Page 11 of Night and Silence

His voice dropped to a whisper. “Maybe you shouldn’t.”

I looked at him, my lover, my friend, and said the only thing I could think of, the only rope I had to throw.

“I love you.”

He didn’t say anything. He just stepped into the shadows and was gone, leaving me alone.

I woke with tears on my cheeks, blinking blearily at my ceiling. Light slanted around the edges of my blackout curtains, confirming that it was daytime, but it didn’t feel like afternoon. My head pounded from a toxic combination of grief and the shock of waking too early. I glanced at the bedside clock. Nine am. Why the hell was I awake before noon?

As if in answer to the question, the sound of someone hammering on my front door drifted up the stairs. It wasn’t gentle knocking. It was the kind of pounding that comes from panic or urgency, and it traveled straight up my spine, leaving me on my feet before I had fully committed to the idea of getting out of bed.

My current nightgown was an oversized T-shirt with the logo from a recent production of The Tempest on the front. Decent enough. I grabbed a pair of yoga pants from the laundry hamper and yanked them on, pulling my silver knife from under the pillow and tucking it into the waistband where my shirt would hide it. I’d have to be careful not to stab myself, but finding the sheath would take too long and would involve putting on more complicated clothing. This would do for right now, until I knew what was going on.

What was going on was the person at my door still hammering away. They’d wake Quentin and May soon, if they hadn’t already. Jazz was probably already gone, off to work in the antique store where she spent most of the time that wasn’t in the house. I sent a silent thanks for that as I made for the stairs. She wasn’t as fragile as Tybalt, but she wasn’t in a place where having someone invade her home was going to do her any good at all.

I wove a rough human disguise from lingering shadows as I took the stairs two and three at a time, hitting the bottom with a thump and practically running down the hall. There was a pause in the knocking. I wrenched the door open just as the man on the porch raised his hand to start again. For a moment, it looked like he was getting ready to punch me. I tensed. The blow never came.

“Cliff?” I asked blankly.

My ex-fiancé—the father of my only biological child, no matter how many stray teenagers I brought home—lowered his hand. His face was pale and drawn. Given his Italian complexion, the pallor made him look sick, verging on collapse. The thick, dark hair I used to love so much was thinning. That was natural, given his age. Less natural was the fact that it didn’t appear to have been combed. His shirt was unbuttoned, and one of his shoes was unlaced.

The woman behind him didn’t look much better. Her buttercup-blonde hair was pulled into a thick braid, frizzy breakaway strands radiating in all directions. She was wearing a green sweater that needed to have its cuffs darned, and jeans with a hole just below the knee. Somehow, that hole was the most distressing part of the whole thing. I’d never seen my replacement—Cliff’s first wife, Gillian’s stepmother—looking anything other than perfectly groomed. To be fair, I hadn’t seen Miranda more than a few times: our mutual dislike was one of the only things we had in common. But something about this was just wrong.

“Is she here?” rasped Cliff.

The world snapped into terrible, crystalline focus. I grabbed the doorway with one hand to keep from falling over. “Gillian’s missing?” I managed to squeak. There was no air. Where had all the air gone? “When? What happened?”

“Don’t,” snarled Miranda. She pushed past me into the house. I didn’t stop her. I couldn’t stop her. All the good, logical reasons I needed to get in her way—Quentin and May were sleeping, none of us habitually wear human disguises when we’re in our own home, there were probably swords on the coffee table and strange tea canisters on the counters—were gone, replaced by the sudden, heart-stopping realization that my little girl was missing. My little girl was missing, again, and this wasn’t supposed to happen anymore. This was supposed to be over.

Once upon a time, I tried to live a human existence, to be part of the human world. Cliff was a part of that, the innocent mortal man who took a fairy bride without realizing it. Gillian, though . . . Gillian was the best part of that. She was my little girl, my beautiful daughter, and I would have done anything for her, anything at all.

Unfortunately, what I did for her was leave. I’d followed the wrong trail into the wrong place, and wound up spending fourteen years enchanted and transformed, unable to return to my family or tell them anything about what had happened to me. By the time I’d freed myself and tried to go home, they had given up on me. I couldn’t entirely blame them for that anymore—human lives are so short, and fourteen years is such a long time—but having my daughter grow up calling another woman “Mom” was the sort of pain I’d never expected to experience. I’d thought I’d known what suffering was.

Then Rayseline Torquill, daughter of my liege lord, had decided to kidnap Gillian to get to me, and had nearly killed her in the process. The only way to save my child had been to change her, to pull the fae blood from her veins and let the Luidaeg edit her memory to take all the impossible things away. That kind of magic is fragile. The best way to keep Gillian from being consumed by memories of the impossible was for me to stay away from her completely.

I hadn’t seen my daughter for more than two years, all for the sake of her well-being. And now she was missing.

“Her college called us last night,” said Cliff. He seemed to realize his wife was already inside, because he straightened and followed her past me into the hall.

This time, I had the presence of mind to stop him, if I wanted to. It would have been so easy. He looked like he had no strength left in him, like it had all been drained away by the situation. I didn’t move. Miranda had already breached my defenses, such as they were, and Gillian was missing. I wasn’t going to keep him away from his wife, not now.

“What . . . ?” I managed. I turned to face them, only remembering at the last second that I should probably shut the door. I didn’t even know where Gilly was going to college. That suddenly seemed like a grave oversight on my part. How could I not know where my own daughter was going to school?

“Her resident adviser said there was a break-in. Someone smashed every window in her residence building just after midnight, and when they took a headcount of the students, Gilly was missing. At first, they thought she might have been behind the vandalism. They were calling us to find out if she’d run home when the prank went wrong.” There was no life in Cliff’s voice. He was reciting facts because he had to, not because he felt any real connection to them. “We said we hadn’t seen her. We said she wouldn’t do that. And then . . .” He faltered, looking to Miranda for help.

Miranda turned from her narrow-eyed study of my hallway and said, “They found her car. All the windows smashed, blood on the seat, no Gillian. She’s gone. Someone’s taken her. Was it you? Is this how you get back at us, by kidnapping our daughter?”

There had never been any love lost between me and Miranda, but it still stung for her to jump straight to assuming I’d hurt my own child. I narrowed my eyes, reaching for every ounce of authority I possessed, and said, “Maybe it’s time for you to leave.”

“Maybe it’s time for you to tell us where Gillian is,” snapped Miranda. She wasn’t making any effort to keep her voice down.

I scowled. “People are sleeping. Please, be quiet, and get out.”

“Who?” Miranda demanded. “Who’s sleeping? You don’t have any family. Gillian?” She whirled, starting toward the stairs.

I moved without thinking, grabbing her arm and pulling her to a halt. She shot me a startled look, eyes gone wide. Apparently, the thought that I’d defend my home had never occurred to her.

“She isn’t here, and my housemates are none of your business,” I said, voice low. “You shouldn’t be here, either.”