One Salt Sea: An October Daye Novel

I nodded before turning and walking slowly into the room. No blood had been shed here. That was a small problem—I work best when I work with blood—but not an insurmountable one.

Most people assume an unfamiliar scene is harder to work than a familiar one, since you won’t be able to tell what’s out of place. Those people are both right and wrong. I couldn’t tell what was out of place, and I definitely couldn’t tell you if anything was missing, but at the same time, I didn’t have any preconceptions about what was supposed to be where. A familiar scene can become overwhelmingly strange when it’s disturbed in some way, while unfamiliar scenes are strange to begin with. More importantly, people fill in the blanks when they look at a familiar room, inserting objects where they think they belong. Their eyes can just skip over things. That’s dangerous—more dangerous than not knowing what it’s safe to disregard. Given a choice, I’ll take the unfamiliar every time.

The covers on Dean’s bed were smooth. I indicated the bed, continuing to study the rest of the room. “Was Dean in the habit of making his bed that well?”

“Helmi made it for him,” said Dianda. “It was unmade when he disappeared.”

I bit back my usual lecture on preserving the scene of a crime. At least most land fae have heard of police detective shows, and sort of understand what I’m talking about. I didn’t even know if the Undersea knew what television was. “Was there anything strange about it?”

“No.”

“Right.” The books were shelved in alphabetical order, and even the ones that were wedged in tightly enough to dent their covers were where they belonged. Dean had a space problem, but not an organization problem. “Where do the books come from?”

“Bookstores and Amazon,” replied Patrick. He smiled at my startled expression. “The land doesn’t have a monopoly on adopting mortal technology, you know. There’s something to be said for the anonymity of online shopping.”

“On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a mermaid.” I shook my head. “Did Helmi clean those up, too?”

“Dean’s very careful with his library,” said Dianda. “He was asking . . . he’s been asking about a fosterage for a while now.” She glanced at Patrick, a tangled mixture of affection and regret in her expression. “He wants to know what life is like on the land.”

“I can recommend some good fiefdoms when the time comes,” I said staunchly ignoring her slip into the past tense.

“Let’s hope you get the chance,” said Patrick.

There was nothing I could say to that. I gave the room one more long look before moving toward the bed. It was hard to resist the urge to muss the covers, just a little bit; just enough to make it look like a teenage boy still lived here. As it was, the mixture of tidiness and carefully shelved disorder made it all too easy to imagine this as Quentin’s room. I would have willingly started a war to get my squire back. I didn’t even want to think about what I’d do if Gilly’s life were the one on the line.

A nightstand sat just under the porthole window, holding the standard assortment of odds and ends: an oil lamp, a tattered Stephen King paperback with a bookmark about halfway through, and a ceramic dish filled with the sort of things that collect in an active teenager’s pockets. Small stones, salt-corroded coins, dice . . . and several slips of paper. Most looked like they’d been torn from court documents or larger pieces of parchment, which just made the scrap of blue-lined binder paper look all the more out of place.

I crouched next to the nightstand, breathing deeply as I strained to find any trace of lingering magic to confirm my suspicions. The air smelled clean, with a strong undercurrent of saltwater and wood polish. I closed my eyes, forcing myself to focus. My own magic started to rise, the cut-grass-and-copper smell of it somehow forcing the other scents to separate, rather than obscuring them.