The Unkindest Tide (October Daye #13) - Seanan McGuire Page 0,96

knees protest the gesture. The old damage that used to make certain things difficult for me had long since healed; this was a new protest, born from the still too-limber joints of my artificially Merrow form. The spell would wear off soon. Until it did, I’d have to live with gills in my throat and the occasional twinge from a skeleton that was no longer sure it loved the land the way it always had before.

Gently, I lifted one of Isla’s hands and uncurled her clenched fingers. Her skin was soft and spongy from the water it had absorbed. It would trickle from her for hours, maybe even days, if the night-haunts didn’t come to carry her away. Which, I noted with regret, they didn’t even have to do. There were no webs between her fingers. They would come anyway. Her blood still held memories for them to carry.

No webs between her fingers, but there were bruises on her wrists. This hadn’t been a suicide.

“She died human,” I said, making no effort to keep the sadness from my voice. If I couldn’t be sad over a needless death, a fae death, I was one step closer to becoming the monster I had never wanted to be. “Someone stole her skin and then they threw her overboard.”

There were no obvious signs of injury. If she’d been human when she went into the water, she had drowned, the same way any human could have drowned if thrown into a sea that was unwelcoming to mortal kind.

The night-haunts would have come for her as soon as she’d washed up on shore. With their filmy wings and delicate bodies, they couldn’t have come for her in the water; they would have been bogged down and drowned. That was something, at least. We were still dealing with the original Isla, and would be until we left her body alone for the night-haunts to collect. She could still tell us her secrets.

I drew my knife, ignoring Peter’s voice asking shrilly what I was intending to do, and sliced the flesh of her right wrist. It was a shallow wound, and I was lucky, according to some definitions of the term: she hadn’t been dead long enough for her blood to fully settle.

“I hate this part,” I said, and bowed my head, and drank.

I came to, flat on my back, with the others standing around me in a circle. Peter looked terrified. The Cephali looked bemused. Quentin looked like he couldn’t decide between the two states, and so had settled on furious as the best way to split the difference.

“You just drowned,” he informed me, voice a little too shrill. “On the deck. With no water. You drowned.”

“That explains why my throat hurts,” I muttered, sitting up and coughing. A little more water was dislodged by the movement, and ran down my chin to soak into my shirt. I grimaced. “Okay, one, that’s disgusting, and two, I don’t think I can ride Isla Chase’s blood.”

“What was your first clue?” asked Quentin, voice still too shrill.

“The drowning was too traumatic for her, and for me. It’s blocking out everything else.” I looked at the body. “I could wait and try to talk to the night-haunts, but they’ve asked me to stop doing that, and I don’t have what I’d need to make a safe summoning ritual. The risk is too great. I’m sorry. I should be braver.”

“I think I’m glad you’re not,” said Quentin. He took a short, sharp breath through his nose. “What do we do now?”

Go the hell home and let the Luidaeg deal with this, I thought, and stood. Aloud, I said, “We find out who did this. Whoever it was has to pay.”

“Pay how?” asked Peter. He was showing far too much interest in the body, watching it with an avid fascination that was barely balanced by Quentin’s restraint. It was true that he’d grown up in a more militant part of Faerie, but still. Childhoods in the Undersea were clearly very different. “It’s only against the Law to kill purebloods, and sometimes not even that.”

I opened my mouth, prepared to answer. Then I froze, really thinking about his question.

The Law, Oberon’s Law, is very simple: no one kills purebloods. Not changelings, not other purebloods, and certainly not humans, not unless they feel like finding out how cruel Faerie can be when it comes to devising punishments for people with no one to speak for them. There are exceptions, like wartime, or like the