Night and Silence (October Daye) Page 12

  I turned. “Madden . . . ”

  “I have Gillian’s.” He bobbed his head, doglike, eyes on me. “Between the room and the blood, I have her scent. If we go back to where the car is, I can follow it. Now that we know she’s alive, I can follow.”

  I wanted to cry. I wanted to throw my arms around him and thank him forever. I settled for nodding. “Then we go. Bridget, call me.”

  “I will,” she said. “Open roads, October. And good luck.”

  Hearing such a traditional farewell from human lips was strange, but not unpleasant. “Kind fires,” I said, and moved for the door, the rest of my motley little band trailing behind me, leaving Bridget to the remains of her morning. Madden dropped back onto four feet before he left the room, choosing efficiency. The makeshift leash and vest May had crafted for him didn’t reappear.

  Before I could point out that unleashed dogs were probably against school rules, Quentin waved a hand and muttered something under his breath, flooding the hall with the scent of steel and heather. The weight of the don’t-look-here fell across us like a shroud, making my ears itch. I shot Quentin a glare. He responded with a silent, exaggerated shrug.

  It was a good move. It was the move of someone who knew how close I was running to the limitations of my magic and wanted to be sure I wouldn’t incapacitate myself before we knew what we were up against. It’s a little scary sometimes how well Quentin knows me, how prepared he is to risk himself to protect me from my own decisions. He’s been my squire for a long time. I didn’t want him in the beginning. Now, I have no idea what I’m going to do with myself when he moves on.

  Definitely not take on another squire. When Quentin—and by extension, Raj—were done with me, I was done with taking responsibility for random teenagers. They were an impossible act to follow, and so I wasn’t going to try.

  We made our way through the cool, quiet halls and back to the faculty door, which didn’t require a key from this side. We didn’t pass anyone. That was nice, if a little eerie. It was the middle of the morning, easing on toward noon. The human world was never more awake than it was right now. They should have been everywhere, and instead, we walked alone, isolated, a few feet to the side. It was like Gillian’s disappearance had shifted the entire campus a few feet out of true, making it a twilight place even with the December sun beating relentlessly down.

  Madden was the first one out the door, bounding ahead with his nose pressed to the ground and his tail held low behind him, like this was too serious a situation for wagging. It was odd. I was so accustomed to going through life escorted by cats that it was hard not to read that motionless tail as a sign of happiness, and he had no business being happy right now. None of us did. Not with Gillian missing.

  No one looked our way as we moved down the path back toward the crowd of students and police surrounding Gillian’s abandoned car. Madden trotted forward, nose still to the ground, sniffing and searching as he spiraled first in, toward the vehicle, and then out, away from it. Finally, he stopped, raised his head, and looked back toward the rest of us. It wasn’t clear whether he could see us, or whether he was tracking the place his nose told him we were. It didn’t really matter.

  “Go,” I murmured.

  His ears perked forward. Then he turned and trotted purposefully away from the crime scene, past Wheeler Hall, toward the rest of the campus. We followed, sticking together so we wouldn’t lose sight of each other, moving around the humans who, oblivious to our presence, went about their day.

  Madden reached the edge of campus and stopped. My heart lurched until I realized he was only pausing because the traffic wasn’t in his favor. Crossing a busy street as a dog is never particularly safe. Doing it as a mostly invisible dog? Seemed like a good way to become roadkill. Still, I walked a little faster, and May and Quentin matched my pace, until we were waiting on the curb next to Madden.

  He glanced our way, eyes not quite focusing, and sniffed the air before barking softly.

  “Yeah,” I said. “We’re here.”

  The light changed. We crossed the street, still hidden by the don’t-look-here. Madden pressed his nose to the ground again, reorienting himself, and then trotted forward faster, leading us onward, away from campus and into the busy urban streets.

