Page 19 of Night and Silence

No. I shoved the thought away, refusing to let it take root in the fertile soil of my fear. I would know, because I would ask her when I found her. That would be my payment for bringing her home. I couldn’t ask her to let me be her mother again, couldn’t make her let me into her life, but I could ask why she hadn’t punched this simpering child the minute she’d refused to let the topic of Gillian’s family drop.

“Hey,” said Quentin, all teen idol earnestness. “I know this is probably overwhelming, and I get that you’re scared. I’d be scared, too. But we need your help. We need to know where Gillian would have gone.”

“I know you,” sighed Jocelyn dreamily. “You’re Quentin, her squire. You’re in the Mists as part of a blind fosterage, but everyone knows you just have to be noble. I mean, nothing else makes sense, not with her being a hero and you being so handsome.”

May and I exchanged a look.

Quentin, for all that he seemed increasingly uncomfortable, nodded. “That’s right, I’m Quentin. It’s a pleasure to meet you. But look, we’re really worried about Gillian, and we need to find her as soon as possible. Is there anything you can tell us about where she would have been last night? Anything at all?”

The dreamy look in Jocelyn’s eyes turned calculating. “I might be able to show you, if you took me with you to find her. I promise I won’t be underfoot. I know how things work. I can be helpful. I can be useful. You’ll see.”

Madden, who had been snuffling at the space under Gilly’s bed, pulled his head out and made a small woofing noise. He didn’t like this idea.

Yeah, well, neither did I. But if that was what we had to do to get this girl to show us where Gillian and her friends would have been before the incident, I was going to go with it. “Do you know where they found her car?” I asked.

“It was near where her study group meets,” said Jocelyn. She stood, pulling her hand away from Quentin’s with obvious reluctance. “Let me get my coat and we can go. You won’t leave without me, will you? Promise you won’t leave without me!”

“Sure,” I said. “We promise.”

She beamed, bright as a Christmas tree, and ran out of the room, leaving the four of us alone. May and I exchanged another look. Quentin rose, wiping his hand on the side of his leg.

“I don’t know whether to be terrified or impressed,” he said. “Are all changelings like her?”

“You know better,” I said mildly. “There’s no such thing as ‘all’ when you’re talking about people.”

His cheeks reddened. “Sorry,” he said. “I guess I do.”

“Apology accepted,” I said. “Now come on. We have maybe a minute to search this place without anyone watching us. Go.”

I moved toward Gillian’s side of the room, feeling simultaneously like I was invading her privacy and like I was finally entering a place I’d been standing outside for years. Her clothes were stuffed into a rickety dresser that looked like it had been purchased from one of those flatpack outfits, put together with a wrench and a lot of swearing. Cliff had never been the handy one in our relationship. He had probably bled all . . .

Bled all . . .

There was blood in Gilly’s car. There was blood in my daughter’s car. The police had found blood, and the blood was probably hers, and she hated me, and I was going to need to roll her memories across my tongue in order to see what she had seen in the moments before she bled. I would need to slide myself into her, into all the things she’d never wanted me to see, all the thoughts she’d never wanted me to share.

Under those circumstances, going through her dresser wasn’t an invasion of privacy. It was a normal thing a frightened parent might do. What I was planning to do when we got to her car . . . that was an invasion of privacy. It was unforgivable. And I was going to do it anyway.

Gillian’s clothes were neatly folded—surprisingly so for a college student; even Quentin didn’t keep his dresser quite that organized—and smelled oddly herbal. I leaned closer, taking a deep breath, and coughed as I recoiled. May and Quentin turned away from their own investigations to stare at me. Madden flattened his ears with an inquisitive whine. I coughed again, signaling for them to stay where they were, and dug into the clothes.

I found what I was looking for at the bottom of the drawer, wedged into the far corner, where it was unlikely to get accidentally dislodged in the process of pulling out a pair of socks. It was a small mesh sachet, tied off with red-and-white ribbons, packed with herbs that made me want to drop the whole thing. Touching it made me feel dirty, slimy, like I had no business being here.

Breathing as shallowly as I could, I lifted the sachet and took another sniff. Grudgingly, my magic sorted through the individual components, naming and labeling them. Fennel and kingcup and St. John’s wort; gorse and dill and kale. I blinked at the last one. “Kale?” I muttered and took one more sniff. Scots kale, to be specific, an old, almost heirloom strain.

“What is it?” asked May.

I dropped the sachet on the floor. Relief washed over me as soon as I wasn’t in contact with the disgusting thing. Sadly, relief didn’t come with a decongestant. “It’s a marshwater charm,” I said, voice thick with sudden snot.

May’s eyes widened.

“What?” asked Quentin. “It’s not wet.”

“Marshwater charms are a class, not a specific description,” I said, wiping my hand on my pants and glaring at the sachet. We needed to take it with us. I could see that. But I did not want to touch it again. “A lot of changeling tricks are considered marshwater. Small, simple, mostly self-powering if you put them together right.”

“Like alchemy,” said Quentin.

“Surprisingly, yes,” I said. I looked around the room until I spotted a piece of tin foil in one of the trash baskets. “Get the foil. I don’t want any of us touching this thing.”

“But what is it?” he asked.