“Uh, okay,” said Madden dubiously. He looked over his shoulder to the small kitchen, where a human man with hair the color of ripe blueberries was washing dishes. “Hey, Z’ev, can you cover for me a minute? My friend needs to pick something up that she left in the bookstore.”
“Sure thing,” said the man, stripping off his gloves and moving toward the counter, even as Madden was stepping out from behind it and gesturing for us to follow him to the attached bookstore. That’s one of the nice things about small establishments: things can be loose enough to allow for a certain fluidity during the day, which is important when, say, you’re secretly a shapeshifting canine in service to the local fae monarch. To pick an utterly nonspecific example.
No one seemed to think there was anything strange about Madden leading two people past the rope that cordoned the café off from the bookstore when their operating hours didn’t match up. Those people probably would have been a little surprised when, after leading us to the back of the store, Madden turned and bared his teeth at Simon. They were suddenly much larger, seeming to occupy too much real estate in his jaw. Saliva foamed around them, making him look on the verge of rabid.
“I know you,” he snarled, eyes fixed on Simon. “I know what you did. What are you doing?”
“I’m looking for my daughter,” Simon said. To his credit, he didn’t flinch away from the possibility that an angry Cu Sidhe was about to rip his throat out.
It was almost a relief to have someone finally reacting to Simon Torquill the way I thought they should. It was also remarkably inconvenient. I needed Madden’s help, and I didn’t have time to go over the whole story yet again. Not with August still out there somewhere, needing to be found; needing to be saved.
“My mother has taken Tybalt and Jazz as collateral against my bringing my older sister, August Torquill, home,” I said. “Sylvester agreed to wake Simon in order to help me find her, since she’s his daughter, too. Simon has been bound with a blood geas to keep him from acting against my interests in this matter.”
“Blood geasa are only as good as their wording,” said Madden. “They can break.”
“Maybe so, but I haven’t seen him making any effort to break this one,” I said. “We’ve been following August’s trail since the bachelorette party.”
Understanding flooded Madden’s features. “That’s why none of you have been answering the phone!” he said. “Ardy was starting to get really worried. I think she was going to swing by tonight.”
“The new Queen in the Mists makes house calls?” Simon looked genuinely amused by the idea. “How quaint.”
Madden growled.
“Let’s play a fun game,” I said. “It’s called ‘don’t bait the man who’s going to help us.’ Here’s how you play. Simon, stop being you.”
“Would that I could, milady,” he said.
There was genuine regret in his voice, enough that Madden and I both paused.
Madden recovered first. “Well, that got dark fast,” he said. “What do you need?”
“We’ve been following the Babylon Road for days,” I said, pulling the candle from my pocket and holding it up for him to see. “Long trip, long story, need a shower bad. Our last stop dropped us out on Valencia, and I lost the trail. I need to try to find it again, and then I’m probably going to need to cast a don’t-look-here, because the candle is sort of conspicuous.”
“So you need privacy and maybe me to help you sniff somebody out,” said Madden. “Got it.”
I offered him a wan smile, closed my eyes, and breathed in deeply, looking for the thin ribbon of August’s magic.
Instead, the smell of smoke and roses punched me in the nose, thick and cloying enough that I gasped and staggered backward, dropping the candle. Simon was there to catch me, the line of his body so similar to Sylvester’s that some deep-buried instinct said safe and allowed me to go limp. He still grunted with the effort of keeping me from hitting the floor.
“Toby?” Madden sounded alarmed. As well he should. The smell of my own magic was hanging in the air: cut-grass and copper and the faint, ashen scent of a spell that had been released too quickly, more charred away than dismissed. I might not be visible from the street, but anyone who came over to the bookstore side looking to surreptitiously use the bathroom was going to get an eyeful of pure, unadulterated Dóchas Sidhe.
“Sorry.” I got my feet back under myself, coughing a little as I stood. This time, I breathed more shallowly. The scent of August’s magic was just as strong. I turned to Simon. His eyes were wide; he was staring at me. I stared back.
“She was here,” I said. “August was here. Madden. Have there been any fae around recently that you don’t know? She’d have shown up . . . I don’t know, sometime in the last year. Red hair. Might have a funny way of talking, like she doesn’t really know what words mean anymore.”
Madden shook his head. “No, no one,” he said.
I paused.
Madden is Cu Sidhe, a fairy dog, in the same way that Tybalt is a fairy cat. With the shapeshifters, there’s always a little bleed between their fae and animal natures. They seem oddly human in animal form, sitting up like people or using their paws to grasp objects like they’ve forgotten about their lack of opposable thumbs. They seem a little bit animal in human form. Tybalt’s tendency to curl his tongue when he yawns, for example, or the way he sometimes looks at me through sleepy, half-closed eyes, utterly feline, utterly content.
Cu Sidhe have different mannerisms naturally. They’re a different breed of beast. With Madden, one of the big tells that he isn’t quite human is the way he moves his head. Humans—and people shaped like them—usually rotate from the chin, shaking or nodding in a way that’s difficult to describe with other words, but which reads as “normal.” Madden shook and nodded his head from the nose first, more like a canine than a man. It was a small thing, not enough to betray his fae nature under any ordinary circumstances. There are entirely human people out there with stranger affectations.
But he was shaking his head from the chin. This wasn’t right.
“Madden, do they still sell lemonade next door?” I asked carefully.
He brightened, looking relieved to be back on familiar ground. “Oh, sure,” he said, with a bob of his head—a bob that originated, in the canine manner, with his nose. “Do you want me to get you some? Sugar’s good when you’ve had a shock.”
“No, I’m good,” I said. “Have you seen an unfamiliar redheaded woman around here recently?”
Again, he shook his head; again, the shake started with the chin, human-style. “No, no one,” he said.
Simon looked between the two of us, eyes narrowing as he caught on. “Interesting,” he said. “October?”
“Give me a second.” I focused on Madden, squinting as I looked for signs that he was under some sort of a spell.