Seven #3
Arden and Nolan blinked, both of them looking stunned by this new arrival. Chelsea ignored them, clinging to my arms as she babbled, “Can’t find her I tried I went looking and she’s not there not anywhere Toby she’s gone she’s gone she’s gone…”
Anything that involves the phrase “she’s gone” that many times in a row is probably bad, especially now that we have so many people that “she” could apply to.
Despite the spike of fear that tried to pierce my heart, logic told me that she wasn’t talking about Miranda: if she had been, Tybalt would have been here first, and I’d already be gone, off to find whoever dared to touch my child and break their hands for even thinking about it.
But this was Chelsea, and she was clearly distraught, and really, any questions I had were just a frantic attempt to convince myself that my first guess was wrong, that Luna wouldn’t do this to her own daughter.
I knew the truth. Taking a deep breath, I looked at Chelsea and asked, “Where’s Raysel?”
“I just told you I can’t find her,” half-wailed Chelsea.
“I often cannot find my sister,” said Nolan. “She went out for coffee last night and it was four hours before I could locate her. Perhaps the Torquill girl has gone for coffee?”
“She’s Daoine Sidhe, Nolan: she can’t teleport,” I said. “If she’d just gone for coffee, she would have taken Chelsea with her, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
Chelsea turned to look at him like he had just said the stupidest thing in the history of speech, then turned slowly back to me, eyes still teary and over-bright.
“She went … Quentin took her to one of the sitting rooms to catch her breath where she wouldn’t have to look at people.
I went to join her, and she asked me if I could find some of the little surprise pithiviers the waiters were handing out.
I said sure and I … I…” She stopped talking and started wailing, tears coming hot and fast.
Shit. “Chelsea, whatever happened, this isn’t your fault,” I said firmly. “Whether you were there or not, if someone was going to take her, they were going to take her. What happened?”
“I went for the pithiviers, and when I came back, she was gone.”
“Could she have gotten tired of waiting and gone somewhere else on her own?” asked Arden.
Chelsea shook her head, drooping as she let go and pulled away from me.
“I came back and the glass she’d been drinking from was broken on the floor.
Raysel never leaves broken glass just laying around.
She lives with blood-workers and a baby, she’s too careful for that.
And before you ask, she wouldn’t have left it for somebody to step on while she went to find a broom.
She would have called for someone to bring her one. ”
“That still doesn’t prove—”
“She wouldn’t have left without telling me!” snapped Chelsea, then wilted, pulling back, as she realized that she’d just raised her voice to the Queen in the Mists.
Arden raised an eyebrow but didn’t otherwise comment, just turned to me. “Sir Daye, it appears your ward may be missing. Will you please let us know when you’ve located her safely?”
It was simultaneously a dismissal and permission to go take care of the situation. I gave her a shallow, grateful bow before turning back to Chelsea. “Can you take me to where you left her?”
“I can,” said Chelsea, and grabbed my wrist even as she sketched a portal in the air with her free hand. The smell of her magic rose around us, strong enough to be overwhelming, and then she was stepping through the portal, pulling me along with her.
I looked over my shoulder, getting one last glimpse of the moon-drenched courtyard before the portal slammed shut and we were standing in one of the small parlors off the receiving room.
It was decorated in silver and purple, empty save for several plush chairs and a small table on which someone had left a small sandwich tower and a plate of some sort of half-eaten shrimp salad.
The smashed glass Chelsea had mentioned was still on the floor, along with a discarded fork.
“See? She was right—”
“Be quiet.” I raised a hand. Chelsea shut up. Closing my eyes, I took the deepest breath I could.
Chelsea’s magic was the most obvious, hanging over everything else like a thick fog.
I pushed my way beneath it, and there was the hot wax and crushed blackthorn of Raysel’s magic.
It hadn’t been used actively, but she had been here long enough for it to permeate the air where she’d been sitting, settled low and easy, like a purring cat.
There were other magical scents beneath that, but they were faded and worn away, left behind by the staff in passing.
