“Yes,” he said fervently, scrambling to his feet. “Please.”

“No,” said May, just as fervently. I raised an eyebrow. She glared. “You’re not going anywhere until you tell me what happened. Where’s Gillian? Is she here? Is she . . .” She stopped, no more capable of finishing her sentence than I would have been.

“I don’t know where she is, but I know who has her,” I said. “Raysel took her. Just went right into the house, and took her. I have to get her back.”

“So what, you’re going to drive all over the city?”

“Not quite. There was a Selkie named Margie. Raysel took her captive down at the docks. I’m hoping there might still be a blood trail for me to follow.” And while I was down there, I could pay Bucer a visit—there was no way he’d skipped town already. Maybe he’d be able to tell me about a stone room in a shallowing where redwood trees grew. He might not want to tell me, but I can be very convincing, when I have to be.

“Was a Selkie?” asked May, slowly.

“She’s dead. Raysel killed her. It was an accident.”

“The Law doesn’t care about accidents,” said Quentin.

May, on the other hand, was staring at me with a new type of fear in her wide gray eyes. “If you haven’t already found the blood trail, how do you know about the Selkie?”

“I called the night-haunts.”

She stiffened. Only a bit. I probably wouldn’t have noticed, if I didn’t know her so well. “What did they say?”

“That Gillian isn’t with them. Neither are the Lorden boys. There’s still time, but that doesn’t mean that we should be wasting it.”

“That’s a relief,” said May.

“Yeah. It is.”

May was trying to keep her expression steady. It wasn’t working. She’s at a disadvantage when it comes to hiding her emotions from me—I grew up with her face, after all, and I know it better than I currently know my own. Her face held an odd mixture of fear and resignation, like she expected me to start yelling at any second. That look hadn’t been there before I told her I was meeting with the night-haunts.

Her apprehension put some of the things they’d said to me into a new context, one that almost made sense. Maybe we’d talk about it later, and maybe we wouldn’t. It was only going to matter if we made it through alive.

“We—” I began . . . and stopped as Raj came running into the room. He wasn’t wearing a human disguise, and his pupils were thin slits against the glass-green of his eyes, broadcasting his fear.

“Raj?” I took a step forward, hand instinctively moving to my knife. “What’s wrong?”

“There are people coming up the beach!” he said, stumbling to a halt a few feet in front of me. “I came out of the shadows down near the cliff, where nobody would see, and they were there, coming out of the water! They’re on their way here.”

“Undersea?” I asked.

Raj blinked, briefly looking at me like I was an idiot. I guess asking if they were from the Undersea when he’d seen them coming out of the water qualified me. “Yeah,” he said. “And they have Connor with them. He doesn’t look happy.”

“Well, then, he can join the club.” I grabbed my coffee off the table, downing its contents in one long, fortifying gulp. “Looks like we’re going to have guests before anything else gets done. Anyone who doesn’t want to meet with the Undersea, this is your cue to exit. Everyone else, come with me.”

“Where are we going?” asked Raj.

“The throne room. If we’re going to be receiving guests, we’re going to do it like civilized people, not like, well, us.” I put down my mug. “Come on. It’ll be fun.”

May looked at me dubiously. “Fun?” she echoed.

“Isn’t everything?” I shrugged, starting for the kitchen door. To my relief, the others followed. I’d been happy to let them duck out if that was what they really wanted, but I had to admit, I hadn’t been quite as enthused about the idea of facing the Undersea delegation—whoever it included—by myself.

Our footsteps echoed as we entered the throne room. I frowned a little, looking at the empty dais. “I should probably get a chair,” I said.

“Wait right here,” said Marcia. Gesturing for Raj and Quentin to follow, she started down the hall toward the solarium.

I folded my arms across my chest as I watched them go. “Do I want to know what they’re doing back there?”

“Probably not,” said May. “Do you have anything you need me to do?”

“Yeah.” I glanced her way, quirking a faint smile. “Get the door.”

May raised an eyebrow before looking down at her knee-less jeans and glittery, rainbow-striped T-shirt. “Because what, I have ‘impressive’ written all over me now?”

“Because you’re who’s available to do it. Now go.” I pointed to the door. “See if you can stall them long enough for us to get some sort of seating in here.”

“I’ll juggle,” she deadpanned.

“That’s a start.”

May rolled her eyes, and went.

Marcia came back out of the hall with Raj and Quentin behind her, the boys struggling to hold up a big oak chair that I didn’t remember seeing when we were first cleaning out the knowe. “Put it on the dais,” she said, waving helpfully in the indicated direction. “And try not to drop it again.”

Raj muttered something. I couldn’t quite make out the words, but from the tone, I was comfortable assuming that they weren’t complimentary. Quentin did his furniture moving in stoic silence, as befits a squire. At least one of us was taking his training really seriously.

“Where did you find that?” I asked.

“It was jammed into the corner of the kitchen before we moved it to storage,” she said. Giving me a sidelong look, she added, “I figured you’d be happier with a nice-looking kitchen chair than you’d be sitting in Evening’s old throne.”

The idea was enough to make my stomach do a slow flip. “You figured right,” I said, and walked over to help Quentin and Raj position the thing. Purebloods seem to build things according to two mutually exclusive camps of design aesthetic. Everything is either so fragile it can be destroyed by a stiff wind, or so sturdy that it could probably survive being hit repeatedly with a Buick. The chair fell into the second category. It felt like it had been carved so long ago that it had forgotten what it was to be a tree. All it knew now was being a chair, and it was good at what it knew.