Page 53 of Silver and Lead (October Daye #19)

My blood didn’t soak into the paper. Instead, it beaded up and rolled down the page, illuminating cramped black writing as it went.

I couldn’t read anything that was written there—there wasn’t enough blood for that—but I could see that the page had been filled out completely before it was concealed.

When the blood reached the bottom of the paper, it rolled off to splatter uselessly against the desk.

I tapped it with a clean fingertip and brought it to my lips, tasting red salt and nothingness.

The magic my blood normally contained was gone, soaked into the paper and dissolved from the world.

Interesting. I jabbed my finger again and repeated the process at a different point on the page, illuminating more text. It took ten jabs before the whole page had been bled across, the blood rolling and beading away each time, leaving the text revealed in its place.

It was a ledger. Items and names, written in a tightly controlled hand, followed by figures.

Some of the figures had checkmarks after them, presumably signaling that the item in question had been delivered; others were still open.

A few were crossed out. I squinted at those.

Whether it had been Dugan or his sister keeping the ledger, they’d been smart enough not to write things out in full: that would have been an easy conviction, erasing plausible deniability. Still, I could make reasonable guesses.

One of the crossed-out lines read “S.S., any—T.W.” If I read that correctly, it had been an order for a Selkie skin or skins, probably placed by my old semi-friend, Tracy Wilson.

Tracy had been at Home with Bucer and me, and her daughter, Jocelyn, had been responsible for the last time my daughter had been attacked.

I rubbed my stomach with one hand, only half-aware of the gesture.

A Selkie skin would have allowed Tracy to become fully fae, or to make her daughter fully fae, but there were virtually no Selkie skins left in the world, and the ones that remained were under such tight guard that trying to steal one would be a creative form of committing suicide.

I tapped that line with my finger. “Bucer, can you come over here?”

He turned away from the bookshelf and trotted back over to the desk, leaning down to look where I was pointing. He nodded. “Yeah, she asked me for a Selkie skin. I couldn’t get it.”

“Did you try ?”

“I told her I tried.” At my withering expression he took a step back and raised his hands defensively.

“Hey, she was my employer! She wanted it, I said I’d go for it, I went down to Half Moon Bay and kicked around for an afternoon, then came back and said I couldn’t manage it.

I got some really nice ice cream. I’d do it again. ”

“But you didn’t mess with the Selkies?”

“She asked for that before the enchantment collapsed. I thought she was requesting something that didn’t actually exist anymore, since the Selkies had been gone for centuries.

But I dug around in some secondhand stores, looked at this place that sold weird taxidermy, and didn’t find any pelts with magic associated with them.

Then the enchantment collapsed, and I just didn’t remind her that there might be skins available again in a world where the Undersea still existed. ”

I eyed him warily. “If the Undersea was lost, how did Tracy know to ask for a skin?”

“She was flailing around looking for ways to turn her daughter fully fae before she was executed,” said Bucer.

“Jocelyn was being held by the nameless Queen for crimes against pureblood society—didn’t know her place, didn’t bow her head, pushed too hard and too far—and she was going to be killed after Moving Day.

Tracy thought if she could make her pureblooded, she’d be pardoned.

Selkie skins and Swanmay cloaks were at the top of her list. I couldn’t find one of those, either, don’t worry. ”

“Are Swanmay cloaks valuable?”

“Moreso than Raven bands. There’s not as many of them, and most people who think turning into a bird would be cool would rather be a giant bad-ass steroid duck than a flappy goth pigeon.”

I frowned. I had never considered the price of essential pieces of people’s connection to Faerie. “Did you steal any of those?”

“A couple,” he said, waving it away like it was nothing.

“Dame Altair had orders. Never did manage to get one for Jocelyn, though. Poor Tracy was still looking for an answer when the world fell down, and then we got back into reality, and she wasn’t interested in trying hard enough to meet the going price. ”

“Why not?”

He shrugged. “Arden’s not going to execute Jocelyn for being a twit and abducting her college roommate. Even if that college roommate was your daughter, that shouldn’t be a dying offense.”

Much as I wanted to object, I couldn’t. Gillian being my child didn’t mean upsetting her should be punishable by death.