  Berkeley is like San Francisco only in the sense that it’s a Bay Area city, blessed with good weather and tolerably decent public transportation as long as you’re only moving from city center to city center. The buildings are designed to stand up to earthquakes, or at least the newer ones are; older buildings tend to fall down a bit more easily, and the people who own them somehow never feel like investing in repairs is a good use of their money. That’s where the resemblance ends. San Francisco is a city built on hillsides, in the shadow of the sea. Berkeley is surrounded by hills, and extends up into them, but for the most part, it’s a flat territory.

  Berkeley, unlike San Francisco, has space. It’s a city that knows how to sprawl, how to give a store the floor space to carry as much as it likes without turning into a maze of aisles that collide and contradict. It’s also a city that devotes a surprising amount of that space to tiny connecting roads and boulevards that are more like alleys with delusions of grandeur. Madden led us toward Shattuck Avenue and then farther down, to the vast artery of University Avenue. When the city planners were deciding whether to build “up” or “out,” they chose the latter. Berkeley sprawls.

  The cars were more frequent on University, sometimes ignoring the pedestrians they could actually see. People pushed up and down the sidewalk, a jarring density of humans. I’ve lived in cities for my entire adult life. I hadn’t realized, not consciously, how much switching to keeping fae hours had insulated me from their populations. That wasn’t good. That was pureblood thinking, and it needed to stop.

  My thoughts were chasing themselves in circles, a sure sign that I was terrified. I’ve always found the very human tendency to take solace in the trivial and mundane to be . . . not soothing, exactly, but useful. It’s hard to dwell when I can’t focus. And it wasn’t like there was anything else I could do. Madden was following the trail, and no matter how deeply I inhaled, I couldn’t find any trace of it. The person who’d taken Gillian had also taken the time to stop the bleeding.

  I should have been grateful for that, glad my little girl hadn’t been carried through the streets of Berkeley with an open wound. All it made me feel was useless. Like I hadn’t been able to raise her, and now I couldn’t even be the one to find her.

  May glanced my way and reached out to take my hand, giving it a reassuring squeeze. She didn’t say anything. Attracting attention would only have slowed us down. No one was going to look at us and demand to know how we’d suddenly appeared in the middle of the sidewalk—don’t-look-here spells are subtler than that—but as it was, when we walked toward people, they got out of our way. They created space for us to occupy. We wanted that to last.

  We’d gone about three blocks when Madden stiffened, raised his nose from the ground, and barked before breaking into a run. Several pedestrians turned to watch him go, a few exclaiming at the sight of the unleashed dog racing down the street. I didn’t hesitate. I ran after him, dragging May with me, Quentin following close on our heels.

  Madden didn’t slow or look back to see whether we were keeping up with him. He just ran, until we reached a blank brick wall stretched between two buildings. Too blank: every other wall in sight had been plastered with advertisements or tagged by graffiti artists. This was just brick, a tempting target for every form of urban embellishment. So why hadn’t it been tagged?

  Madden whined, looking back and forth like he was confused. I mimicked the gesture, checking the sidewalk. Too many people could see us. We needed to keep the don’t-look-here going for a few more minutes.

  Somehow, I thought it was about to become irrelevant.

  “Quentin, keep the spell going,” I said.
I let go of May’s hand and my human disguise at the same time. Raising my thumb to my mouth, I bit down hard enough to break the skin. Fresh blood filled my mouth as the smell of cut grass and copper settled all around me.

  The brick shimmered. I narrowed my eyes, biting even harder, coaxing more blood from a wound that was trying to heal even as I ripped it open. Blood magic has always been my strength, the one form of magic where I’m as adept as any pureblood. Given enough blood, I can reshape the world.

  Gold-and-silver threads shimmered in the air in front of the wall. I reached out with my free hand, making a tugging gesture. Not enough to break them, since the disappearance of a brick wall would probably attract attention we didn’t want. Just enough to . . . move them a little bit. To let me see what they were hiding.

  The brick warped, not dissolving, but becoming momentarily translucent. I glanced at Quentin. He was still frowning at the wall, not seeming to see the change. That was fine. That was something I could work with.

