“Sorry,” said Madden, sounding halfway abashed. “I was supposed to meet up with Charles after work. When I called to let him know my boss needed me for something, he dropped off my backpack at the coffee shop. I changed in the stockroom before I went dog and ran out the back door.”

  “Ah,” I said. Charles was well-accustomed to unusual hours and strange wardrobe choices. Claiming to work for a drag queen was a pretty solid cover, as such things went.

  “I didn’t go home to change because I know you said it was important. But what’s important?” He looked around the dark room like he was seeing it for the first time—which maybe he was. Dame Altair had never been a social butterfly, and the invites I knew of had never extended to the shapeshifters. “Why are we here?”

  “Dame Altair is responsible for most of the disappearances from the royal treasury,” I said. “I just learned that Dugan Harrow is her brother, and she was paying Bucer here to steal artifacts for her and a list of clients. She was trying to frame Simon for the false queen’s escape, when it was Dugan all along. And when I came here to talk to her about what happened at court last night, she poisoned my drink, knocked me and Quentin both out, and tied us to beds upstairs with silver and yarrow chains.”

  Madden blinked, several times, looking thoroughly nonplussed by the information I had just piled on him. Then he growled, lips drawing back from his teeth in a distinctly inhuman way. “Why haven’t you involved the crown yet?” he asked.

  “Because while she had me captive, Dame Altair disguised herself as me and went to my house, where she was able to subdue and abduct Tybalt and May,” I said. “We’re here because we’re trying to figure out where she may have taken them. Tybalt managed to cut himself before he lost consciousness entirely, and left a blood trail. I didn’t want to call Arden and mobilize her guard until I’d tried to get my people back with less of a production.”

  Madden looked dubious. “Productions produce results,” he said.

  “Yeah, and those results are all too frequently blood and screaming,” I countered. “Right now, we’re dealing with two assholes holding two captives. If we can sneak in and free them without a confrontation, we might be able to get out of this without hurting anyone else.”

  “Small groups are better for stealth missions,” Quentin agreed.

  “And pregnant women are bad for stealth missions,” said Madden.

  “So we’re running neutral, and I’m running out of patience,” I said. “Do you smell Tybalt or May anywhere around here?”

  “Hold on.” Madden dropped to all fours, unfolding into a dog. It was a transition so seamless that it wasn’t really a transformation or a morph: he was one and then he was the other, like our eyes had been deceiving us when he seemed to have thumbs and a biped’s spine. He was supposed to be sniffing the floor, ears cocked forward and tail waving. He moved closer to me, head cocked like he was asking for permission. I nodded, and he shoved his snout in my crotch just like a real dog before stepping off and moving to do the same to Quentin and Bucer.

  “Get off,” Bucer objected.

  “He’s just eliminating our scents from the search,” said Quentin. “He knows what Tybalt smells like, but his nose can get confused, because it doesn’t have the smarts a person’s brain would have.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  I shrugged. A Cu Sidhe’s sense of smell is magical as much as it’s physical; I assume it’s similar to whatever quirk of my own magic that allows me to identify magical signatures with such impossible precision. Madden sniffed until he reached the door, then turned and trotted back over to me, shifting back to his humanoid form in the process.

  He didn’t stand up this time, but remained crouched on the floor, almost like he was offering me some sort of fealty. I knew he wasn’t, but the position was still jarring.

  “He wasn’t in this room,” said Madden. “Lots of other things were here that shouldn’t have been. Not Tybalt, though. But someone with his blood on them was, and it wasn’t you. I can smell the blood on you—so much blood, how do you lose that much blood and not just topple over?”

  “Marcia gave me a sandwich,” I said.

  He looked at me sadly, and I flushed red, feeling oddly like I’d just been scolded. “You need to eat more, or bleed less, or maybe both,” he said. “But someone—I’m not sure who, I’d need to smell them to know for certain—was here, and they had blood on them too, and it was Tybalt’s. I can’t follow the blood from here. I can follow the person.”

  “Now that you have the trail, can you follow it from a moving car?” I asked.

  Madden nodded.

  “All right, then: let’s go for a ride.”

