Seven #5
All the traces from before were still there, but brighter now, easier to follow and understand.
I could see where one of the signatures doubled back on itself several times, the owner repeatedly coming into and going out of the room.
There were new traces as well, ones that had been too faint to pick up without more blood.
I “saw” Arden and Nolan, Cassandra, even the Luidaeg coming and going.
Distantly, I wondered whether our magic had always been intended to serve as some sort of tracking mechanism.
Once you had a lock, it was all too easy to follow.
And Raysel never left the room. Her signature came in, sat down, and stayed, until that dusty rose appeared, too faded and worn-through to be a true magical signature, but the only thing that changed before Raysel’s magic vanished entirely.
I licked the rest of the blood off of my long-healed palm, bringing the signatures momentarily back to heightened brightness.
Still the story didn’t change. There was no blood but my own, no flare of magic that might mark a transformation, nothing that could tell me where my ward had gone. She was just gone.
“Go get Quentin,” I said wearily, lowering my hand, opening my eyes, and leaning over to get a napkin from the table. I paused as I did. “Didn’t you say you’d gone to get Raysel some sort of appetizer?”
“Pithiviers,” said Chelsea. “They’re sort of fancy-fucker donut holes. The ones they have tonight were full of either chopped ham or raspberry jam, and you can’t tell the difference from the outside. Raysel goes bananas over that sort of thing, says it’s like playing hide-and-seek with food. Why?”
“Did she have anything to eat before you went and got the pithiviers?”
“No. Why?”
“All right.” I kept looking at the table. “Did you come back with the pithiviers?”
“I did, but she was gone,” said Chelsea.
Right. “Go get Quentin.”
“But I—”
“Agreed that you’d bring him back when we were ready. So go get Quentin.”
She wrinkled her nose at me, looking like she wanted nothing more than to argue, and then she was gone, stepping through a portal in the air and leaving me alone in the room.
I moved closer to the table, crumpled napkin still in my hand as I leaned over and looked at the polished glass tabletop.
It was pristine, not even fingerprints—Arden’s staff was good at their job—except for a small streak of what looked like maple syrup or honey, right at the edge.
Right at the edge, where it could have dripped from a plate … or from a wound. Not every type of fae bleeds actual blood, because not every type of fae is strictly mammalian. I say that a lot, but even so, sometimes I lose sight of what that really means.
I finished wiping the blood off my hand as best as I could, stuffing the napkin into my pocket, and reached out carefully with an unbloodied finger to touch the edge of the little spill.
It was still wet, tacky in the way of undried syrup, and it smeared easily when I pressed against it.
There was no way the staff would have missed this, then. It had to be fresh.
I lifted my finger to my nose, sniffing cautiously. It smelled like sap, like green, growing things. It wasn’t sweet enough to be syrup, not sour enough to have come from anything animal. I was terribly afraid that meant I knew exactly what it was.
Closing my eyes again, I tapped my finger against the tip of my tongue and swallowed.
It wasn’t much: it wasn’t enough for true memory.
But it was enough to make the dusty-rose smell blossom and intensify, becoming briefly as bright as any other magic in this room.
It developed another scent at the same time, layered under the first one: sugared sloe wine, the sort that was popular in Europe a few hundred years ago.
“Sloe” is another word for blackthorn fruit. I recoiled, eyes snapping open, and gave the sap puddled on the table another hard look, just as a portal opened in the air and Chelsea tumbled through, followed by Quentin.
“Quentin, get over here,” I said. Pleasantries could wait.
He blinked and walked over to me, looking bewildered. “What is it?” he asked.
I pointed to the sap. “Taste this.”
“What is it?”
“Blood, I think. Sort of. Just taste it.”
He stuck his finger obediently into the sap, then into his mouth, making a sour face as he did. “It tastes like dust and roses,” he reported. “And … I don’t know, maybe just a little bit of vinegar? What is it?”
“What you’re tasting is wine,” I said. “And what it is, is that we didn’t double-check to make sure Luna would still bleed in a way we could recognize after she lost her Kitsune skin.
Luna was here. Luna took Raysel. Chelsea, you need to go and notify Queen Windermere, because Rayseline Torquill has been abducted by her own mother, and I’m pretty sure that she’s been taken outside the authority of the Mists. ”
“What do you mean?” squeaked Chelsea.
“I mean, she’s probably in Blind Michael’s lands by now,” I said. “And we’re going to have to go and get her back.”