  “Grab my sleeve,” I said, voice garbled by my mouthful of thumb.

  He didn’t argue. He just grabbed hold, reaching out to take May’s hand for good measure. I bit down one more time, getting a fresh gout of blood. Then I pulled my spit-and-blood–covered thumb out of my mouth and started forward, grabbing the scruff of Madden’s neck as I passed him. He yelped but didn’t bite. Thank Oberon for that. I heal fast, but I feel pain like anybody else. I’d rather not walk into a brick wall while trying to keep an angry Cu Sidhe from ripping my arm off.

  The wall was still shimmering, still shot through with those gold-and-silver threads. I swallowed the last of the blood and took a confident step forward, bracing myself against the moment when my face impacted with the brick.

  It didn’t. My first step carried us past the beginning of the wall, into a charcoal-colored void as disconcerting as it was intentional. Whoever had crafted this spell wanted to be absolutely sure that any humans who happened to blunder into it somehow—say at dawn, when almost all standing spellwork was weaker—wouldn’t feel the need to keep going. Most people don’t like being dropped into formless darkness.

  It’s not my favorite thing in the world. But the Cait Sidhe have access to the Shadow Roads, which are basically formless darkness with a side order of freezing cold, and Tybalt took me there with reasonable frequency. This darkness was room temperature. It was going to have to work a lot harder to get a rise out of me. I took another step forward, pulling my people with me through the dark, out the other side, into a place that shouldn’t have been possible.

  We were still in the mortal world: the sky was the slate gray characteristic of California winters, and the space where we stood was hemmed in on all sides by tall brick walls. Some of them had windows, and I wondered what the occupants saw when they looked out. An empty, inaccessible courtyard? Or the building on the other side of it, somehow rendered closer than the actual architecture allowed?

  They couldn’t see what we saw. They couldn’t see us. If they had, there was no way Faerie would have been able to stay a secret, because this would have been enough, all by itself, to blow the doors right off.

  “Whoa,” said Quentin.

  “Yeah,” I agreed.

  The courtyard was about the size of the surrounding buildings, maybe eighty feet wide by a hundred or so feet deep. It was contained, encysted into the architecture of the block like a worm inside an apple. Plants that had no business growing in the mortal world bloomed everywhere I looked, ignoring the fact that it was December in favor of putting out a riotous assortment of fruits and flowers. A moon-apple tree and a sun-apple tree tangled their branches together, forming a puzzle box lace of twigs and leaves, holding each other up under the weight of their dense harvest of gold-and-silver fruit. A line of goblin fruit bushes grew against one of the walls. I shuddered and looked away, toward the center of the courtyard.

  The back wall was the only place where no vines climbed, where no trees grew. Instead, what looked like an old-fashioned human house huddled there, paint peeling and roof flaking, its porch slanted at a dangerous angle. In front of it, the most jarring thing of all waited, silent and motionless.

  It was a house in miniature, the sort of house a particularly doting parent might build in their backyard for a beloved child. The walls were straight and sound, the roof was perfect; everything about it was perfect. The front door was large enough for a six-year-old, but not anything much larger. It was settled in the middle of a vast, tangled nest, its feathery chicken legs tucked up underneath its foundations. It had no eyes, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was watching us.

  “Quentin, drop the don’t-look-here,” I said tightly.

  The scent of steel and heather overwhelmed the perfume of the flowers around us as the spell dropped away. Madden rose on two legs, a man once more as he moved closer to the group. I understood the sentiment. No one sensible would want to be here alone, not with that little chicken-legged house keeping watch.

  “This shouldn’t be here,” muttered May. I glanced her way. She shook her head. “I have the memories of a dozen people who’ve lived in this town, and none of them knew anything about this sort of garden.”

  “And I used to work for a man who treated secrets like air,” I said grimly. “If Devin had known about this place . . .” I let the sentence die.

