None of us are really in the mood to go to a zoo after the bleak news I've just received, so we head back to the hotel instead, the entire drive filled with tense silence.

“I'll start looking into the process of requesting an exhumation,” Felix says as he pulls his laptop out of his backpack and takes it to the desk against the far wall. “We can go back to the cemetery tomorrow and see if the employees can help walk us through the details. I'm sure they've dealt with this before.”

El lays on the bed to mess around on her phone, and I sit by her feet with Felix's binder. I spend the next half hour just staring at the pictures of the women that Jan the nurse ID'd as possibly being the woman that she met all those years ago in the ER. I inspect each one as closely as I can, my nose almost touching the protective plastic cover sheets Felix put them in; following the lines of each face, comparing hair, eyes, nose shape, everything: looking for something that I recognized in myself.

One maybe shared my face shape. Another looked like her eyes might have been the same color as mine. I swear one had my nose, though the longer I looked, the less certain I became. They all looked vaguely similar: thick dark hair, fair skin. Distinct to anyone who knew them well, but interchangeable to a stranger.

And, as Felix had said, it was more than possible that none of these missing women were my mother. Because if someone had cared enough to report her missing, then someone from the Department for Missing and At Risk Magicians would have been sent to track her, and there's no reason why she wouldn't have been found.

Unless she, like Samuel, had been powerful enough to break a tracking spell placed on her. But then, if she had been that powerful a magician, how come a mundane disease had been what had killed her? Couldn't she had healed herself?

She might not have bothered if she just thought it was a normal flu.

But no, that didn't make sense either. Most magicians who can, do choose to heal colds and flues, as well as minor injuries. Why suffer if you don't have to? Especially if she had me to take care of as a single mom.

But... was she a single mom?

That note the nurse mentioned. 'Have a good day, love you heaps and bunches.' Signed with an S.

I cast my mind back as far as I was able to. I didn't have any memories of any other adults in my life. If my dad, or some boyfriend, had stuck around, I'd have at least vague memories of him too, wouldn't I? Could the note have been a memento from my father that she hadn't been able to bear to part with? It made sense. I wonder what happened between them in the time between the writing of that note, and her dying alone and unnamed in some hospital.

I'd never really though about my father much. I'd always just assumed that he'd been a quintessential dead-beat dad; knocked my mom up and took off before I was even born. With no memories of him, I hadn't ever had much interest in finding him. But... he's probably still alive, isn't he? He's probably out there somewhere, living his life, with no idea whatever happened to me or my mom. He might have a another family now, a real family. A wife, and kids. The kids might be my age, or close to. It might have been him I was sensing during the botched tracking spell back in Felix's apartment.

My head is spinning with a thousand different possibilities, and I have to give it a shake to clear it. There isn't any point in following that trail, it wouldn't lead anywhere. We had even less to go on for the identity of my father than we did my mom. Just the letter S, that wasn't exactly a useful clue.

No, I have to focus on what we actually have, and that's these newspaper articles.

I pull my phone from my pocket and google the name of the dark-haired woman whose picture I'm looking at right now, Valarie Cohen. I get a lot of Facebook accounts, so I try adding the year she went missing.

I get a brief article from a mundane newspaper mentioning her disappearance, but not much else.

For the next woman, I get back some old articles about a couple of bike races she won. That's about all I can find on her, though.

The article on the next woman has the names of her parents given, and I try them instead. Sure enough, I find their Facebook accounts, but they are set to private and I can only see a couple of pictures. They don't look much like me, and wondering if they could possibly be my grandparents makes my head hurt.

I go through the list of the woman Jan pointed out, trying to dig up any personal information that I can. I get a couple of addresses, some more Facebook accounts of family and friends. One won a prestigious scholarship to Harvard, and another has multiple arrest records going back several years before she finally went missing. For most of them, nothing comes up at all. Then I try the magician's internet—accessed by a search engine that requires a spell to pull up. I start from the beginning, typing each woman's name into the MagiSearch bar. I get a little more this time, but not much. A few more home addresses, a couple follow up articles. Magicians didn't start using the internet to interact with other magicians until the early 2000s, since the Council had been terrified of the mundanes somehow getting access. But you can't stop progress, and now we've got a little chunk of the internet to ourselves, protected by so many layers of magic that it's almost too much of a pain in the ass to actually use. It's late adoption however means that I don't have much luck finding anything in the time frame I'm looking for.

One of the women, Emma Wren, gets a couple of hits. Her parents seemed to have bought an announcement in the magician's newspaper every year, pleading for her to come home. Then they trickle down to one every couple of years, until they stop entirely about five years ago. I guess after sixteen years, her parents must have figured it was finally time to give up.

I heave a sigh and close the binder, and return to Google on my phone. All right. Let's try another angle.

Coyote, I type, and hit search. Let's try to find out everything “coyote” could possibly reference.