One Salt Sea
Page 69

There were new faces among the night-haunts, some I knew, a few that I didn’t. Oleander de Merelands was there. So was Dare’s brother, Manuel, and Gordan, the only one from ALH Computing to die a “natural” death. There were more Cait Sidhe than I expected. Tybalt never told me how many of his subjects died when Oleander poisoned them. It looked like the casualties were higher than I ever guessed.
Devin’s haunt followed my gaze and said, “The hunting has been good of late.”
“Uh, yeah.” I cleared my throat. “Look, I was hoping you’d be willing to talk with me.”
“That’s usually the reason for a summons.” He looked at my simple circle, eyebrows raising in that old, familiar gesture of silent judgment. “No flowers? No pretty words or symbolic deaths?”
“Like you said, I’m not what I once was.” I crouched to put myself on his level. “I didn’t send the summons on a whim. I had no other choice. I need your help.”
He smiled. The other night-haunts tittered. “My dear October,” he said, in a tone that was pure Devin, oozing charm and danger in equal measure, “why would we ever deign to help you? We’re not in the business of helping people. Really, darling, I don’t understand.”
Time to deal with the devil. I took a deep breath, and said, “Rayseline Torquill has stolen the children of the Duke and Duchess of Saltmist. I don’t know why—not yet—but I need to find out, or a lot of people are going to get hurt.”
Devin’s haunt cocked his head, smile twisting into a familiar expression of amused contempt. “And what makes you think we don’t want ‘a lot of people’ getting hurt? We need to eat if we’re to live.”
“You remember being us,” I said, quietly. “You remember what it was like to live. I know you need to eat. But I can’t imagine you’d wish for war.”
The night-haunts whispered among themselves, the sound like wind rattling through the branches of skeletal trees. I shivered as I listened to them, and part of me noted, analytically, that the Luidaeg never actually said my circle would protect me. If they decided they just wanted to kill me and be done, I might be in for the fight of a lifetime.
I was getting tired of being in an endless succession of things called “the fight of a lifetime.” Just once, I’d like to have the fight of a Tuesday afternoon. “Please,” I said.
The haunt with Devin’s face looked at me solemnly. “You aren’t what you once were,” he repeated, and the words were all the more unnerving because they were spoken in the voice of my old mentor. “You’re becoming what I always thought you’d be. Who are you looking for?”
“A Selkie. I don’t have a name, and I don’t know whether they’re male or female, but they would have died recently, and without their skin.”
“She didn’t expect to kill me,” said a voice behind me. I turned, and found myself looking at a diminutive figure—diminutive even by night-haunt standards—with ruddy brown hair and freckles spattered across her heart-shaped face. I recognized her vaguely. We’d probably been at the same formal events.
I’d never asked her name.
“Are you the one I’m looking for?” I asked.
She nodded, stepping forward. She stopped with her bare toes just shy of my circle’s edge. “My name is—my name was—Margie. I was in service to Her Grace, the Duchess of Saltmist, these last fifty years.”
What do you say to someone who’s dead? “I’m sorry for your loss,” I said, the words sounding idiotic even as they left my lips.
“So am I,” she said, smiling very slightly. “Mistress Torquill approached me at the Farmer’s Market, of all mad places, and said she wished to speak with me—said she needed a Selkie’s perspective on some matter of great importance. I spoke with her because I thought she wished to make peace with Connor. I began to hope she might have found it in herself to come home to her husband, to begin to make amends.”
That was a more charitable view of Rayseline Torquill than I’d been able to maintain in a long time. I tried not to let that show on my face as I asked, “So you went with her?”
“Not right away, but I went to meet with her that night, yes,” said the night-haunt who’d once been Margie. Regret danced behind her eyes. “She asked me if I would be willing to meet with her near the docks behind the ballpark. I saw no harm in it. I went. And while she was standing in front of me, and us all alone, someone struck me from behind, and everything went black.”
I felt my brief sense of hope wither and die. There was no way Raysel was keeping the children at the docks. They’re big, but they have a high fae population, and the Lordens had been sending people out looking for the kids for days now. If the boys were alive and at the docks, they would have already been found.
“Is that where you died?” I asked.
The Margie haunt blinked, looking surprised. “No, it’s not. I woke again in a room with walls of stone and straw strewn on the floor. The air smelled of spices, like we were near some sort of a kitchen, or maybe a restaurant. I was bound, hand and foot.” Her expression darkened. “Mistress Torquill was there. She had an arrow in her hands. A black arrow, barely the length of a knitter’s needle.”
“Elf-shot,” I guessed aloud.
“Yes. She said she was going to make me sleep for a while—a long, long while—and that while I slept, my skin would be out, making mischief in the world. Then she stabbed the arrow into my shoulder, and everything went away again.” The night-haunt’s face crumpled like she was going to cry. “I don’t think she meant to kill me. She merely meant for me to be blamed for her crimes until the day I woke.”
Selkies without their skins are basically humans with a strange fondness for the beach. “You died when she took your skin,” I said.
Margie’s haunt nodded. “I did.”
“Did you see anything that might help me find the place where you were being held—anything at all? Did you hear something, smell something . . . ?”
“There were the spices . . . redwoods. I smelled redwood trees, and old earth, earth that had been let to decay without disturbance for a long, long time. The place I was in, it was underground, and it felt like a knowe, but not like a knowe.”