“Spell’s over.” I pulled the pin loose, holding it up for him to see before pushing it through the strap of my dress. “I’m done playing little mermaid.”
“Good. That was too weird, even for you.” Danny took my hand again, pulling me to my feet. He didn’t have to work very hard to do it. I’m not tiny, but when you’re as big as Danny is, tiny is a relative term.
His cab was illegally parked at the bus stop with the hazard lights blinking. He opened the passenger-side door, waving grandly for me to get in. “Ladies first.”
“What, so I can trigger any booby traps that might be waiting?”
“Exactly!”
The interior of Danny’s cab smelled like artificial pine, not-so-artificial herbs from the Gremlin charms he used to confuse police sensors, and something that was almost, but not quite, dog. That would be the Barghests. At least there weren’t any of them currently in residence. I’m not sure I could have handled being enthusiastically licked by a venomous horror when I was sopping wet and uncaffeinated.
Danny must have seen how tired I was, because he didn’t talk after we pulled away from the curb. He just drove, racing through the city at speeds ranging from “unsafe” to “insane.” Danny’s a good enough driver that it wasn’t a problem. It was just part of riding with him—and at least this time, he wasn’t likely to drive the cab into the Summerlands. Instead, he was providing a valuable educational service to the tourists visiting our fair city: namely, San Francisco drivers are nuts.
I was the one to break the silence, asking, “Have you been able to learn anything from the rocks?”
“Some. Not much as makes any sense.” Danny’s sigh was like gravel rattling in a trash can. “See, the thing about rocks is they pay attention, but they do it slow. Once you upset them, it takes ’em a while to calm down. I’m still trying to get them to tell me their names an’ where they’re all from.”
Knowing where the rocks were from would be a start. “What do you have so far?”
“Gardens, rivers, sidewalks.” Danny gave me a sidelong look, taking a worrisome amount of attention off the road. “Some of the older ones—the calmer ones—remember you. One of ’em says it came from your yard. Says it used to live under a eucalyptus tree.”
A lump formed in my throat. Sylvester only brought Raysel to visit the apartment I shared with Cliff once; it was too dangerous to take a noble child in the open often, and there was too much risk that Raysel would say something she shouldn’t. But Sylvester wanted to meet my daughter, who was too close to human to enter the knowe, and he wanted Raysel to start getting accustomed to the human world. We sat in the postage stamp yard behind the building for hours, drinking lemonade, talking, and watching Raysel chase pixies around the three stunted eucalyptus growing by the back fence.
Before they left, she asked me if she and Gilly were going to be friends. Maeve help me, I told her they would. Six months later, Raysel was gone. Not long after that, so was I. Cliff moved out of that apartment while I was missing, and I’d never been back.
“Yeah,” I said. “That sounds about right.”
We pulled up in front of my apartment complex only a few minutes later. Danny stopped at the curb, saying apologetically, “I’d come in an’ be social, but I gotta get home and feed the kids. You gonna be okay?”
“As okay as I can be,” I said, and got out of the cab.
“I’ll call as soon as I know anything,” said Danny. Then he was gone, merging swiftly back into passing traffic.
I hugged my waterlogged clothes to my chest as I walked up the sidewalk to the gate. Walther’s car was parked in one of the visitor’s spots, jammed in at an angle that made it clear how fast he’d been going when he arrived. I walked a little faster. If he was here during school hours, it was because he had something he needed to share.
The wards on the door were open. That was a relief. Maybe it’s unkind of me to expect May to sit around playing secretary, but I don’t trust answering machines anymore, and people needed to be able to reach me. I undid the locks, calling, “I’m home,” as I stepped inside.
“Oh, thank Oberon!” May came flying out of the kitchen, throwing her arms around my shoulders before she fully registered how wet I was. She squawked and pushed me away from her. “Toby, you’re soaked!”
“Didn’t Quentin tell you where I was going?” Sudden fear lanced through me. Danny hadn’t mentioned driving Quentin home; I’d just assumed he must’ve, that Quentin would have sent him to wait for me. If he hadn’t—
“Quentin’s asleep in my room,” said May. “He wasn’t making sense when he got here. He said you ran away with the mermaids. I put him to bed when the sun came up.”
“That’s pretty much exactly what happened.” I shook my head. “I went to Saltmist with Dianda, to look for clues about what happened to the boys.”
May’s pale eyes went wide. “Did you find anything?”
“It was Rayseline. Any doubts I may have had . . . is Walther here? I saw his car.”
“He’s in the kitchen. We were showing Raj how to use the cappuccino setting on the coffee maker.” Something clattered in the kitchen, illustrating her point.
My relationship with the coffee maker is very dear to my heart. I grimaced, picturing my overenthusiastic Fetch taking it apart. “Okay. Tell him I’m going to go change into something dry, and then I’ll come in to review what we know. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Back in a minute,” I said, and started for my room.
Getting out of my wet clothes was the first order of business, to be followed by figuring out how to dry my leather jacket without destroying it. They were comfortably mundane problems, and the fact that they’d come about for distinctly nonmundane reasons was secondary at best.
I peeled my leather jacket off as soon as my bedroom door was closed, hanging it from the doorknob to keep it from dripping—much—on the rest of the room. Everything else went into the hamper. I dried my hair with the discarded towel from last night—oak and ash, had that really only been last
I was emptying my jacket pockets when there was a knock at the door. “You all right in there?” called May.
“Just soaked,” I called back. “Something up?”
“Raj did something to the coffee machine. It’s making foam, and Walther won’t stop laughing. You should come take a look.”
“Coming.” I checked the knot on my bathrobe, giving my rat’s-nest hair an irritated glance before grabbing my jacket. If anyone could get the salt off without ruining the leather, it was Walther.
The coffee party was in full swing in the kitchen. May had managed to divert the promised flood of foam, probably through means I didn’t want to hear about. She and Raj swabbed the floor with dish towels while Walther sat at the kitchen table, holding a mug and grinning. Spike was perched on Walther’s shoulder.
“Today we’re learning why it’s bad to use hearth magic to accelerate brewing,” May said, turning to wring her towel out over the sink.
“It was educational,” said Walther.
Raj beamed. “May said I couldn’t possibly mess up the new coffee maker.”
“I’m proud of you. Once again, you’ve managed to exceed all expectations. Never hex my coffee maker again.” I held up my jacket. “Walther, any chance you can get the saltwater out of this?”
Walther turned to face me, and blinked. “I can try,” he said, standing. Spike jumped down to the table. “Did you really visit the Undersea?”
“Well, first I rode a pissed-off mermaid down Leavenworth,” I said, handing him the jacket. “After that, yeah, I went to visit the Undersea. It was a weird night, and it’s already shaping up to be a weird day.”
“More and more, you convince me that taking a job in a nice, safe classroom was the smartest thing I ever did.”
“Yeah, well, it probably was,” I replied. “Why aren’t you there now?”
“I took the day off. The threat of war seemed slightly more important than keeping my freshman chemistry students from burning down the building.” Walther squinted at the leather. “What did you
“Again, I visited the Undersea.”