  SIXTEEN

  TRACKING THE SCENT TRAIL from the car required two concessions: first, that Madden had to ride in his canine form, since his human nose was so much less sensitive that he’d never be able to find the trail, much less keep hold of it. Second, he had to ride in the front seat. Since he couldn’t speak, he needed to be as close to Quentin to possible to make sure that his signals got through. Said signals were simple: he’d bark if he was losing the trail, allowing Quentin to back up and try another route, and he’d wag his tail as long as were heading in the right direction.

  As I folded myself into the backseat, I was intensely grateful that I’d asked Quentin to drive. My car was great, but it wasn’t as large, and I had a tendency to treat it like a rolling trash can sometimes. The back was full of food wrappers and unwanted mail. There was no way I’d have been able to fit comfortably.

  I still wasn’t comfortable, but at least I had enough legroom. Spike settled in the middle seat, curling so its thorns were pressed flat against my leg rather than impaling me every time it twitched. I appreciated that. It looked at me with sleepy eyes before putting its head down on its paws.

  Bucer climbed into the remaining backseat and smirked.

  “Both of us get to ride second-class this time, eh, Daye?”

  “I could punch you in the throat, you know.”

  Spike raised its head, rattling ominously. Bucer ignored it.

  “Ah, you’re enjoying our reunion or you’d have turned me over to that shiny new Queen of yours already. We both know you missed me.”

  “I didn’t, Bucer.” I leaned back, resting one hand atop my stomach and the other on Spike’s back. “I really, truly didn’t.”

  Quentin got into the driver’s seat after holding it open to let Madden leap in and across the car to the passenger side. “Sorry about this,” he said, concern making his Canadian accent broader than usual, so that for a moment he sounded like he was setting himself up for a joke about pronunciation. “You all right back there, Toby?”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Go ahead and drive, and we’ll get this taken care of.”

  “Got it.” He closed the car door, turned the engine on, and touched the roof with one hand, humming several bars of an old sea shanty. The smell of heather and steel rose around us, and he dropped his hand, looking pleased with himself as he pulled away from the curb.

  “Don’t-look-here?” I asked.

  “Big one,” he replied. “Can’t have a dog this good-looking hanging out the car window without people noticing us.”

  Madden had put his own mortal disguise back on, and now looked like a golden retriever rather than an inexplicably red and white dog out of a fairy tale. He barked once, agreeing with Quentin, then stuck his head out the open window, plumed tail waving wildly to signal that the trail was still in range.

  Oh, I hoped he could stop wagging if he needed to. He said he could, but I didn’t like gambling my ability to find my husband on a dog’s ability to stop wagging his tail.

  Still. Quentin was driving, my hand ached where I had stabbed it on the iron needle, and I was exhausted. Maybe Tybalt had the right idea, encouraging me to stay home for months after Titania’s spell was broken. Being out in the field was a lot harder on the body than I remembered, even without excessive blood loss—and if I’m in the field, there’s going to be excessive blood loss. That’s sort of inescapable. I know my weaknesses. Fortunately, bleeding is one of my strengths.

  Keeping my eyes open in the back of a car as it’s being driven through the darkness is not one of my strengths. They slipped slowly closed, and the world slipped away with them as I fell into a mercifully natural sleep, dozing as the car turned, sped, and hit the inescapable bumps left behind by the California highway system.

  It was the deceleration that woke me. I opened my eyes, shifting to sit back up from the slight slump I’d developed while sleeping, and wiped the drool from my chin before looking around. We were driving down an urban street I vaguely recognized, brick buildings and glass storefronts. It wasn’t San Francisco. I could tell that much.

  “Where are we?” I asked.

  “Berkeley,” said Bucer. There was genuine fear in his voice. I turned. He was sitting rigidly in his seat, one hand on the handle above the door, gripping so tightly that his knuckles had gone white. If not for the human illusion covering him, I was sure his ears would have been pressed flat against the sides of his head. Much like Madden’s tail, a lot of the part-animal fae have trouble keeping their bodies from visibly betraying them.

  “Berkeley?” I asked. I rubbed my eyes, trying to clear the sleep away. I could have done with another hour or three. And a bed. A bed would have been absolutely amazing. And a bathroom. I winced, suddenly realizing how much I really needed to pee. “Hey, Quentin, can you be careful of the potholes?”

