The Unkindest Tide (October Daye #13) - Seanan McGuire Page 0,100

tucked their individual scents neatly away, earmarking them for later. I’d be able to follow a single spell cast by any of these people halfway around the world. It was a slightly unnerving thought. The more I learn about what it means to be Dóchas Sidhe, the more I wonder how many of my choices—becoming a private investigator, following trails I probably shouldn’t have followed—have been guided by my magic trying to find a way to assert itself on the world.

It was an unnerving thought, and so I shunted it aside and focused on what I wasn’t seeing around the stalls. I wasn’t seeing any Selkies. With as many as I knew were in the Duchy, they should have been everywhere. Selkie children should have been getting under the feet of the merchants; Selkie adults should have been poking through the available wares. Keeping the still technically human relations back at the beach would have made sense, but the absolute absence of the Selkies as a people was strange. I didn’t like it.

Tybalt and Quentin frowned at my expression, then at each other, and kept walking. They’d done enough of this sort of thing to know that I’d speak up when I felt it was safe to do so, and not before.

“Are you sure we’re going the right way?” asked Quentin.

“Even with as overwhelming as the magic in this place is, I can’t lose the Luidaeg’s trail,” I said. “It’s like a fishhook in my nostrils. I could follow her anywhere.” The scent of her magic wasn’t normally this strong. She also wasn’t normally this open about her true nature. The more of her masks she set aside, the easier it got for me to track her.

That explained a lot—including why August hadn’t been able to find Oberon when she’d run off on her fool’s errand and gotten herself lost for more than a century. If the Firstborn can mask themselves to the point that their terrifyingly powerful magic becomes nothing more than a vague parlor trick, how much more than that can the Three do? Can they disappear so that no one can follow them?

Can they ever be found?

The beach opened before us as we came down the final stretch of dock, its sands shimmering in the moonlight. There were no children playing outside now. There was no one. The whole place was empty, and if not for the candles flickering in the windows of the little Cape Cod-style houses, I would have thought there was no one here at all. I stopped, squinting at the houses.

Selkies didn’t tend to use much magic beyond that which came to them from their skins. The Roane were prophets and storm-singers, almost as skilled at controlling the waves as the Merrow, but none of that had carried down to the people who’d stolen their place in Faerie. We were probably going to have some nasty weather patterns when the Roane were reborn and had to rush to learn how to keep their natural gifts under control.

That was a problem for another day, and frankly, for someone else. I was just here to bring the Roane back into the world—and now, to get justice for one Selkie woman who hadn’t deserved to die the way she did.

I stopped, squinting at the row of small, semi-identical houses. Tybalt and Quentin waited patiently, until I raised my hand and pointed.

“There,” I said. “Elizabeth came out of that one.” Out of all the Selkie clan leaders, Liz was the one I actually knew and felt like I could talk to. She might listen to what I was going to propose. The fact that the Ryan clan had claimed responsibility for Gillian didn’t have anything to do with it, honest.

All right. Maybe it had a little bit to do with it.

We trudged across the sand, the waves crashing against the pillars of the boardwalk and the wind whistling around us, and we could have been anywhere; we could have been in Santa Cruz, or Half Moon Bay, or Ventura Beach, any place where people lived alongside the sea. It was a cunningly constructed little community, allowing the people who lived there to pretend that they weren’t on a floating duchy in the middle of the empty ocean. It was probably good for the mental health of the Selkies, who could, as we had seen so brutally demonstrated, drown.

The curtains were drawn at Elizabeth’s house. There was no doorbell, which made sense, given the level of technology around