Page 55 of Silver and Lead (October Daye #19)

Walther turned toward the sound of my voice.

He was wearing a disguise to make himself look human, and he had a pair of slightly tinted glasses on, blunting the unnatural blue of his eyes.

No illusion in the world has ever been good enough to make a Tylwyth Teg’s eyes look human without a little extra assistance.

“Apple seeds?” he asked.

“He knows what I’m talking about.” I focused on Bucer, raising one eyebrow. “Come on. I know you pocketed those jars.”

Bucer scowled at me, reaching into his pockets and pulling out the jars, one from either side. “Show, not give?” he asked.

“For now. Those aren’t yours.”

“They aren’t yours either!”

“I’m a hero of the realm, and they were received in exchange for stolen goods,” I said. “I think I can make more of an argument for a claim than you can, don’t you?”

Walther, meanwhile, was staring at the jars of seeds like he was seeing the face of Maeve herself. He stepped toward Bucer, hands already reaching out. “Are those…?” he breathed.

“Sun- and moon-apple seeds,” said Bucer. He sounded a little smug, like he had somehow been responsible for growing or harvesting the seeds in question. “Fresh, even. Dame Altair germinated a few of them to prove that they could grow.”

Again, something about the seeds nagged at me.

Both sun- and moon-apples were fruits from deep Faerie, originally from Avalon, and all the trees had died centuries ago, either consumed by pests and plagues or crossbreeding with mortal apple strains until they disappeared, creating the equivalent of changeling fruit.

But I had seen them not all that long before. I knew I’d seen them.

Bucer surrendered one of the jars to Walther, who gazed at it with open awe.

“Give him the other jar,” I said, through numb lips. “We need to go.”

“What?” Bucer jerked like I’d pricked him with a pin, while Quentin and Madden just turned to look at me with confused concern.

“We need to go,” I repeated. “We’re almost there.” I turned then, walking out of the room, Spike at my heels.

As I had hoped, the boys followed, even Walther, who was still holding the jar of apple seeds. I glanced at him.

“They tell you what’s going on?” I asked tightly.

He nodded. “Tybalt and May are missing. You know we could make things a lot easier if we just tagged everyone in your household with tracking devices.”

I snorted. “It’s a fun thought, but I doubt they’d let me.”

“Come on, you know it’s a good idea. You lose your people like Cinderella loses her shoes. Things would be so much more straightforward if you could just pull out your tracker and head straight for their current location.”

“Isn’t that what Madden is for?” I asked.

“I resemble that remark,” said Madden mildly.

“But seriously, Walther, you don’t have to come with us,” I said. “This could get dangerous.”

“Says the pregnant woman to the alchemist,” said Walther. “If anyone is sitting this out because it could get dangerous, it should be you. But I don’t see you sitting down and letting someone else handle things.”

“It’s my husband and sister,” I protested.

“It’s my friends,” said Walther. “See, we can both play this game.”

The campus wasn’t as dark as I would have expected.

As a student safety measure, there were lights everywhere, making the walkways easy to follow.

We did exactly that, following them to the edge of campus and out onto the sidewalk, where Madden sniffed the air before excusing himself to step behind a bush.

The golden retriever came bounding out to join us only a second later, pressing his nose to the pavement and starting off down the road.

The feeling of d é j à vu was becoming overwhelming.

I hadn’t just seen those apples before, I’d taken this exact walk through Berkeley before, following Madden toward an inevitable destination.

And indeed, he stopped at a blank brick wall. Too blank: there was no graffiti, no posters advertising local events or student shows. Only brick, smooth and untouched as the day it had been installed. He looked back at me. I nodded.

“I know where we are, Madden,” I said. “Go on through.”

He turned back to the wall, then ran forward, vanishing into the brick, which trembled for a moment, like it was a pattern somehow painted on a soap bubble and he had just stepped through without popping it.

Spike was the next one through, trotting calmly into the brick without looking back at me. I grabbed Bucer’s arm, motioning for Quentin to go through ahead of us.

“If you know anything about this, now would be the time to say something,” I said pleasantly to Bucer, while he looked at me with wide, overly rounded eyes.

“I have no idea what’s going on,” he said.

