could pick it apart before it had a chance to impact us. These things are just that: things. Interesting things, often, things I’m glad to purchase once Alex sniffs them out for me, but things all the same.”

“What does this have to do with my being here?”

“Alex’s latest find was a storage unit in Fremont that was flagged for sale after its owners stopped paying the upkeep,” she said easily. “I acquired the lot, and expected nothing but a few interesting novelties. What I found, though . . . what I found was a mystery.”

We had reached the back of the room. Li Qin motioned me to wait as she opened another door, revealing a smaller, less cluttered room. This one was very cold, frigid air pumping from boxes in all four corners, and there were no shelves. Instead, a black rectangle about two feet tall and almost cubical sat in the middle of the floor. Thick cords snaked out of what I presumed was the back, connecting to small white panels at the base of the two farthest walls. The side toward us was brushed gray metal, ridged with long, thin openings and topped with a circular black button whose outline was glowing faintly red.

“Behold the mystery,” said Li Qin.

I frowned at the box. “What’s so mysterious about it?” Besides literally everything about it, I added, silently.

“I’ve heard the Dóchas Sidhe are supposed to be blood-workers to rival the Daoine,” she said. “You tell me.”

Her tone made me bristle, feeling belittled even though she hadn’t said a single untrue thing. I shrugged, fighting the urge to glare. “Maybe so, but I’ve never been trained in blood magic. I don’t know the first thing about blood magic.”

“Ah.” If Li Qin was disappointed, she didn’t show it. Instead, shrugging, she began to circle the box. “Close your eyes and reach for the presence of magic. You know it’s here. You can find it.”

“We’re inside your knowe,” I protested. “All I’m going to find is a headache.”

“They really didn’t . . . All right. Humor me.” Li Qin stopped circling to look at me. “Try closing your eyes and searching for magic. If you don’t find it, or you find a headache, we’ll stop. I’ll buy you dinner at someplace nice out in the human world, so you can feel like you’ve really had an adventure, and then we’ll call Sir Etienne to come and take you home. But if you do find it, the mystery will start to make sense to you. Go ahead. Give it a try.”

Great. The Duchess of Dreamer’s Glass was a major weirdo, and I was stuck with her until I tried her ridiculous party trick. I closed my eyes and tried to focus on “reaching for the presence of magic,” whatever that meant. I smelled the cider and smoke of Father’s spell, which soothed my nerves. On top of that was the cedar smoke and lime scent of Etienne’s magic, and—

And I paused. How could I tell them apart? No one had ever told me that Etienne’s magic was cedar smoke, but there was no question now that I was really thinking about it. His magic was cedar and lime, and Father’s was waxed whitebeam smoke and mulled cider, with all the complexity that implied. What the hell was a whitebeam? I didn’t think I’d ever even heard the word before, and the shock of it was almost enough to make me open my eyes before I caught myself and kept reaching. I still wasn’t sure how that was supposed to work. Apparently, “reaching for magic” was a fancy name for sniffing the air.

My own magic was layered under both of theirs, cut grass and copper. I could smell black tea and white hydrangea lingering nearby, vital and fresh enough that I assumed it had to be coming from Li Qin. The constant flow of fresh cold air was pushing all the scents down, muddling them. But under Li Qin’s magic, faint and almost static, like it was frozen in time, was something else. Something sweet and sharp at the same time, the scent of the moment before lightning struck during a storm. I turned my face toward the scent and opened my eyes.

I was looking directly at the black box.

“What—?” I asked.

Li Qin smiled. “I don’t know. Isn’t it fabulous? It’s a mystery. I was going through the contents of the storage locker, and when I reached this, I felt magic in the case. It’s worked into the whole structure of the server. I tried opening the panel on the back, to see whether there were runes etched inside, and I found wood.”

“Wood?”

“Wood. It’s as if someone tried to integrate a computer system with a living structure, something like what the Dryads use. It’s nothing I’ve ever seen before, and it’s fascinating. So of course I tried to turn it on.”

“Of course . . .” I said, somewhat baffled.

“But it wouldn’t come on!” She sounded both delighted and personally affronted, like the—the server? Why was she referring to a box as if it were a member of the household staff?—had refused to function just to spite her. “Do you understand how Shyi Shuai work?”

“You’re not Seers, I know that.”

“That’s correct. We don’t see the future, but we can nudge it when we want to. Sort of sharpen our luck and prod things along.”

I blinked. “So why does anything bad ever happen?”

“So many reasons that I couldn’t possibly list them all, but the big one where I’m concerned is that we’re not Seers. We can’t influence an outcome if we don’t know the outcome is going to need influencing. You understand?”

“No.”

“All right, let’s look at it another way: when I want something to go one way and not another, I can start poking luck to show me the best path to getting what I want. Sort of asking very narrow yes-or-no questions, and then using them to dowse the correct result. I want this server to come on. So I prodded luck and asked if that was possible. The answer was affirmative.”

“You talk to luck?”

She stopped to look at me flatly. “For a changeling living in an enchanted tower, you sure do want things to make sense according to a narrow set of rules. Luck doesn’t talk. It’s not a person with a language and an opinion. But it can answer you, if you ask correctly and know how to listen. That good enough?”