One Salt Sea: An October Daye Novel

“Something terrible?” I asked, hands clenching on the steering wheel. “Something terrible like what, exactly?”


“She didn’t say. I don’t think she knew.” The Luidaeg’s reflection closed her eyes, letting her head rest against the back of her seat. “Mary, Mary, quite contrary. She doesn’t always understand what she sees, only that she sees it, and that what she’s seen can’t be unseen. She used to be more in control of her prophecy. But that was before.”

“Before what?” asked Quentin.

“Before the betrayal of the Roane,” said Connor. His voice was barely more than a whisper. If not for the Luidaeg’s spell shutting out all sound outside the car, I wouldn’t have heard him at all.

I frowned, slanting a glance in his direction. “What are you—”

“That’s a history lesson for another day, October,” said the Luidaeg, her tone leaving no room for debate. She didn’t lift her head or open her eyes as she gestured toward the road in front of us. “Drive. There isn’t time left for anything else.”

“I’m tired as hell of people being oblique and prophetic at me, you know,” I complained, pressing my foot down harder on the gas. “Do you people take some sort of correspondence course on making no damn sense at all?”

“It’s more of a graduate degree, actually,” the Luidaeg replied. I glanced again at her reflection. She was smiling. Only a little bit, but it was there. “I got the best grades in my class.”

“Figures,” I said, and focused on the road.

We were making the trip out of San Francisco at record speed, even for me, and whatever she’d used on the car was much better than an invisibility charm or a don’t-look-here. I didn’t even have to avoid the few other drivers who had somehow managed to avoid the Luidaeg’s misdirection charms and stay on the main roads. They just never happened to be where we needed to be next.

The Luidaeg’s presence was definitely making Connor uncomfortable. He sat, straight-backed, and watched the road ahead of us like he was counting down the miles to his own execution. An air of palpable tension was settling over the car, getting stronger with every minute that passed. We were moving toward a conclusion.

I saw a few cars after we crossed the Golden Gate Bridge into Marin, but the road ahead of us remained as open as ever. I was doing seventy when the phone rang. “Oh, thorns,” I swore, fumbling it out of my pocket and flipping it open with one hand. “Hello?”

“Tobes, hey. I tried what you said. This a bad time?”

“You shouldn’t be on the phone while you’re driving,” said Connor. “It’s against the law.” He sounded faintly alarmed—less, I think, because I was breaking the law, and more because I wasn’t slowing down to compensate for splitting my attention.

I would have needed a third hand to flip him off. I settled for hitting the gas a little harder, and watching him go pale.

“No, Danny, this is a great time,” I said. “We’re on the way to Muir Woods now. Did you get anything out of the rocks?”

“You’re already on the way to Muir Woods? What are you, psychic?”

“No, impatient.” I shook my head, trying to clear away the image of Bucer’s wide, frightened eyes. “What did they tell you?”

“Three of the rocks recognized the smell of redwood—said they missed the big trees. One of ’em also said it missed the water, so I put it in the sink.” He sounded exceedingly pleased with himself as he continued, “They like the environmental cues.”

“Good. Did they give you any other details? Anything we can use?”

“The smallest one remembered redwoods an’ cars. Used to be at the edge of a parking lot. Apparently, it got picked up and put down again by a whole lotta kids, so it remembered Raysel real clear. She was the first one that didn’t put it back.” Danny hesitated. “I, uh, promised I’d put it back when we were done. Is that okay?”