A local habitation

The air in front of her flickered, and April was there, delight transforming her face into something bright and real. I looked at her, remembering what Gordan told me. April loved her mother. No one could see them together and deny it.

Jan looked down, and smiled. “Hey, sweetie. I hope I’m not interrupting anything?”

“Nothing of importance, Mother. May I assist you in some way?”

“Please. Do you remember Quentin?”

April’s nod was immediate. “Yes. He is located on the first floor, in office A-3.”

I stared at her. Either she’d just been visiting him, or she knew where he was without thinking about it. If it was the latter, the killings couldn’thave been an outside job—she’d have spotted an intruder before they could do anything. “You watched us get here, didn’t you? That was you in the woods,” I said, before I fully realized I was going to.

“Yes,” April replied. “I watch all entrances.”

Right. Unless our killer was somehow invisible to April, we were dealing with a person, not a thing. “Have you seen anyone strange coming or going right around the murders?”

“Only you.”

“I see. Will you be available later? I’m going to want to talk to you.” I just needed to figure out what I was going to ask her.

She slanted an anxious glance toward Jan. “Mother?”

“Do as Toby says, sweetie; it’s all right.” April made an unhappy face. Jan smiled. “I know you don’t want to. Tell you what: I’ll come to your room and watch a movie with you tonight, real-time, okay? We can snuggle.”

“Will there be popcorn?”

“Popcorn and cartoons.”

“Acceptable,” April said, and vanished.

Jan looked toward me, a tired smile on her lips. “Normally, she watches movies straight from the file server, but she’ll watch them slow if it means I do it with her.” She removed her glasses, rubbing her eyes with the back of her hand. “Motherhood is exhausting. What was I thinking, saying I could handle a County and then adopting a kid? I must’ve been crazy.”

“Jan . . .”

“This whole thing is crazy.” Sighing, she put her glasses back on. “I’m sorry we were so weird when you got here. We’ve been ru

“I’m sorry,” I said, and was surprised to realize that I meant it. “We’re doing our best.”

“I know you are.” A flicker of something like anger crossed her face. “It’s almost ironic. What we’re trying to do here . . . people shouldn’t be dying. That’s the last thing that should be happening.”

“What areyou trying to do here?”

“Nothing big. Design better computers. Get the Summerlands onto a decent phone plan. Save Faerie.” She waved a hand vaguely, like she was brushing off a fly. “The usual nonsense. What are you going to do now?”

“Go back to Quentin, and go through the rest of this paperwork.” I picked up the drawer, tucking it under my arm. “I need you to be more careful. All of you. Gordan’s in the cube maze, alone. Elliot is Oberon- knows-where, alone. Cut it out.”

“I’ll talk to them,” she said.

“We’ve reviewed the information you gave us and searched the offices we could find. Did Yui have an office?”

“Yeah—she just hid it really well.” She pursed her lips, looking momentarily unhappy. “When Elliot gets back, I’ll ask if he can lead you there. He can usually find it.”

“Elliot? All right. We can’t find anything the victims had in common, other than working here. I’m going to have a second look at the places where the bodies were found, but I don’t expect to find anything.”

“They were hired from a lot of different places, for a lot of different reasons,” Jan said, almost apologetically. “Colin . . . well, we needed a Selkie for some of our integration testing. It’s difficult to explain, but race really mattered. Peter was a history teacher with a specialization in folklore—that wasn’t just human folklore.”

“Faerie historian?”

“Genealogist.”

“Why did you need a genealogist?”

“Market research.” Jan shrugged. “You can’t use the same sales pitch with a Daoine Sidhe and a Centaur. It’s not going to work. Yui was our team alchemist. She could make just about anything compatible with anything else, if you gave her time.”

“What about Barbara?”

“Friend of Gordan’s, hired in a nonsecure position. She was from San Jose. That probably explains why . . .” Jan stopped.

“Why she betrayed you? Yes, it probably does.”

“Don’t the bodies tell you anything?”

“Nothing. They died of some internal trauma; I have no idea what it was, but the external wounds can’t have killed them. Maybe I’d know if I were more of a forensics expert, but I don’t, and I’m not.” The fae have never needed forensics training; that’s what the Daoine Sidhe are for. Unfortunately, that means we don’t have many options when the blood fails us.

“Maybe you’re too weak to ride their blood,” Jan said, slowly. “Changelings are weaker a lot of the time, aren’t they?”

“Quentin tried, too. Nothing.”

“We can’t get you a forensics expert. We can’t get the police involved.”

“I know,” I said. “Unfortunately, the dead aren’t talking.”

“But why are they like that?” she asked. “Why didn’t the night-haunts come?”

“I have no idea.” I raked my hair back with both hands, trying to hide my exasperation. “You’d have to ask the night-haunts.”

“Well, can you do that?”

I paused. “Can I . . . ?”

Could I ask the night- haunts? Were they something you could ask? I’d never seen them, and neither had anyone I knew; they came in the darkness, took the bodies of our dead and were gone. They weren’t something you saw . . . but couldI see them? Was there a way to summon them—and more importantly, could they tell me what I needed to know? The Daoine Sidhe know death, but the night-haunts aredeath. They might have the answer. I owed it to Jan to try.

Jan was watching me. I nodded, saying, “It may be possible; I don’t know. I’ve never heard of it being done. Maybe they can be summoned without a body.” I paused. If there was anyone who would know how to call the night-haunts . . . “I’ll have to get back to you on that.”

“Please.”

“I’m going to head back to the office, go through these files, and try to figure out whether it’s possible. And get coffee. I really need coffee. Will you be okay until Elliot gets back?”

“I’ll be fine.” She pushed her glasses up with one finger. “I’ll lock the door and check in with April every few minutes.”

“Okay.” I inclined my head in the bare outline of a bow, tucked the drawer up under my arm, and walked back out into the hall. I had a lot to think about.

SEVENTEEN

VOICES RAISED IN faint argument were drifting through the door of Colin’s office. I sped up. Quentin’s safety was the one thing I wasn’t willing to risk. That’s why I wanted him to stay in the office in the first place: better paranoid with a locked door between him and the rest of the knowe than following me when I wasn’t sure I could protect him.

“—and I’m telling youthat if they focused more on telling a good story, the graphics wouldn’t matter! How many explosions do you needin the first ten minutes of a movie?” That was Quentin. He sounded a

“Your argument is specious,” countered the second voice. April, who sounded like, well, herself. Not quite bland enough to be a machine, but close. “You are a teenage male. Teenage males like explosions.”

“Generalize much?”

I relaxed before leaning forward and knocking, noting impassively that my brief terror seemed to have helped my exhaustion. The voices went quiet. Then Quentin called, “What’s the password?”

“Do your homework. Now let me in.”

He unlocked and opened the door, revealing April in my abandoned seat. The Hippocampi were clustered at the end of the tank, apparently as unhappy with the Dryad’s presence as they’d been with mine. I looked between them and raised an eyebrow.