Night and Silence (October Daye) Read online

  The answer was simple and so, so obvious. “Jocelyn.”

  “What?”

  “She’s a changeling—she couldn’t have made the sachets, but she could have found the ritual, gone to the Library and looked it up or bought it off some street-witch who cared more about money than they did about keeping something like this contained.” If Jocelyn had done it all, if Jocelyn somehow had access to that impossible courtyard, she wouldn’t even have needed money. A handful of fresh goblin fruit could have paid for anything she wanted in the world. “Pay a human to do it, and plant them all around Gillian.”

  “Why?” asked Quentin. “She was so excited to see you.”

  “Yeah, and she was sure fast to try to get me to thank her. She knows enough about the rules to use them, but does she understand them? And remember, changelings don’t respond to things exactly like purebloods do. Iron doesn’t hurt us as badly. Dawn hurts us more. Maybe she could clear up her allergies with actual, nonmagical Benadryl. Or maybe she thought it would only repel full fae.”

  “Why would she want to repel you, though?” Quentin’s frustration was mounting. Being poisoned tended to do that. “She was so happy to meet you.”

  “Maybe she just didn’t want us around Gillian,” said May. “If we hadn’t found the sachet, if we’d just encountered Gilly on campus . . . ”

  “You would have felt a strong compulsion to avoid her, probably because every time you got near her, you’d start sneezing,” said Walther. “If this Jocelyn seemed immune, she might even have been able to position herself as a source of information. It’s an unnecessarily complicated plan, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad one, and these are college students. I watched one of them spend a semester trying to train squirrels to bring him Mountain Dew from the vending machine because he was too lazy to get up and press the button.”

  “Did it work?” asked Quentin.

  “No, but some other kids broke into the squirrel nests later in the year and found twenty bucks in quarters.”

  We were all silent for a moment, considering that image. I shook it off. “Bridget, you know both of them. Any idea how they became roommates?”

  “The house where they live takes applications at the start of the term,” said Bridget slowly. “They don’t accept everyone, of course, and once you’re in, it can be difficult to get a new roommate. If I had to guess, I’d say Jocelyn greased a few palms to get the assignment she wanted.”

  This was beginning to look more and more damning. I took a breath. “Walther, can we get more of that allergy medication, just in case? If the herbal blend sticks to clothes, we might be reexposing ourselves by looking for Gillian.”

  Quentin gave the bundle of clothes he was still carrying an alarmed look.

  Walther nodded. “I made some up in pill form. It doesn’t work as fast, but every dose should last for about eight hours. If you think you’ve been exposed, take another pill.” He picked up a clear bottle filled with violently blue gel caps and lobbed it at me. I caught it, shook it once to see how many pills were in there, and tucked it into my pocket. He tossed another bottle to May. I nodded approvingly. Never put all the life-saving medication in one basket.

  “Overdose risks?” I asked.

  “None.” Walther paused. “Well. Some, but you’d need to take more than I’ve given you, and all you’d do is turn blue for a while.”

  “Swell.” I turned to Madden. “I want you to take May and follow the second trail. If you find anything, anything that might tell us where Gillian’s been taken, call me immediately, and I’ll be right there.” Sending them off without me ached. But if there was anyone this side of Faerie who loved Gilly like I did, it was May. She wouldn’t let our daughter come to harm if there was anything she could do about it.

  “What are you going to do?” he asked.

  “Go and have a little talk with Jocelyn.” I bared my teeth at him. He took a startled half-step backward. “She and I have so much to discuss, don’t you think?”

  “Don’t kill the poor girl,” said Bridget.

  I looked at her. “And if she’d taken Chelsea? Would you be saying that?”

  “No. I’d be telling you to bring me her entrails, so I could have a go at reading the future. But I am neither a knight nor a hero of the realm, and as Etienne would have me understand it, the rules are different for you.” She looked at me levelly. “I’ll not tell you to spare the girl if she doesn’t deserve sparing. I am telling you to be sure before you do something that can’t be taken back. It’s a cruel enough world, Toby. There’s no need for us to go and make it worse.”