Sure, what Jocelyn had done had resulted in more than upsetting Gilly—it had cost her the last of her humanity, invalidating the choice she’d made the first time she’d been elf-shot.

I resented that. Even knowing my daughter would be with me forever now, I still resented it.

“Has anyone checked Arden’s dungeons to see if Jocelyn’s still there?”

Bucer snorted. “Tracy said she was when she came and made another bid for a Selkie skin. Altair told her to fuck off. Said we don’t do second tries for impossible things.”

“Okay…” I turned back to the ledger. Tracy might still be someone we needed to talk to as part of the investigation Arden had tasked me with, but not until we had our people back. Maybe there would be something in these lists of sale that would tell us where Altair and her brother had taken them.

The fear was starting to bubble up in my gut, making me nauseous and uneasy.

Tybalt wasn’t indestructible, not like May.

He could be in real trouble. He could be hurt, or worse.

This ledger proved that Altair wasn’t above dealing in fae bodies as if they were commodities.

No one had to die to steal a Selkie’s skin or a Swanmay’s cloak, but for the person who lost them, being left suddenly mortal and cut off from Faerie might as well have been a form of dying.

There were other things written down there, most of them unfamiliar.

I didn’t know what the abbreviations meant, although she had helpfully labeled some of the items as “pers.”, which I assumed meant “personal.” Most of those were checked off, which didn’t make me feel any better. The second most common entry was “M.M.”

I did feel a tiny spark of satisfaction when I reached the line that read “H.C., vault—pers.” and saw that it was neither checked off nor crossed out. She didn’t have the thing she’d wanted most. There were no items listed after that: that was when she’d lost faith in her thief.

“Who’s M.M., Bucer?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I don’t know. That was Dame Altair’s mystery buyer. She never let me know who it was, but they paid with some pretty weird shit. Old money, jewels, alchemical supplies, plants—whoever it is, they’re pretty well-connected.”

“Because that’s not ominous or anything,” I muttered.

“What?” asked Quentin, turning away from the bookshelf.

“Nothing. You find anything we can use?”

“Not really,” he said. “Lots of old books. Some of them are in languages I can’t read. Some jars of seeds and stuff. Not alchemical supplies—they’re not prepared or anything. They’re just in glass jars, like someone’s going to start a garden.”

“What languages do you read?”

He shrugged. “English, French, some Breton, and Welsh.”

“Huh.” That was three more languages than I could read. I closed the ledger, tucking it under my arm as I moved to stand. “Can you tell what kind of seeds they are?”

“Apple seeds,” said Bucer. He picked up two small jars that had been tucked back into the shadows of the shelf, carrying them toward me. When he was close enough he held the jars out to let me see their contents.

They were indeed apple seeds, dozens of them in each jar, tiny brown teardrop shapes piled upon themselves and preserved behind glass. That wasn’t the strange part. The strange part was the way they glowed, pale silver in one jar, pale gold in the other.

“How—?”

“Sun-apple and moon-apple seeds,” said Bucer. “I told you that one client liked to pay in weird shit. These are worth their weight in diamonds in the mortal world, and priceless in Faerie. Even the Golden Shore doesn’t have these in their orchards.”

“Huh,” I said. Something about that made my brain itch, but the thoughts weren’t quite connecting, much as I wanted them to. I started to reach for the silvered jar.

I pulled my hand back as claws scraped on the floor out in the hall.

That was our only real warning before a large white dog with bloodred ears and paws came racing into the room, equally red tail waving like a banner behind him.

He saw Quentin and performed an enthusiastic play bow, paws straight out in front of himself while he stuck his backside in the air and let his tongue loll in the canine version of a hello.

Spike hissed and rattled its thorns at the dog like the cat it resembled, leaping up onto Altair’s desk with a sound like a dozen maracas rolling down a flight of stairs. It continued to rattle and snarl, crouching safely out of the dog’s reach.

Turning, the dog came bounding over to the desk and stood up on his hind legs.

Somehow, midway through this gesture, he was a virtually human-seeming man rather than a canine, complete with sharp canines and bloody streaks in his otherwise platinum hair.

