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She snickered once. “No.”
“Neither have I. And I’ve read through all the Collections.”
“All of them?”
“Well, the last five hundred years or so. Dad had a large set. I didn’t get out much.” I drummed my fingers on the work table. Werewolves didn’tdorelics. We didn’t even do heirlooms. We got rid of a dead wolf’s worldly possessions because we believed that clinging to those things would weigh them down when they crossed the River into Judgement. So that meant giving away items among the pack, burning very personal items not suitable to be given away, or in the case of items that could be taken apart, incorporating the parts into new things. Like breaking down jewelry or a warrior’s claw gauntlet, then using the metal and gems and mechanisms to make new items. It wasvery, veryunusual to leave things intact.
So perhaps this crystal on its chain had originally been part of a larger piece of regalia.
“You ever hear of a piece of jewelry set with blue gems?” I asked. “Like limpet-blue?”
“If you’ve read through the past five hundred years of Collections, you’re better read than I am,” MaryAnne said.
I’d read about alotof trinkets and bride-price payments and ceremonial pageantry nonsense, but crystal spears filled with a liquid the color of blue limpets had not been on any of the invoices. So either this item had been carefully scrubbed from all records, or had never been recorded, or had disappearedlongago.
Maybe the FrostFangare would know. They were the oldest pack and looked after the Archive doomsday vault, and claimed to have documented history going back a thousand years. Werewolf history went back longer than that, but FrostFangare was the undisputed longest-surviving pack. It was just disputedhowlong they had existed.
Maybe…
I almost knocked my stool over scurrying across the floor and up the stairs. Almost lost my phone too. Ack. I stopped on the stairs out of sight of MaryAnne, re-secured it in my bra strap, and headed back up to the main part of the house. Marcella was working from home today, so I headed down to her office.
The door was halfway open. I stuck my head in.
She looked up from her monitor and stopped typing. “The door half-open meansknock. The door closed meansdon’t.”
“Apologies. If you’ve got a minute, I could use some help down in the Archives.”
She gave me a look straight out of the Mom Field Expression Guide and listed underexcuse me, young lady, WHAT did you just say?“I’m going to humor this conversation for thirty seconds.”
That was fifteen more than I needed. “I’ve tracked the necklace my mother kept seeing to the Florida Everglades, but I can’t figure outwhereto even start looking. I was thinking your Moon’s Gift might help literally sniff out which of the clues are pertinent.”
It sounded crazy. Probably was even a little crazy. I was hunting a relic from a species that didn’t deal in relics to a place that said species did not, and had never, inhabited on any meaningful scale, and said relic was from a dream and I had just asked an Elder Luna to please come smell pieces of paper to help find it.
That was more than a little crazy. That was the sort of crazy that didn’t fit into a shoebox.
“You’ve tracked it to the Everglades,” she said.
“I know how it sounds. Believe me, Iknow. But humor me for ten minutes.”
“I spend a lot of time humoring you.”
“Well, I don’t know what you were expecting when you got mixed up with me. Were you expecting a nice, normal paint-by-numbers political gambit?”
Marcella actually rolled her eyes and looked at the ceiling. “Gaia give me patience.”
“Fresh out. I used the last of it.”
She pursed her lips, but that might have been because she was trying not to smile. “Fine. Ten minutes. But that includes my walk back and forth.”
“Trust me, I’m not interested in chasing some obscure relic that hasn’t been catalogued or mentioned in five hundred years of official records, either. But my mother’s sent me on this cursed scavenger hunt, and so far…”
“So far.” Marcella agreed grimly.
MaryAnne seemed shocked and disapproving when Marcella came back into the workroom. Marcella told her, “Put everything away. I’m here for Autumn’s journals, which aren’t part of the Archives.”
I showed Marcella my puzzle-map that pointed to Florida. “Thoughts?”
“Fuck me,” Marcella said. “I can smell it. It’s not strong, but there’s a scent.”
