The Unkindest Tide (October Daye #13) - Seanan McGuire Page 0,121

help,” said Marcia. We all turned to stare at her. She flushed red, the color traveling all the way up the sides of her ears, and said, “Lily had custody of a Selkie skin for a few years, while she was waiting for its owner’s daughter to be old enough to claim it. The, uh, owner had been clanless, so he handled the dispensation of his own skin.”

“We allow people to select their heirs,” protested René.

“Even when someone dies, and their chosen heir is too young?” asked Marcia. Her voice was cold and gentle at the same time, like the first swirl of snow on a winter morning. She looked unflinchingly at René. “He came to Lily because he was afraid that if something happened to him, his skin would be given to the ‘most deserving,’ and his daughter would have to wait until someone else died without an heir—assuming that if and when that happened, she’d be found more deserving than everyone else in her position. I don’t know why he was so sure he was going to die. Maybe he’d found an actual seer, or maybe he just had a bad feeling. Whatever the reason, Lily agreed to safeguard his skin if anything happened, providing we could get to it before the Selkies did.”

“I remember that,” I blurted. “She paid me and Julie to break into a man’s apartment.” It had been small, and dark, and very, very clean, the kind of place I would only later come to appreciate as the loving home it was. There had been a man in the kitchen, bullet wounds in his chest and throat. The night-haunts had already been and gone, replacing the original corpse with a perfect, convincingly human replica.

The sealskin we’d been sent to retrieve had been neatly folded off to one side, presumably by the night-haunts themselves. It had seemed like an odd courtesy, but they loved the Luidaeg in their strange, windborne way. Maybe they’d been trying to honor her long-dead child as they took care of their latest meal.

He hadn’t been my first dead body, sadly. I’d been with Devin long enough by that point to have learned the world wasn’t all moonlight and roses. The sight of him had still been enough to wrench my dinner back out of me. I’d made it to the bathroom, barely, and promptly wished that I hadn’t, when I’d seen the colorful flotilla of rubber duckies sitting in the bottom of the dry tub, waiting for a bath time that was never going to come.

Whoever had killed him hadn’t been doing it for his skin. Julie had been the one to carry it back to Lily’s, maybe because she’d heard it calling to her, maybe because she’d known I—back then, before the pond, before the discovery of my actual heritage, when I’d thought of myself as a defective Daoine Sidhe and not a perfectly functional Dóchas Sidhe—would be vulnerable to temptation.

I’d never met the daughter. I wondered, suddenly, whether she was here.

Wrenching myself out of the memory, I focused on Marcia. “What do we do?”

“We’ll need a willow basket lined with wax and filled with oil,” said Marcia. “I can find the herbs I need here in the garden if someone can get me the basket.”

“I think I saw a booth selling crab baskets in the market,” said Quentin.

“Don’t go alone,” I said.

“I’ll go with him,” said Cassandra. “The air’s a little thick in here.”

“Meaning my father and brother have been yelling at each other since we all stopped crying,” said Dean, in a dry, weary tone. “I’d go also, if I weren’t afraid of being arrested the second I stepped foot outside the courtyard.”

“It seems the Lady sea witch’s name carries some weight even with those who would trouble us, as none of the ruffians have been willing to cross our threshold,” said Nolan. He turned to René. “I can take you to your sister, if you would like.”

“I would appreciate that,” said René. Nolan beckoned for him to follow, and the two of them walked across the courtyard to the apartment where Poppy was sitting with a dead woman, counting down the minutes of her decay.

“It makes sense that the people who live here wouldn’t want to piss off the Luidaeg; she’s their own personal nightmare,” I said, as Quentin and Cassandra made their necessary, clearly much-desired escape. “Peter, why are you yelling at your father?”

“He just—he just stood there and let them take my mother!” he