  If Devin had known about this place, he would have been trading the kids who depended on him to keep them safe for bushels of apples, for the carrots that poked out of the soft earth in front of the berry bushes. Earth carrots come in a lot of colors, but they don’t glitter. There had to be some pureblood, somewhere, who was willing to pay the world for carrots that tasted the way they remembered carrots tasting when they were young and the doors to deeper Faerie were open.

  “That house is looking at me,” said Quentin.

  “Which one?” asked May.

  “Yes,” said Quentin.

  His tone was flatly confused, and somehow, that snapped me out of my own frozen contemplation. “Madden.” I turned. “Where is she? Where does the trail go from here?”

  “Um.” He sniffed the air, then sneezed. “Too many scents. I’m sorry. I followed her this far, but this is where everything gets sort of fuzzy.”

  The little house stood up.

  It was a quick, efficient gesture: it just got its feet under itself and pushed off, rising from its nest and revealing the full length of its scaled orange legs. It scratched a few times, like it was reassuring itself of its balance, and then it hopped out of the nest, strutting deeper into the courtyard. We all watched it go, momentarily united in our amazement.

  There was something blue tangled in the branches at the edge of the nest. I barely had time to register the color before I was running, yanked forward by some intangible instinct. The little house ignored me in favor of continuing to strut away. That was a good thing. I had absolutely no idea how to fight architectural poultry.

  Then I was at the nest, shoving my hands into the twisted branches and pulling out a pair of blue jeans with the knees ripped out. There was more fabric beneath them. I grabbed it, yanking until a red Berkeley sweatshirt came loose, followed by a full set of underthings. There was even a pair of shoes, shoved all the way down at the bottom. I stared at them for a moment before looking at the sweatshirt in my hands.

  The fabric was dark, the same shade of red that I favored for my tank tops, because it hid the blood so well. A sob rose in my throat. I choked it down as I raised the sweatshirt to my nose, sniffing. I wasn’t Madden. I couldn’t follow a trail across a city. But when there’s blood, I will always be able to find it. It calls to me. When the blood is so closely kin to my own . . .

  My nose was still stuffy from the mysterious sachets we’d found in Gillian’s room. This close, it didn’t matter. The smell of my daughter’s blood struck me hard, almost sending me reeling back. I grabbed the edge o
f the nest with my free hand and breathed in deeper. The blood carried no magic, no memory, nothing but the irrefutable knowledge that my daughter had been hurt, and I hadn’t been there to stop it.

  “Toby?”

  I turned. Quentin was a few feet behind me, an anxious expression on his face. Madden was walking in a slow spiral, his head bowed and his nostrils flaring as he tried to recover the scent without shifting back to his canine form. Only May hadn’t moved. She was still looking around the courtyard in silent wonder, drinking in the sight of a secret that the Bay Area had apparently been able to keep even from the night-haunts.

  Not just from the night-haunts. There were no pixies. I forced myself to breathe in and out, slow and easy, as I scanned the trees. There were no pixies, no bogeys, none of the other small and wonderful monsters that made Faerie a healthy ecosystem. The only things I could see moving were the bumblebees flitting from flower to flower—apparently as unconcerned about the actual season as the fruit-heavy trees—and the chicken-legged house, which was now pecking at the dirt. It didn’t have a beak. “Pecking” consisted of tapping its roof against the dirt over and over again, like a foraging bird.

  I looked back to Quentin. “Yeah?”

  “I . . . I don’t like to say this, and please don’t get mad at me, but . . . ”

  “She was never here.”

  His eyes widened in shocked relief. “How did you—?”

  “First, I’m the one teaching you, remember? If I couldn’t reach that conclusion before you did, I’d be a pretty lousy teacher.” Or a distraught mother holding her daughter’s bloody clothes in her hands. That was also a possibility. “But no. There’s too much blood and there’s not enough blood, and the only way that isn’t a contradiction is if she was never here.”