Page 12 of Night and Silence

“Toby, we’re not here to fight,” said Cliff. “We just want Gillian back. Please. If you don’t have her, can you help us? Can you find her?”

For a moment, the world seemed to spin as an overwhelming sense of déjà vu settled over me. This, too, had happened before, when Rayseline had Gillian, when Faerie had reached out and tried take my child, who should have been safe, who had been isolated from me for so long that she should never have become a target. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, chasing the vertigo away.

“Yes, I’ll find her,” I said, opening my eyes and leveling my best glare on Cliff as I let go of Miranda’s arm. “She’s my daughter, too. I didn’t take her, and you didn’t need to come here and accuse me like this, but there’s no way I am ever going to leave her in danger. You should have known that. How could you have been with me for as long as you were and not have known that?”

Cliff had the decency to look ashamed. I turned toward Miranda.

“You, on the other hand, you don’t know me at all. You’ve never liked me, and I guess that’s okay, because I’ve never really given you a reason to. But you are never, never to do anything like this again. This is my home. You are not welcome here. You were not invited to be here.” I paused. “How did you even know to come here? I never gave you this address.”

Miranda looked to the side, expression turning shifty, like she was afraid to look at me. Cliff sighed.

“I paid someone to find it, after you moved out of that terrible apartment,” he admitted. I stared at him, open-mouthed. “I’m sorry. It was low and shitty, and I shouldn’t have done it, but Gilly wasn’t sleeping after what had happened to her. She was crying all the time, and I needed to know where you were. For my own peace of mind, I needed to be sure you weren’t going to come and try to take our baby away. And then you went and moved into this house, like you were getting ready to need more room, and . . .” He rubbed the back of his neck with one hand. “I thought you were going to challenge me for custody. I’ve been waiting for years for you to come after her. To say I was a bad parent for letting her be taken in the first place.”

“Cliff . . .” I stopped, the protests dying on my lips. I didn’t know how to finish that sentence. It felt like I didn’t know anything anymore, like everything I’d fought so hard to learn had fallen away, tumbling into the abyss of my-daughter-is-missing.

Miranda returned to his side, looking down her nose at me. There was a condemnation as deep and wide as the Pacific Ocean in her eyes.

“Can you blame us for being afraid of you?” she demanded. “Can you blame me?”

Yes, I wanted to scream. Yes. Their fear sounded like an excuse. It sounded like the reason my little girl had become a woman in a house where I wasn’t welcome. Other people split up. Other children grew up with parents in multiple places. It would have taken a lot of time and effort to rebuild those bridges, to find a way to reconcile the angry teenager with the loving toddler I had left behind, but I’d been willing to put the time in. The only reason I hadn’t was because Gillian hadn’t wanted me to, and I’d loved her too much to force her into something she didn’t want.

Only now I was finding out that maybe Gillian hadn’t been the one who’d wanted me to stay away. Gillian hadn’t been the one afraid of custody challenges and missing mothers swooping in to snatch her from the home she’d always known.

I was tired. I was so, so tired. And Gillian was still missing. No matter how tired I was, I needed to go and bring my daughter home.

“All you ever had to do was tell me to stay away, and I would have stayed away,” I said softly. “You never had to spy on me.”

“We knew you weren’t going to come to the house again,” said Miranda. “If I’d thought there was any chance you were going to show up on our doorstep, I would have convinced Cliff we needed to move somewhere else a long time ago.”

“Even as the noncustodial parent, I would have been able to fight that right up until Gillian turned eighteen,” I snapped, before I could think better of it.

Miranda smiled, slow and broad. “And I would have welcomed a court case. After all, nothing like taking all your inadequacies as a parent in front of a judge to clear the way for my adopting my own daughter.”

In that moment, I felt it would have been completely forgivable for me to smash her head against the wall until I was satisfied that I’d knocked all thoughts of adoption clean out of her skull. I didn’t do it. I didn’t move. I just stood where I was and glared at her, wishing all those old stories of the fae cursing people with a glance had any basis in truth.

Miranda’s smile turned brittle before curling up and fading altogether. “I’m sorry,” she said. “That was mean of me. I get petty when I’m under stress.”

“I never would have guessed,” I said. My teeth were clenched so tightly that it felt like they would shatter and dissolve into dust in my mouth.

“Gillian is missing,” said Miranda, like I had somehow forgotten. “There was blood. Please. Can’t we put all this behind us? Can’t we agree to settle our differences long enough to find our daughter?”

The way she kept saying “our” was like claws against my skin, ripping and tearing at me, stealing the air from my lungs. I forced the feeling away and said, “I already promised to help. Where is she going to school? I’ll head over there right away.”

“Berkeley,” said Cliff.

I managed to conceal my relief. Any local school would have been good, as long as it was inside the Kingdom in the Mists. I’d cause a diplomatic incident for my daughter’s sake if I had to, but it was better if it wasn’t necessary. Berkeley was the best-case scenario.

Thanks to an old land agreement, the city was unclaimed territory: Arden was the only noble with any direct authority there, and even she was mostly ignored by the inhabitants. Walther and Bridget were both on the faculty; they could get me the kind of access that would have been exceedingly difficult otherwise. Even better, Cassandra was a grad student there, which meant Arden wouldn’t need to assign someone to keep an eye on me. If she got concerned, she could just ask her chatelaine. All my attention and energy could go to finding my daughter and getting her back where she belonged. That was good. Getting started would be better. My initial shock was starting to thaw, replaced by the horrified conviction that I had very little time in which to find her and bring her safely home.

“I need to get dressed,” I said briskly. “I’ll call you if I find anything.”

“If you try to keep things from us—”

I leveled a flat gaze on Cliff. “You mean like you kept my daughter from me after I was abducted? Fuck you.” The mortal profanity felt good, like honey on my tongue. “Turnabout may be fair play, but some of us have standards. Now I need to get moving, and that’s going to be easier if you’re not standing here waiting for me to pull a miracle out of my ass.”

“October—” Cliff began.

“Get out your phone,” I said.