on my face. “I don’t know how free you are to go where nothing has died, but . . . if one of them dies . . . can you find me? Can you tell me?”
I didn’t want to think of any of the three missing children as expendable. Two of them would start a war, and one of them was my only daughter. But if it happened, if one of them died . . . maybe I could get to the other two in time.
The night-haunt with Devin’s face turned to the others. Buzzing and rattling filled the room, like a thousand dead branches scraping against each other. Finally, the susurrus faded, and he turned back to me. “We will,” he said. “This one time, we will.”
“I . . .” Biting back the urge to thank him was almost impossible. I swallowed hard, and said, “This is very kind of you. I know you don’t have to do this.”
“So return the kindness,” he said. “Answer a question for us.”
I blinked. “Of course. What do you want to know?”
“Why aren’t you dead?”
I hadn’t expected the question, or the naked confusion in his voice. I stared at him for a moment before managing to say, “I’m alive because . . . well, because I haven’t died. I don’t know why. How the hell am I supposed to know?”
“A Fetch was called for you,” he said. “We sent her off with weeping and all proper ceremony. But here you are, and your Fetch is still alive.”
“The natural order of things is not preserved,” said the night-haunt with Margie’s face, punctuating the statement with a snap of her wings. “You can’t exist like this.”
“Since when does the natural order of things have anything to do with Faerie?” A soft grumbling swept through the night-haunts. I sighed. “The natural order of things is going to have to cope, because I need May to keep paying her share of the rent.”
“This isn’t right.” The night-haunt with Oleander’s face muscled her way forward, glaring at me. We didn’t part on the best terms. I killed her, after all. “You should be dust and memory. Your Fetch should be a rattle on the wind, a warning to our children.”
“She’s not, and neither am I,” I snapped, tucking my hair back to display the recently sharpened point of one ear. “See? I died. Mom just refused to let it stick.”
“Must your line forever be so cavalier with death?” asked the Devin-haunt. The others sighed, like dry leaves brushing together. “We’ll come to you if we learn anything, but you can’t do this again, Toby. The courtesy we can afford for the sake of the life you saved can only extend so far. We’ll be going now.” The flock began to rise.
“Wait!” I said. “What are you—”
I was too late. The night-haunts left as quickly as they’d come, leaving me standing alone in my rough circle of blood.
“—talking about?” I finished, to the silence.
The silence didn’t answer.
TWENTY-FOUR
MARCIA WAS WAITING in the throne room when I emerged. Her easy pose against the wall must have taken some serious thought—she could only have looked more casual if she’d been wearing a bikini and sipping a cocktail. I stopped where I was, raising an eyebrow.
“Yes?” I asked.
“How did it go?” Marcia abandoned her faux relaxation in favor of standing up straight, turning the full focus of her attention on me. “Did they tell you anything good?”
“The night-haunts were obscure and unnerving, but they told me some things I needed to know,” I said, walking past her. She fell into step behind me. “The Selkie Raysel killed was named Margie, and the Lorden kids aren’t dead.”
“That’s good—the boys, I mean, not the dead woman.” She walked a little faster as she pulled up alongside me, and frowned, studying my face. “That
There was no point in trying to conceal the truth forever. I’ve never been any good at that sort of thing, anyway. “My daughter’s missing.”
“Wait—what? You have a daughter?”
“Yeah. Gillian. She lives with her human father. Rayseline took her, and I need to find her, fast, before there’s time for her to suffer any permanent damage.”
Marcia took a short, sharp breath, like she was biting off an exclamation. Then she went quiet, walking with me across the courtyard and down the hall to the kitchen without saying a word.
It wasn’t until I was reaching for the pot of coffee that simmered gently on the stove that she said, very softly, “What makes you think she hasn’t already?”
I paused for a moment, my hand just shy of the handle. Then I finished the motion, trying to let the familiarity of it soothe me. It wasn’t working. Sometimes, even ritual has no comfort left to give. “What do you mean?” I asked.
“I mean . . . Toby, if she lives with her
“If that,” I muttered darkly. “What’s your point?”
“Does she even know Faerie exists? How do you know she hasn’t already been hurt, just by finding out how much she doesn’t know?” Marcia shook her head. “I’ve known a lot of changelings who couldn’t cope with learning that their parents—” She stopped mid-sentence, looking stricken.
I sighed, and finished, “With learning that their parents lied to them. Because that’s what we do when we play faerie bride. We lie. We lie to our lovers, and we lie to ourselves, and if we’re really lucky, when our children find out that we’re liars, they forgive us, and grow up to become liars in their own right.”
“Yeah.” Marcia bit her lip, looking at me. “You lied to her, Toby. For her whole life. And now she’s in a situation she never had a reason to prepare for, and she’s probably scared to death, and I mean, you’re right, we need to get her back, but I don’t think we can say she hasn’t already been hurt.”
Her words hurt more than I could have imagined. I closed my eyes for a moment, counting slowly to ten before I opened them again, and said, “That doesn’t matter. All that matters now is that I’m going to get her back. I’m going to find a way to save her.”
“And you’re going to stop the war at the same time, right?”
“I . . .” I paused. I was starting to feel overwhelmed. Too much was happening. I just wanted to crawl into a cup of coffee and wait until it all went away. “I’m going to do the best I can.”
Marcia nodded. “I guess that’s all I can ask for. What are you going to do now?”
Every inch of me ached to be moving, to be making some progress toward finding my daughter. At the same time, I knew that I needed to stop and breathe before I did that, or I was just going to get myself killed.
I realized, without much surprise, that I wished Connor were there. Maybe we were about to be on different sides of a war and maybe we weren’t, and either way, I didn’t care. Everything I loved was in danger. I wanted him to put his arms around me and tell me it was going to be okay.
I sighed, and asked, “Could you make me a sandwich?”
Marcia smiled, motioning for me to sit down before she moved toward the icebox. “How do you feel about strawberry-and-chicken sandwiches?”
“I think I speak with complete honesty when I say that I have no opinion on strawberry-and-chicken sandwiches,” I said, abandoning my reach for the coffee and settling on the bench. “Just make it something I can take in the car with me. As soon as May gets here, I’m gone.”
“You’ve got it,” said Marcia, and got to work.
I propped my elbow on the table and cradled my chin in my hand, watching her. It was weirdly soothing. Making a sandwich was a simple domestic activity, and the fact that we were on the verge of war did nothing to change that. If Marcia were asked to make sandwiches in the middle of a battlefield, she’d probably do it the exact