“Well, then, this is going to be educational,” I said, and pulled him through the brick, into the impossible courtyard on the other side.

The courtyard was dark, which made sense: I didn’t think its owner ever came here at night, and since we were still technically in the human world, anything that might have attracted attention was probably not the best idea.

The sky above us remained exactly the same, true night, clouds streaked over single moon and distant, glittering stars.

The lack of light didn’t really matter for fae purposes.

The trees, herbs, and flowers that grew in wild profusion all around us were limned in starlight, and might as well have been fully lit from the way Walther was staring.

He wasn’t moving, wasn’t trying to take it all in: he was just staring at one of the moon-apple trees like it was a miracle, like he had never seen anything so beautiful in his life.

“Moon-apples were used in beauty potions and tinctures to reshape the body for centuries,” he said, voice low and intense.

“With a bushel of these, I could help every trans changeling in the Kingdom. I could stabilize some of the temporary health fixes for ailments that purebloods don’t suffer from, the ones we’ve been treating as if they were as good as it was possible to get. And this is just here ?”

“It’s not ours,” I said. “It belongs to my grandmother.”

“Your… grandmother ?”

“It’s a long story. Madden, where does the trail go from here?”

He looked at me and didn’t bark, only tipped his nose back to the ground and started walking toward the back of the courtyard.

There was a half-collapsed house taking up the entire rear wall—but as it hadn’t changed since our last visit, I was beginning to think its decay and disrepair were as much a matter of presentation as the “brick wall” we’d walked through to get here.

Someone was deeply invested in this house looking like it was about to collapse.

There was a nest about five feet across in front of it, made from woven branches, vines, and mismatched fabric strips.

Crouched in the middle of the nest was what looked like a children’s playhouse with feathery chicken legs.

It shifted positions as we approached, looking at us with its glassy windows.

I didn’t know whether they were eyes or whether they were some sort of distracting coloration surrounding and concealing the real eyes.

I wasn’t sure it mattered either way, since the end result was the same: a small house was looking at us.

“I think it’s harmless if we don’t mess with it,” I said. “Just keep going.”

Madden reached the porch of the collapsing house and looked back at us before bounding up the stairs.

We continued to follow. He brushed his nose against the front door and it swung open.

More of that dog magic of his, convenient mostly because it meant we didn’t need to slow down. We continued to follow.

When we reached the front room of the house, Madden was human again, and there was no one else there. He turned to look at us, clearly uncomfortable.

“I don’t like this,” he said.

“I don’t either,” I agreed. “This is the second time we’ve followed a blood trail to this courtyard. At least we know who owns it now.”

I had been inside this house before, and nothing had changed since the last time.

The door opened straight onto the front room, which was small and spotless, with rose-patterned wallpaper and a polished wood floor.

Everything looked like it had been dusted recently; it gleamed.

The air smelled of Lemon Pledge rather than any identifiable magical signature.

From the front room, I could access the stairway to the second floor, the kitchen, or the hallway which led to the other downstairs rooms. I hadn’t bothered checking most of them the last time I’d been here, and I really didn’t have time to waste searching them all now.

“Yeah, and that doesn’t make it better,” said Madden. He dropped back onto all fours, seeking the comfort of a fur coat and sharp teeth. I couldn’t blame him. If I’d been able to remove myself from the conversation by turning into something else, I would almost certainly have done it.

“Cheater,” I muttered.

“Not everyone knows,” said Walther, giving me a hard look. “You want to let me know who’s been hiding a Firstborn’s ransom in rare alchemical materials less than a mile from my office? Because I’d really like to have a few words with them about the good of Faerie. I’m willing to pay.”

“I don’t think money is much of an object here, I’m afraid,” I said. “And I already told you who owns this place. My grandmother.”

“Okay, and your grandmother would be…?”

“Me,” said a voice, and a blonde woman in a long green dress stepped out of the shadows on the other side of the room.

Janet Carter, betrayer of Faerie, breaker of Maeve’s last Ride, still looked just as young as she’d been on the day when she walked into the woods of Caughterha to save her lover, who had been earmarked to die for Faerie’s sake.

It had been centuries, but she truly hadn’t aged a day.

She looked at me and smiled, slow and cold, and I finally understood just how screwed we really were.

“Hello, October,” she said.