  “Big words from a woman who tried to hit me with a cast iron pan when she even suspected I might have had something to do with her daughter’s disappearance.” Bridget flushed red and turned her face away. I tried to feel some sense of victory. All I felt was tired.

  “Don’t kill her so much that I don’t get a chance,” said May.

  “That, I think I can promise.” I turned to Walther. “I’ll see you soon. Open roads.”

  “Kind fires,” he echoed automatically.

  With that I turned and walked out of the office, Quentin beside me, leaving the rest of them behind.

  We made it out of the building and down the steps before he looked at me anxiously and asked, “You aren’t really going to kill her, are you?”

  “I don’t know, kiddo,” I replied. “I really don’t know.”

  We walked on.

  NINE

  THE OFFICERS WERE GONE from the residence hall when Quentin and I got there. Several girls I assumed lived there were out front, hammering boards over broken windows with the resigned air of people who thought they were too good for basic, menial tasks. Only a few of them looked at us as we walked up the path to the front door, and no one moved to stop us from going inside or even ask who we were there to see.

  “Nice security,” I commented. Cliff was going to get an earful about this once Gilly was safely home, that was for damn sure. Maybe I didn’t have any authority over her life at this point, but I could certainly make my feelings known. She needed to be living somewhere with a front door that locked. Maybe a doorman would be a step too far—in addition to being prohibitively expensive—but dammit, she deserved some sort of protection.

  Quentin made a disgusted snorting noise. It was nice to know someone was on my side in this.

  We reached the top of the stairs, walked to the room Gillian and Jocelyn shared, and stopped dead, both of us staring. Quentin found his voice first. He had fewer layers of shock and self-recrimination to work through.

  “What the hell . . . ?”

  Gillian’s side of the room looked exactly the same as before. May’s search, intensive as it had no doubt been, had left no traces. That was good. She lacked the muscle memory to do things like drive or fight, even if she could close her eyes and relive my lessons, but she knew how to toss a room without getting caught. Jocelyn’s side of the room, on the other hand . . .

  The bed was stripped. All her personal items were gone, from the books on the headboard to the small display of pictures on the wall. Even the desk was bare. I suddenly felt like I was choking, and it was no allergic reaction this time. She was gone, my daughter’s roommate was gone, and I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t breathe.

  Slowly, I stepped into the room, Quentin standing frozen behind me. The acrid scent of the herbal sachets lingered in the air. I realized I had no idea what Jocelyn’s magic smelled like, or whether it was even strong enough to have a scent at all. The presence of so many hostile herbs had prevented me from sniffing it out while she was here, and now . . .

  Now she was gone, and our chances of finding Gillian might well have gone with her.

  “Oh, are you Jocelyn’s mom? She told us you’d be coming by to make sure she hadn’t forgotten anything.”

  I turned. A harried-looking hum
an woman was standing in the hall, a clipboard in one hand, like something out of a college recruitment catalog. She flushed when she saw me staring.

  “I’m Chloe, I’m the residence director,” she said, almost apologetically. “I’m sorry. It’s been a hell of a day.”

  My anger and confusion fell back as a mask of professionalism snapped into place. This woman might have answers, at least to the question of where the hell Jocelyn had gone. “I heard one of your residents went missing.”

  “Not from here, thank God.” Her flush faded, replaced by a shocked pallor. “I’m sorry. That sounded bad.”

  “That’s the second time you’ve apologized,” I said, trying to sound gentle. I probably didn’t succeed. Hopefully, I at least sounded like I understood why she might be tense. “Have they found the girl?”

  “Not yet,” she said. “Gillian was parked on campus when someone snatched her. No one noticed for hours because we’d had some vandalism here—wait. Didn’t Jocelyn tell you all this?” Her eyes narrowed. “Can I see some ID?”

