Page 33 of A Divided Duty

All the magic in the room leapt into sharp relief, spilling details about the people who had left it behind. With a sniff, I could identify descendant lines and start to guess at spells that hadn’t even been cast in this room. I bit again, coaxing more blood from the already-healing wound, and reached deeper.

It can be easy, when I’m mostly dealing with more-mammalian fae, to forget that there’s no such thing as “normal,” especially not in fae biology. The majority of fae have olfactory magical signatures, usually two scents of roughly equal strength … but pixies have visible glitter that sparkles in the air when they pass by, hanging suspended like dust. It would be strange if all the fae in the Undersea had magic you could smell.

Dryads, for example, tend to have very thin magical scents. April, the only Dryad I ever really spend social time with, has a faint scent of ozone that follows her everywhere she goes. Luna, even when she’d appeared to be Kitsune, had never had a particularly strong or clear magical signature. Now that she was properly Blodynbryd again, I wasn’t sure I’d recognize her magic if I managed to detect it. It was a mystery to me. She was a mystery to me.

I bit down again, and I smelled roses. They were under everything else, so faint that they were barely present, and not enough to prove anything at all. Still, I focused on them, continuing to bite through the skin of my thumb rather than let that scent get away. It was recent, and more importantly, as I began to pull the layers of magic in the room apart, it was on top of all the traces I’d dismissed as having been left by staff earlier in the day. The only scent that it really seemed to share space with was Raysel’s. The two overlapped, trading places back and forth.

“All right,” I said, lowering my hand and opening my eyes. Snapping back into reality was almost dizzying, and my knees felt briefly weak. “Chelsea, you stay here. I’m going to step out into the hall and see what I can pick up there.”

I didn’t wait for her reaction. I just went, exiting the room for the hall.

It was a long, straight corridor back to the party, but we were far enough removed that the sound of it was dulled by distance, or maybe by Cassie’s winds, the same trick that made voices from the dais carry keeping the commotion at least somewhat contained. I closed the door, paused, and closed my eyes, raising my hand again.

The layers of magic were definitely denser and more complicated in the hall, where more people had passed by—and, if past experiences with formal court told me anything, more than half of them were wearing some sort of illusion or enhancement, making them look more put-together, more attractive, just plain more. Some of them, especially the changelings, would have clothing that was entirely conjured from loose components, goose feathers and dried leaves and flower petals. Being able to construct and maintain that sort of spell was a means of quietly bragging, without showing up dressed so shabbily that you insulted your hosts.

So the magical miasma in the hall was comprised of considerably more layers, piled substantially deeper than they were in the sitting room. I bit down on the side of my thumb, hard, and began trying to sort through them until I found the traces of Rayseline’s magic.

It came down the hall and went into the sitting room. But it didn’t come back out again. Whatever had happened to her, Chelsea was right: she’d vanished from the sitting room. Which meant, given her specific magical talents, that someone had taken her.

“Do you bite your thumb at me, sir?” asked a male voice, familiar and amused.

“Is the law on my side if I say aye?” I asked, and opened my eyes to find Tybalt standing a few feet away, expression a mixture of amusement, affection, and concern. It was a bit more than I can usually read out of a look, but I’ve had a lot of practice interpreting his moods.

“No,” he said.

“Then no, I’m not,” I said, and lowered my hand. “Hey, you. What’s going on?”

“My wife ran off after the queen, and no one seems to know quite where she’s gone,” he replied. “I wish she would choose to remember how much I dislike it when she disappears on me, and how much of an effort I’m making not to hover.”

“You used to have an easier time with that,” I said.

“Yes, but I can’t help remembering that while her latest disappearance may have only been four months in length, she has a history of being lost for longer,” he said. “Fourteen years is her current record, and that’s longer than I care to endure. So that’s what’s going on with me, as you so quaintly put the question forth. What’s going on with you?”

I sighed heavily, letting the moment go. “Raysel’s missing,” I said. “I was talking to Arden and Nolan—who just needed a minute, by the way, and to yell a little about Luna trying to incite a war with the Undersea—when Chelsea popped in and said Raysel had disappeared. And she’s right. Raysel’s magic goes into this room, but it never comes out again.”

“Could she have been transformed into something inanimate? A chair or a bookend or something of the like?”

“I suppose anything’s possible, but it seems unlikely,” I said. “I just can’t figure out where she could have gone.”

“I don’t know either,” he said grimly.

I tilted my head back and looked at him. “I know you’re not a bloodhound—you’ve told me so often enough—but do you think you could go and see who else is missing? Just get eyes on Sylvester, and Luna, and the Lordens. Anyone who might have any reason, however slim, to have hauled Raysel out of here. Check to see if anyone’s got a new black eye or the like. I don’t think she would have gone willingly.”

“Of course, little fish,” he said, and began to step away.

“Wait.” I stopped him with a hand on his arm. He looked quizzically back at me. “If you see Quentin, send him my way? I don’t like doing this alone.”

His whole face relaxed when I mentioned sending me some backup, and he was actually smiling as he nodded. “You shall have your squire. I’ll be back as quickly as I can.”

This time I let him step away, and as soon as he was clear he folded in on himself, becoming a large brown tabby tomcat with one notched ear. He looked up at me, flicked his tail, and rubbed against my legs before he went bounding off down the hall, heading for the main receiving room.

Tybalt wasn’t a bloodhound, but his nose was even keener than mine when it came to picking people out of a crowd. He might not have been able to pick up Raysel’s trail with her magic not leaving the room, but he’d be able to find the people I had him looking for in no time. I was confident of that.

I was equally confident that Quentin would be coming down the hall very soon. With that encouraging thought held firmly in mind, I turned back to the sitting room door and opened it, letting myself inside.

Chelsea’s head snapped around as soon as she heard me, and I felt terrible as I watched her slump, the light leaving her eyes.

“How long have you two been dating?” I asked.