  “Sure, Toby. Sorry, Toby.” I saw his grimace in the rearview mirror. He knew as well as I did that I was asking him to help me not pee in his car.

  “It’s okay. I’ll hold on.”

  Madden shimmered and was a man, awkwardly folded into the front of the car. “The trail’s been getting stronger for a while,” he said. “We should park.”

  I looked around. “We’re near the campus,” I said. “This late at night, the student lots should be fairly open, and if you leave the don’t-look-here up, we won’t get ticketed.”

  Quentin nodded. “And Walther may be at his office, which means you won’t have to pee in a bush.”

  Did I like the idea of pausing our search so I could use an actual bathroom? I did not, and I didn’t think Tybalt would do it if our positions were reversed. But I also didn’t love the thought of trying to squat in a bush while I was so unwieldy, or figuring out if Quentin had anything in his car that could be used for toilet paper, and not having to do that seemed worth taking ten minutes out of the quest at hand. There was also the possibility that Walter might somehow be able to help us now, as he so often had on other occasions.

  Quentin pulled off the road and into the student parking lot closest to the science buildings, driving toward the hall where Walther’s office was located. There were only a few cars this late at night, and I was pleased when I saw Walther’s beaten-up old sedan in the faculty rows.

  “There,” I said, with increasing urgency. Quentin pulled into the spot I was indicating, turning off the engine.

  I had my seatbelt off by the time the car stopped running, and was already halfway out the seat. Madden was still substantially faster. He looped around the car to offer me his arm and help me to my feet, then began to hustle toward the chemistry building. Quentin followed behind, all but dragging Bucer by one arm.

  The door was locked. Naturally; it was after midnight. I was thinking miserably of the effort needed to get another thorn from Spike and pick the lock when Madden brushed the keyhole with his fingers and muttered something under his breath.

  There was a clicking sound and the door swung open. I lifted both eyebrows, blinking at him.

  “I don’t have thumbs half the time,” he said. “I had to have some way of getting through closed doors. I can do that when I’m a dog, too.”

  “You’re gay and I’m married, or I’d kiss you,” I said, and pushed through the unlocked door, into the cool, lemon-scented hall beyond. The floor was slick but not slippery: while the custodians had clearly been through recently, they had only washed, not waxed. I was grateful for that, even as I was focused solely on getting to the bathroom halfway down the hall.

  Spike accompanied me, charging into the bathroom ahead of me and rattling its thorns with a degree of menace that would have triggered any ambush in pure self-defense. Nothing stirred in the darkened space. I crashed onward, into the first open stall, and managed to get myself situated in time.

  Sagging with relief, I put my hands atop my stomach again. “You are a complication,” I informed it. “I’ll be really glad when peeing isn’t an emergency anymore. But hey, you’re getting another adventure with Mom before it’s time for diapers and overprotective dads. Congrats, kitten.”

  The baby, naturally enough, didn’t reply.

  I finished my business and cleaned myself up, leaving the sink running after I was done so Spike could get a drink. Rose goblins are plants—I think. They don’t eat so much as they photosynthesize, but they love a good drink of water.

  When Spike dropped back to the floor I turned the faucet off. “Appreciate the help,” I said. It rattled its thorns at me. “Ready to go?”

  It didn’t nod, but it did turn and trot toward the door, waiting there for me to come along. I smiled and followed after it.

  There was an open door in the hallway that had been closed before, buttery light spilling out to illuminate the tile. I turned in that direction, hurrying when I heard Walther’s voice drifting out, words unintelligible but tone light. Whatever we’d interrupted, it wasn’t so important as to be a problem.

  Once I reached the office door I looked in. Walther was standing next to his desk, facing Quentin and Bucer. As was often the case late at night, he had a full chemistry set out and in use, distilling various herbs and flower petals into something more esoteric. He taught chemistry to human students, and he did alchemy at night, working his magic in a more solid form. It’s a gift that often seems to arise in the Tylwyth Teg, although it isn’t limited to them.

  “Bucer, show him those apple seeds,” I said.

  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 déjà 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.