  “Absolutely.” I pulled a chunk of broken glass out of my pocket, intentionally slicing my fingertips on its edges, and murmured, “Baa, baa, black sheep, have you any wool? Yes sir, yes sir, but you can’t have any, fuck off.”

  The smell of grass and copper swirled around us as a spike was hammered into my temple, the pain from before flaring up twice as brightly. Chloe’s eyes went briefly unfocused. When they sharpened again, she was smiling.

  “Sorry about that, but you know how it is,” she said. “You can’t be too careful where student safety is concerned.”

  A funny sentiment, considering that Quentin and I had just walked in. I shoved my hands into my pockets, hiding the blood on my fingers, hiding how tightly clenched they were. “Safety is the highest priority,” I said. It was a struggle to keep my voice from wavering from the pain in my head. “Jocelyn was very upset about the disappearance of the Marks girl. She was a good roommate.”

  “Everybody loves Gillian,” said Chloe. “I’m just sick at the thought of something like this happening here. We’re going to set up a buddy system until she’s found, to make sure the rest of the residents are safe. Please tell Jocelyn that when she decides to come back, I will be happy to personally be her buddy. Nothing is going to happen to any of my other girls.”

  “I appreciate that,” I said neutrally. The spell I’d used to make her see an ID she would accept had also made her suggestable. That was a good thing, as long as I didn’t push it too hard. “Did you have any sign that this was coming? Suspicious people hanging around the house, neighborhood kids throwing rocks, anything?”

  Chloe looked uncertain.

  Screw it. I’d push as hard as I had to. “If I’m going to allow Jocelyn to return to school, I need to know she’s going to be safe.”

  “It seemed like nothing.”

  Jackpot. “What seemed like nothing?”

  “Someone kept cutting the house internet. I know, that sounds silly, and at first we thought it was just our ISP being awful—it happens, people assume the Bay Area will have this incredible, super-fast service, and really, we’re on decaying DSL lines and nobody wants to pay to upgrade them—but it kept happening, and one of our computer science majors managed to uncover an ongoing denial of service attack against us, specifically. Someone was flooding our Wi-Fi.”

  “All the time?” I didn’t understand half of what she was saying, but I could tell Quentin did. He was frowning, looking thoughtful, not confused. He could explain this to me later.

  “No.” Her expression turned sorrowful, sheepishness and regret and hindsight warring for dominance. “Only when Gillian was home. Now, after the fact, it feels like . . . well, it feels like someone was trying to make sure she’d stop studying in the house. Maybe they were trying to get her to Wheeler Hall. I don’t know.”

  I ground my teeth so hard it hurt, and I tasted blood. That was enough to center me, and I took a careful breath before I said, “I feel like someone should have called me, since she was rooming with my daughter.” True enough, as long as the “she” in that sentence referred to Jocelyn.

  The fae are great liars. They’ve had centuries to perfect their art. I’ve always found the truth to be more effective, especially when I’m already operating under false pretenses. It’s harder to get caught in a contradiction when you never contradict yourself.

  “We honestly didn’t think it was anything dangerous.” There was a defensive note in Chloe’s voice now. I was approaching the end of her patience, even for a parent. “We would have notified all parents if it were.”

  “I appreciate your candor,” I said, with a meaningful glance at Quentin. He nodded agreement, so vigorously that for a moment I was afraid his head would pop clean off his shoulders. “If you’ll excuse us, I want to finish cleaning up in here and be on my way. My daughter is very upset about everything that’s happened.” Another truth—or at least I hoped it was. If Gillian was conscious, I had no doubt she was upset.

  “I’ll be in the kitchen if you need me,” said Chloe, and retreated. For once, the natural human desire to avoid the fae—even if they didn’t realize that was what they were doing—was working for me, not against me.

  I turned to Quentin. “Check under the beds, behind the dressers, anywhere for signs of where she might have gone. If you see anything herbal, retreat and call me, got it? We have five minutes, tops, before that woman realizes we probably shouldn’t be in here unsupervised.”

  “On it,” said Quentin, and made for Jocelyn’s bed.

