The Unkindest Tide (October Daye #13) - Seanan McGuire Page 0,115
of them, buried in every strand of fur, and I can’t follow them. Tybalt, on the other hand . . . “We know where Isla’s body ended up. What I want to know is what happened to her skin.”
“Because whoever has her skin is the killer?” asked Quentin.
“Not necessarily.” That would be too easy. “Tybalt?”
He transferred his unflinching gaze to me. “You’re about to ask me to transform and try to sniff out the trail of a killer, aren’t you? How many times must I tell you that I’m not a bloodhound?”
“Oh, believe me, I know you’re not,” I said. “I want the killer or the skin, or both. Any of the above will help me start figuring out what happened.”
“Scent doesn’t cling well to sand,” he said.
“It’s better than nothing.”
Tybalt sighed, sounding exquisitely put-upon—and slightly relieved at the same time. If I was doing this with him, I wasn’t going to be tempted to run away and do it without him. “As you wish,” he said, and folded forward and inward at the same time, the scent of musk and pennyroyal filling the air as he landed on all four feet in the sand, a tabby cat instead of a nearly-human man. One of his ears was tattered, the artifact of some fight long before we’d come to know each other. His eyes were the same. I would always, always know him, by those eyes.
Tybalt sauntered over to wind himself around my ankles once, twice, three times before stepping more delicately toward the circle of disturbed sand, his tail low and twitching behind him, his nose pressed close to the ground and his whiskers fanned forward as far as they would go. He sniffed, sneezed, and then began slinking toward the far end of the sand, toward the place where the artificial land dropped away and became all too real ocean.
At the very edge, he stopped, yowled, and looked back over his shoulder at me. I knew a cue when I saw one. I walked over and looked down . . .
. . . and there, floating in the tangled kelp that matted around the pylons, was a gray sealskin without anyone to wear it, cast aside like so much garbage. My stomach churned, threatening to bring up my last several meals for a repeat engagement.
“René, stay back.” My voice was remarkably steady. I wanted to be proud of that. I couldn’t quite manage it.
Isla’s killer hadn’t been content with ripping the skin off her shoulders and pushing her into the sea to die. They had thrown her skin in after her. I wanted to believe they’d thrown them both in at the same time, giving her a fighting chance, even if she hadn’t been able to stay alive long enough to benefit from it. I couldn’t. I knew, without any proof beyond the gnawing in my gut, that her killer had waited until she went under before they threw her skin after her. Selkies learned to swim while they were still human. They had stood here, skin in their hands, watching her drown. Only when there was no chance the sea could still be kind had they thrown her skin in after her, willing to let it be lost forever.
Maybe that had been the plan for Isla and her skin alike. Let the leader of one of the Selkie clans disappear the day before the Luidaeg’s long-delayed judgment was finally to be passed, and see what that did to the rest of them. Could any of the Selkies resist the urge to run, if they believed Isla had been able to get away clean?
And if they had run, if they had believed . . . who would have benefitted from that? Who would have stood to gain from having the Luidaeg’s oaths broken?
René moved to stand next to me. I gave him a careful sidelong look. He was staring at the skin with open avarice, and I had to wonder at the coincidence of it all. The murdered clan leader was the sister of another clan leader’s husband, one who had been seen publicly questioning the Luidaeg. If he got his hands on his sister’s skin, would we ever see it again?
The chain of evidence matters, even in Faerie. I shrugged out of my jacket, offering it to Quentin, who had appeared—as expected—by my shoulder. “Keep René up here,” I said. “Whatever you do, don’t let him into the water.”