And there was one thin ribbon of scent that I couldn’t quite pin down, light and floral, running under everything else. It was strange, definitely magical in nature, but not as deep or complex as I would have expected it to be. I sniffed again, then opened my eyes.
“No one portaled her out of here,” I said. “And if somebody used a compulsion spell, they managed to do it without leaving any traces of their magic behind. I don’t know, Chelsea. I think she may have just walked away for some reason.”
“She didn’t. She wouldn’t. Please, Toby. There has to be something here to find.”
I frowned, then lifted my hand and bit down on the skin at the side of my thumbnail.
Healing the way I do means that I almost never have to worry about scarring, and so the skin there stays thin and easy to tear.
After only a few nibbles, the cuticle tore and blood smeared onto my tongue, bright-hot and sweeter than I would have thought possible.
All the magic in the room leapt into sharp relief, spilling details about the people who had left it behind.
With a sniff, I could identify descendant lines and start to guess at spells that hadn’t even been cast in this room.
I bit again, coaxing more blood from the already-healing wound, and reached deeper.
It can be easy, when I’m mostly dealing with more-mammalian fae, to forget that there’s no such thing as “normal,” especially not in fae biology.
The majority of fae have olfactory magical signatures, usually two scents of roughly equal strength …
but pixies have visible glitter that sparkles in the air when they pass by, hanging suspended like dust. It would be strange if all the fae in the Undersea had magic you could smell.
Dryads, for example, tend to have very thin magical scents.
April, the only Dryad I ever really spend social time with, has a faint scent of ozone that follows her everywhere she goes.
Luna, even when she’d appeared to be Kitsune, had never had a particularly strong or clear magical signature.
Now that she was properly Blodynbryd again, I wasn’t sure I’d recognize her magic if I managed to detect it.
It was a mystery to me. She was a mystery to me.
I bit down again, and I smelled roses. They were under everything else, so faint that they were barely present, and not enough to prove anything at all.
Still, I focused on them, continuing to bite through the skin of my thumb rather than let that scent get away.
It was recent, and more importantly, as I began to pull the layers of magic in the room apart, it was on top of all the traces I’d dismissed as having been left by staff earlier in the day.
The only scent that it really seemed to share space with was Raysel’s.
The two overlapped, trading places back and forth.
“All right,” I said, lowering my hand and opening my eyes. Snapping back into reality was almost dizzying, and my knees felt briefly weak. “Chelsea, you stay here. I’m going to step out into the hall and see what I can pick up there.”
I didn’t wait for her reaction. I just went, exiting the room for the hall.
It was a long, straight corridor back to the party, but we were far enough removed that the sound of it was dulled by distance, or maybe by Cassie’s winds, the same trick that made voices from the dais carry keeping the commotion at least somewhat contained.
I closed the door, paused, and closed my eyes, raising my hand again.
The layers of magic were definitely denser and more complicated in the hall, where more people had passed by—and, if past experiences with formal court told me anything, more than half of them were wearing some sort of illusion or enhancement, making them look more put-together, more attractive, just plain more.
Some of them, especially the changelings, would have clothing that was entirely conjured from loose components, goose feathers and dried leaves and flower petals.
Being able to construct and maintain that sort of spell was a means of quietly bragging, without showing up dressed so shabbily that you insulted your hosts.
So the magical miasma in the hall was comprised of considerably more layers, piled substantially deeper than they were in the sitting room. I bit down on the side of my thumb, hard, and began trying to sort through them until I found the traces of Rayseline’s magic.
It came down the hall and went into the sitting room. But it didn’t come back out again. Whatever had happened to her, Chelsea was right: she’d vanished from the sitting room. Which meant, given her specific magical talents, that someone had taken her.
“Do you bite your thumb at me, sir?” asked a male voice, familiar and amused.
“Is the law on my side if I say aye?” I asked, and opened my eyes to find Tybalt standing a few feet away, expression a mixture of amusement, affection, and concern. It was a bit more than I can usually read out of a look, but I’ve had a lot of practice interpreting his moods.
“No,” he said.
“Then no, I’m not,” I said, and lowered my hand. “Hey, you. What’s going on?”