Page 45 of The Innocent Sleep

But then, there had been situations before that would have been easier with a gifted blood-worker at my side, but hadn’t been impossible, mostly because I’d been willing to try. This had begun with me making an effort, and now I was just standing around as my nephew’s Regent at least tried to find an answer. That couldn’t be allowed. My magic might not be enough to help me here, but I was a cat, and cats have other gifts. I straightened, then transformed, hitting the ground on all fours.

As I have often told October, I am not a bloodhound. Neither am I Dóchas Sidhe. October can trace a person by the faintest hint of their magic, finding someone’s trail days or even weeks after they’ve passed through. Magic is a function of the blood, after all, and she takes it to its furthest extreme.

I can’t do that. But my nose, in feline form, is far more sensitive than a human’s, and I can find things that aren’t visible to the naked eye. If we were looking for a Babylon candle, we were looking for something that had been crafted by the Luidaeg. It would still smell of her, assuming it had been in her presence any time recently. I pressed my nose to the floor and sniffed, beginning to walk.

The room was very large, and filled with scents. No mice or rats, sadly—if prey animals could enter the Court of Cats, our current struggles would have been substantially leavened—but traces of all the people who’d lost these things. I continued to walk and sniff, looking for any hint of the familiar.

We weren’t being entirely unreasonable. There is a logic to the way lost things tumble into the Court. While architecture tends to come from all over the world, objects will normally fall into the Court of Cats closest to where they were lost. It aids with finding them, on the rare occasions when we care enough to assist. Stolen things don’t come to us. A thing that has been stolen may be lost to its original owner, but it’s not lost to the new one, and our strange magic over misplaced things does not extend that far.

I had paced along two of the aisles, focusing more on scent than surroundings, before I caught a hint of something as familiar as my own breath. I stopped, whiskers fanning forward in surprise, before I began following the scent with more dedication. There was no trail as such; October had never walked here, in the depths of my Court, although she had seen far more than should have been allowed to one who was not feline. Still, something of hers was nearby, and I was going to find it.

The scent led me to a pile of discarded clothing. I stood on two legs, seeking the convenience of thumbs, and began digging into the heap, continuing downward until my fingertips brushed against leather and I knew that I had managed to find my objective. Holding it like a sacred relic, I pulled it from the pile and sat back, simply staring at it.

Not every scrap and bit of refuse winds up in the Court of Cats. We wouldn’t have the room. What’s loved enough to look for comes to us, and perhaps that was how I could be here, alone, with October’s leather jacket—once my own—in my hands.

Ginevra came around a corner and stopped at the sight of me, blinking for a moment before she asked, “That Toby’s jacket?”

“Yes,” I managed.

“Take it with you next time you go to Shadowed Hills.”

I looked sharply up at her. She shrugged.

“Call it intuition. She’ll need a change of clothes eventually, and you know it’s her size. Maybe the smell of your magic will call her. So take it and slip it into their lost and found. She lost it, you found it. Maybe she can find it too.”

It wasn’t the worst idea I’d ever heard. I allowed Ginevra to take the jacket from my hands. The scent of it would just distract me, and we still had a candle to find.

I transformed again. Ginevra has been capable of changing forms for less time than the average Cait Sidhe, having spent the bulk of her life as a changeling, and sniffing out a trail was as yet outside her experience. So I continued to take the lead while she followed, jacket draped over her arm, watching where I paused.

Two aisles over, I finally found a trace of the Luidaeg. I stopped and meowed, loudly, before beginning to follow it with new focus, stopping at a closed credenza that seemed far too large to have been lost in a manner that would bring it here. I meowed again, and Ginevra, using her convenient thumbs, opened the credenza door.

A cascade of flatware poured out, forcing me to skitter backward to avoid being hit by falling silver. Ginevra laughed. I glared at her, then began pawing through it, sniffing for traces of the Luidaeg’s scent. I was following the smell of who she was as a person as much as her magic—anything she’d handled frequently would stand out. Even if I just found her favorite teaspoon, it would give us something Ginevra could use for her own search.

Forks, knives, and spoons tangled together on the floor and on the half-filled shelves. I knocked them out of my way until I found the source of the scent: a key. It was surprisingly heavy, for all that it seemed to have been made from a single piece of silver, accented with strips of other metals. I paused a moment, paw on the teeth of it, before I shifted back to human form and closed my hand around the key, standing.

“We need to go back to the Library,” I said. “I believe I know what this is.”

Ginevra looked surprised. “What?”

“I want to be sure before I start making promises. But if I’m correct, it’s a key that can unlock the door we need to find. Can the Court spare you?”

“I’ll go ask Raj,” she said. “Wait here?”

Then she stepped into shadow and was gone, leaving me without the time to answer. That was fine. I stared at the key in my hand, willing it to be what I required. If I was right—if my memory served me correctly—I had seen this key before. The Luidaeg had shown it to me once, while Quentin and October were picking up burritos for eating during what he called a “found family game night.”

“This is the Summer Roads Key,” she’d said, inexplicably solemn as she held out the little piece of twisted precious metals for my study. Study only—I wasn’t allowed to touch it. “It’s very old. My father made it as a courting gift for my mother, back when the world was much younger and courtship still seemed like a good idea. My sister”—and the disgust in her voice had been enough to tell me that she spoke of Eira: no other could invoke that mixture of resentment and loathing in her tone, not even Titania—“thought it belonged to her, because it was old and pretty. She couldn’t use it, but she took it anyway. Your weird girlfriend gave it back to me.”

“Is that why you like her?”

“It’s one of the reasons I tolerate her.” She had closed her hand around the key then, making it vanish, and I hadn’t quite dared ask her why she’d chosen to show me. She was the sea witch. If she occasionally wanted to brag about the treasures she’d accumulated, that was her right.

The night had gone on as normal from there, and she had never mentioned the key again. But this key smelled of her, and I recognized it. It had to be the same one.

The shadows parted, Ginevra stepping into the room. She no longer had the jacket, and I felt a pang of loss at its absence.

No matter. I would have it back again when it came time to carry it to Shadowed Hills.

“Raj says we can go,” she said, and I nodded, sharply, before stepping into shadow, Ginevra close behind.