The Golden City by J. Kathleen Cheney Page B

down her paper and touched the smooth brown hair dressed in a simple knot at the nape of her neck.
    Duilio hadn’t inherited that hair. He had his father’s, darker and with a tendency to curl. The only feature he’d inherited from his mother was her eyes. He wished he resembled her more, as Alessio had.
    He waited for her to finish her sentence, but in st ead she st ared down at her newspaper as if she had no idea what it was doing there. Sighing inwardly, Duilio rose and took his leave of her, kissing her cheek in farewell. Her maid, Felis, bu st led pa st him, no doubt eager to get her mi st ress up and about her silent day. Duilio paused and watched the elderly woman fussing over his mother’s unmoving form.
    His mother’s pelt was missing, st olen from the house three years before. In a feat of magic that Duilio’s intelle ct never could grasp, a selkie could remove his or her pelt and be left in human form. Half-human, Duilio couldn’t do that himself, but he’d
seen
it done many times. It st ill baffled him. And even in human form, that pelt remained part of the selkie, an eternal tie to the sea and her life there. Without her pelt, his mother couldn’t go back to the ocean she loved.
    Duilio hadn’t been around at the time of the theft. If he had, he might have st opped it, but he’d been in London in st ead, st udying the police force there. Alessio had written and mentioned a theft, but hadn’t told Duilio
what
was st olen, a gross oversight. He would have come back to hunt the thief himself if only he’d known. But Alessio and Father had thought they could find the thing without help. Unfortunately, that hadn’t been the case.
    Then Alessio had died.
    His death nearly a year and a half ago had been suspicious. He’d gotten involved in an argument over a lover and ended up dueling another gentleman in a clearing outside the city. Both parties had seen it was foolish and in the end both men deloped, firing their guns into the air. Yet somehow Alessio was shot through the heart. Duilio had talked to witnesses, and none had any idea from where that fatal shot had come. With no evidence to the contrary, the police had called it an accident.
    Duilio wondered if that st ray bullet was linked to Alessio’s hunt for their mother’s pelt. In his journals, Alessio had indicated he was close to a breakthrough right before his death. But he hadn’t recorded that breakthrough, whatever it was, leaving Duilio in the dark.
    It turned out they a ct ually knew who’d taken the pelt from the house: a footman hired only a month before. The man had pinched both the pelt and a st rongbox from the desk in the library. When Alessio had located the footman’s apartment, the st rongbox and the pelt were already gone. And they couldn’t que st ion that false footman about it. He’d been st rangled to death. That made it likely he’d merely been
hired
to find the pelt and st eal it. Whoever hired him had probably killed him to keep him quiet.
    Duilio’s father had continued the search for the pelt, but one damp night while out hunting, Alexandre Ferreira contra ct ed a chill that all too quickly became pneumonia. He died before Duilio could make it home from Paris. In the intervening year, Duilio had recon st ru ct ed every la st st ep his father and brother had taken in their searches, with no more success. His gift had proven singularly unhelpful in this particular que st .
    The thief hadn’t de st royed the pelt; Duilio knew that much. His mother would have died if that were the case. No, it was secreted away somewhere, an item of indescribable magic. Without it she would never be whole again. If she were to answer the call of the sea, she would be as vulnerable to the waters as any human. She fought that desire con st antly.
    After one rueful look at his mother, Duilio headed to the door to colle ct his things from the long mahogany table in the front entryway. He hadn’t found her missing pelt yet, but perhaps he