  I didn’t want to come into contact with another of those dusty, deadly sachets, and so I turned away from the dressers, toward the room’s single narrow closet. It looked barely big enough to contain my clothes, much less the clothing belonging to two girls in their late teens, when having a different outfit for every occasion still felt like it mattered. And it did matter, for some people. I’d never seen Arden wear the same Court dress twice. I’d never seen my mother do it either. Depending on what they chose to do with their lives, Gilly and Jocelyn might need to have wardrobes large enough to contain worlds, packed with shoes and slip dresses, with silks and satins. Or they might wind up like me, barely filling a single dresser. That’s the thing about time, about youth. It passes, and you become a bit more yourself with every day gone.

  Nothing in the closet appeared to have been taken or even disturbed. I frowned thoughtfully. It was like Jocelyn wanted us to know she was gone but hadn’t wanted to go to the trouble of actually leaving. Cautiously, I parted the hanging dresses. I knew when I touched something of Gillian’s by the faint tingle it left on my skin and the acrid scent of dried fennel and kale. I was going to need more of those allergy pills before the day was done.

  There was nothing of interest in the closet, and the sachet tucked into the far corner meant that sniffing out Jocelyn’s magic wasn’t an option. I closed the door and turned to her dresser, pulling the top drawer open.

  There was a note there, neatly folded atop the balled-up socks and rolled underpants. I stopped, looking at it.

  Quentin caught the change. He glanced my way. “Toby?”

  “It’s addressed to me.” I poked the paper with one finger. There was no tingle. If Jocelyn had made the sachets, she had been incredibly careful to keep their contents off her skin.

  I picked up the note, unfolded it, and read aloud, “‘October, I bet you wish you’d been nicer now, don’t you? I could have told you a lot of things, but you didn’t want to listen. Good luck finding your precious brat. I guess you’re pretty good at losing her. If you decide you want to play nicely, I’ll find you in the place you gave away.’” I turned the note over. “That’s all there is.”

  Quentin didn’t say anything.

  I sighed, allowing weariness to settle over me for a moment, letting it weigh me down. I was so damn tired. I hadn’t slept,
I hadn’t eaten, my daughter was missing, and now it seemed we’d let one of the people responsible for her disappearance slip right through our fingers.

  As if on cue, my phone rang. I pulled it out and swiped my thumb across the screen as I raised it to my ear. “Hello?”

  “We’re at Telegraph and Durant. Can you get down here? And hurry? There’s something you need to see.” May hung up. Either they’d found something terrible, or she knew we didn’t have time to waste. Either way, we needed to move.

  “Come on.” I shoved my phone back into my pocket and tucked the note into my jacket as I turned for the stairs. Quentin followed behind me; thank Oberon, he didn’t ask where we were going, or why we were going so quickly. He just followed, and when I hit the front porch and broke into a run, he did the same.

  We raced down the sidewalk, the two of us, and this was such a familiar scene that it ached, because this had never happened before, not really, not like this. It felt like everything was crumbling around me. Gillian was missing, maybe hurt, and Tybalt was shutting me out, and Jocelyn had gotten away. Would I have recognized her as a threat if I’d still been closer to human, if I hadn’t shifted toward thinking of people without magic as harmless? Would I have caught the signs that could tell me she was dangerous, not merely an annoyance, if I hadn’t been distracted by worrying about Tybalt? Was Gillian going to pay the price for my hubris?

  We ran and ran, and I tried to let the running become a distraction. If I could focus on the act of putting one foot in front of another, maybe I would be able to find something that would let me fight through this terrible situation to the other side.

  A corner loomed ahead of us. We turned, running two more blocks, and there was Telegraph Avenue, artery of the city, running straight and clean from the highway to the quad where the clocktower loomed. We turned again, weaving through crowds of students, parents, and tourists, passing street vendors both human and otherwise as we made our way toward Durant, a cross-street that connected the surrounding residential neighborhoods with this bustling commercial chaos.