He was wearing archaic, almost medieval clothing, which would have made sense if he’d come straight from court, but he’d come from work, which was much more modern. I raised an eyebrow.

“Sorry,” said Madden, sounding halfway abashed. “I was supposed to meet up with Charles after work. When I called to let him know my boss needed me for something, he dropped off my backpack at the coffee shop. I changed in the stockroom before I went dog and ran out the back door.”

“Ah,” I said. Charles was well-accustomed to unusual hours and strange wardrobe choices. Claiming to work for a drag queen was a pretty solid cover, as such things went.

“I didn’t go home to change because I know you said it was important.

But what’s important?” He looked around the dark room like he was seeing it for the first time—which maybe he was.

Dame Altair had never been a social butterfly, and the invites I knew of had never extended to the shapeshifters. “Why are we here?”

“Dame Altair is responsible for most of the disappearances from the royal treasury,” I said.

“I just learned that Dugan Harrow is her brother, and she was paying Bucer here to steal artifacts for her and a list of clients. She was trying to frame Simon for the false queen’s escape, when it was Dugan all along.

And when I came here to talk to her about what happened at court last night, she poisoned my drink, knocked me and Quentin both out, and tied us to beds upstairs with silver and yarrow chains. ”

Madden blinked, several times, looking thoroughly nonplussed by the information I had just piled on him. Then he growled, lips drawing back from his teeth in a distinctly inhuman way. “Why haven’t you involved the crown yet?” he asked.

“Because while she had me captive, Dame Altair disguised herself as me and went to my house, where she was able to subdue and abduct Tybalt and May,” I said.

“We’re here because we’re trying to figure out where she may have taken them.

Tybalt managed to cut himself before he lost consciousness entirely, and left a blood trail.

I didn’t want to call Arden and mobilize her guard until I’d tried to get my people back with less of a production. ”

Madden looked dubious. “Productions produce results,” he said.

“Yeah, and those results are all too frequently blood and screaming,” I countered. “Right now, we’re dealing with two assholes holding two captives. If we can sneak in and free them without a confrontation, we might be able to get out of this without hurting anyone else.”

“Small groups are better for stealth missions,” Quentin agreed.

“And pregnant women are bad for stealth missions,” said Madden.

“So we’re running neutral, and I’m running out of patience,” I said. “Do you smell Tybalt or May anywhere around here?”

“Hold on.” Madden dropped to all fours, unfolding into a dog.

It was a transition so seamless that it wasn’t really a transformation or a morph: he was one and then he was the other, like our eyes had been deceiving us when he seemed to have thumbs and a biped’s spine.

He was supposed to be sniffing the floor, ears cocked forward and tail waving.

He moved closer to me, head cocked like he was asking for permission.

I nodded, and he shoved his snout in my crotch just like a real dog before stepping off and moving to do the same to Quentin and Bucer.

“Get off,” Bucer objected.

“He’s just eliminating our scents from the search,” said Quentin. “He knows what Tybalt smells like, but his nose can get confused, because it doesn’t have the smarts a person’s brain would have.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

I shrugged. A Cu Sidhe’s sense of smell is magical as much as it’s physical; I assume it’s similar to whatever quirk of my own magic that allows me to identify magical signatures with such impossible precision.

Madden sniffed until he reached the door, then turned and trotted back over to me, shifting back to his humanoid form in the process.

He didn’t stand up this time, but remained crouched on the floor, almost like he was offering me some sort of fealty. I knew he wasn’t, but the position was still jarring.

“He wasn’t in this room,” said Madden. “Lots of other things were here that shouldn’t have been. Not Tybalt, though. But someone with his blood on them was, and it wasn’t you. I can smell the blood on you—so much blood, how do you lose that much blood and not just topple over?”

“Marcia gave me a sandwich,” I said.

He looked at me sadly, and I flushed red, feeling oddly like I’d just been scolded.

“You need to eat more, or bleed less, or maybe both,” he said.

“But someone—I’m not sure who, I’d need to smell them to know for certain—was here, and they had blood on them too, and it was Tybalt’s.

I can’t follow the blood from here. I can follow the person. ”

“Now that you have the trail, can you follow it from a moving car?” I asked.

Madden nodded.

“All right, then: let’s go for a ride.”