Page 14 of Night and Silence

I went.

Quentin’s door was slightly ajar. He didn’t mind the cats, and when they weren’t with me, they could usually be found with him, hogging the covers and somehow managing to force my adult-sized squire onto a strip of mattress about six inches wide.

There was no response when I knocked. I pushed the door open, choosing a small invasion of privacy over trying to wake him by making enough noise to rouse the dead. Assuming I even could wake him that way. If Cliff hammering on the front door for as long as he had hadn’t been sufficient to wake Quentin up, I wasn’t sure any amount of noise would get him out of bed. I sort of envied that. Sleeping deeply is a gift.

Enough light slipped around the edges of his curtains to illuminate the room, showing the hockey pennants and posters on the walls and the scattering of laundry on the floor. I didn’t judge. Quentin has been keeping his room cleaner than mine since the day he moved in, which is pretty impressive for a kid who grew up in a literal palace, with servants to cater to his every whim. Most people would take “it’s okay to be a slob” away from that. Quentin took “somebody has to clean up the mess, and it might as well be me.” It’s things like that that make me convinced he’s better than I ever deserved to have in my keeping.

There was a tank atop the dresser just inside the room, filled with tiny hippocampi, brightly-colored fae creatures with the lower bodies of impossible fish and the upper bodies of horses. The stallion circled his mares, eyeing me suspiciously. The reason for his caution became clear when I looked closer: there were several foals at the middle of the herd, their equine bodies no larger than my thumb. Almost everything that lives is willing to die in the defense of its young.

I turned away from the tank and started for the bed. The cat draped atop the blankets over Quentin’s hip raised its head and looked at me. I blinked.

My cats, Cagney and Lacey, are Siamese. This cat wasn’t mine. The shadows were deep enough to turn most colors to gray, and for a moment, my eyes sketched stripes where no stripes existed, telling me the cat on Quentin’s hip was a burly tabby, telling me things were getting back to normal.

The cat blinked enormous yellow eyes and yawned, showing me all its fine, sharp teeth. All his fine, sharp teeth. I sighed.

“Hi, Raj,” I said in a low voice. “Didn’t know you were sleeping over.”

Raj licked a paw before looking down the length of his nose at me, his entire body forming a question of what the hell I thought I was doing there. I shook my head.

“It’s a long story,” I said. “Can you hop off, please? I need to wake Quentin.”

Raj stretched with as much insolence as a cat could show and slid off of Quentin, landing on the mattress and continuing to watch me through wary eyes.

I tried not to think about what it meant for Raj to be coming here to sleep. It wasn’t unusual to find him in the house—he’d basically moved in when Quentin became my squire, claiming that if one of them got to live with me, they should both be allowed to live with me—but normally, he told me when he was going to spend the night. That he hadn’t done so smacked of trying to hide something . . . or trying to hide from me. To keep me from asking him questions he didn’t want to answer. The fact that he was staying in his feline form made me suspect there was a lot he didn’t want to talk about.

“Yeah,” I said mildly. “Me, too.”

I stepped over Quentin’s discarded backpack, which I only ever saw him use when he was going to spend the night at Goldengreen with Dean, and shook his shoulder. He grumbled.

“I’m going on errantry, and I will leave you here,” I said calmly.

He opened his eyes so quickly that if it hadn’t been for the change in his breathing, I wouldn’t have believed he’d been asleep at all. “You wouldn’t dare,” he said, voice heavy with exhaustion. He sat up, barely seeming to notice when Raj slunk out of the way, and ground the heel of one hand against his left eye. “Toby? What are you doing in my room? What time is it?”

“We need to go,” I said. I took a step back so that I could address both boys at the same time. “My daughter has been taken. We don’t know whether it was humans or the fae—I’m hoping humans, sweet Titania, I’m hoping humans—but we need to move if we’re going to get there before the trail goes cold.”

Raj meowed, the sound small and lost in the dark room. I looked at him and nodded.

“I know you can’t help, and I know Tybalt probably can’t help right now either, and I’m not going to ask how he’s doing, because this isn’t the time and it isn’t fair to you. But, yeah, you can tell him. You should tell him. And tell him I’m going to call Arden and ask if I can borrow Madden.” Madden is a Cu Sidhe, a fairy dog in the same way that Tybalt is a fairy cat. Which meant that his nose could be the difference between finding my daughter and not.

Quentin had finished rubbing his eye and was openly staring at me. “Gillian? But isn’t she . . . ?”

“Yeah, she’s human,” I said. “I’m going to get ready; you need to do the same. May is coming with us. Cliff and his new wife were just here, since clearly if my estranged, adult daughter is missing, it must be because I kidnapped her.”

The urgency that had flooded my veins when they told me about Gillian’s disappearance was getting stronger, starting to burn. My daughter was missing. I needed to find her. Even if she wouldn’t thank me for it, even if she would just . . . just turn away from me again, I needed to find her. I needed to bring her home.

I’d been forced to build a life without my child, one where I would always love and worry about her, but where she was no longer in the forefront of my daily thoughts. I had surrendered her to her father in a cave that shouldn’t have existed when I pulled the immortality from her veins and allowed the Luidaeg to wipe the impossible from her memory. Cliff had never done any of those things, had never made any of the choices that would put our daughter out of his reach. He didn’t know how to live without her. He’d never needed to know.

It was tempting to envy him for being that secure in his position as friend and father to our little girl. But there wasn’t time for envy, either. We had work to do.

“All right,” said Quentin, and slid out of the bed.

I nodded. “Good. Meet you in the hall in five minutes. Raj, open roads, and if Tybalt wants to find me, I’ll be in Berkeley.” I turned on my heel and left the room, heading down the hall to my own door.

We had so much to do and so little time. All I could hope for was that we’d be fast enough to bring my daughter safely home. Anything more than that would be greedy, and so I didn’t even dare to think about it. Just let me bring her home.

Cagney and Lacey were curled up against my pillow, bodies compacted into the warm spot my body had formed during the short time I’d been allowed to spend sleeping. Spike was a few feet away, stretched out in the narrow sunbeam that had managed to slip through my blackout curtains, its thorny belly exposed to the ceiling. I couldn’t stop myself from smiling, just a little, at the sight. Rose goblins are basically cat-shaped, impossibly mobile rose bushes. When Spike and I had met, it had been the size of a rabbit, or maybe a small cat. Now, after years of fertilizer, water, and all the sunlight it could want, it was nearly the size of a corgi. I didn’t know how big it could wind up getting, but I was looking forward to finding out.

“Gillian’s missing,” I informed it, as I stripped off my sleep clothes and started digging in the laundry on the floor, looking for something that was suitable for dealing with the police. Sure, I could use illusions to make myself fit into the scene, but illusions always work better when they have something to work with. My magic isn’t strong enough for me to discount that.