I didn’t blame them for not getting it; I would have missed it, too, fifteen years ago, but time has given me a new distance from Faerie. Sometimes that’s a good thing. “Yui was a four-tailed Kitsune. That means she was strong, fast, and had pretty powerful magic, right?”

Alex nodded. I continued, “Whatever killed her took her by surprise—we know she didn’t struggle. We also know she was strong enough to defend herself: she could have fought back, and the amount of power she had would have stopped most people. It would definitely have stopped someone like me. That means one of two things. Either her killer was something so nasty that it could take down a four-tailed Kitsune without a fight, or . . .”

“Or it was someone she knew,” Alex said, horrified. “I didn’t even think of that.”

“Most people wouldn’t.” Most people don’t spend as much time dealing with death as I do. Lucky them.

“If it was a monster, would the bodies have been there?” Quentin asked.

“That depends on what it eats. The best answer is ‘probably not’—we could be dealing with something that killed in self- defense, but killing for food is more likely, and I’ve never heard of something that can kill a Kitsune but wouldn’t eat the body. Have there been any unexplained disappearances in the County that you haven’t reported to the Crown?”

“What? No. We report all deaths and disappearances to the Queen’s Court.”

“Up until this most recent batch, you mean,” I said.

“Yes. No. I . . . Jan tried to report those!”

“To her uncle, not the Queen, but whatever. I’m not going to fight with you. I’m just going to trust that if you think of any deaths I’m missing, you’ll tell me. Have you found any unusual tracks or spoor? Animal markings? We might have a shapeshifter on our hands.”

“Not that I’ve heard of.” He leaned forward, putting his hands over his face. “I can’t believe one of us is doing this. I just can’t.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, and I meant it; it hurts when your family betrays you.

“You could be wrong,” Alex said, through his fingers.

“We could be,” I agreed. “How long has the company been here?”

Alex lifted his head. He wasn’t crying, but it was only a matter of time. “Seven years.”

“Where was the company before it was here?”

“Uptown, near the Dreamer’s Glass border. We found land we could connect to the Summerlands about eight years ago, and we wanted to get farther away from Duchess Riordan, so we started construction.”

“But you could only open a Shallowing?”

“The ley lines weren’t deep enough to allow for anything else.”