Betrayal (22 page)

I laid on the trampoline one night days later thinking about how close to my nineteenth birthday it was.  It was only days away and no one had said a word.  A year ago they seemed highly attentive to the date.

I found all the familiar smells tingling my nose and wondered where all three might be.  Kin was never far lately and I no longer stayed alarmed that he was here to take me.

I closed my eyes and relished in the silence.

“Are you going to sing next my little mermaid?”

“Kin, you shouldn’t be here.  Ian or Pike will catch you and you know it.”

“And your point?”

That he didn’t care and that was pure courage in my eyes.  I admired his tenaciousness, but he was also haunted with things of the past that led too many of his decisions.  I worried that was what drove him to me so often.

“Why are you here?” I looked at him with disbelief always disturbed by his intentions.
              “To see you, of course.”

“Kin!” 
Geez!

“Just thought I’d tell you what your mother shared with me.”

I sat up fast.  Once again, jipped of information.  One of them was always telling me things because their own minds made up that I was ready to hear it. 

“Thought that might convince you if my amazingly—not often turned away from charms— didn’t affect you.”

“Your charms affect me, just not the way you want,” I said pretentiously out of sarcasm.

“Well, she admits a small truth.  I’m impressed.”

“Get on with it.”  His punch to my stomach mentioning my mother hit me too strong.  I was growing knots the longer he made me wait.

“Pushy, pushy!  Your father was an ambassador to the human world of stock markets and the exchange of human wealth to the Unseelie court even after his reduction of title and was caught.  My father must have seen this as a challenge and maybe even an advantage if he sent him to the human world alive.  Your mother wasn’t happy to tell me this, but it answers a lot.” 

“Then how did he end up with my mother?” I didn’t want to state the obvious.

“Meaning she was just a Firebearer, you mean?”

Count on Kin for doing that for me. “Yes,” I croaked.  I looked around for anyone disturbing us.

“I believe he was already wiped of the memory of his true identity when he met your mother, just not his skills.”

Making him still holding magic.  That explains a lot.  “So your father envied my father, wiped his memory, put him in the slave cave, glamoured him from his own court to hide his identity, and sent him away with mom to hide him when he caught her eye.”

“Nutshell.”

“And did Lazyra really protect him?”

He didn’t make any expression, “You doubt Ian’s word?”

Uh oh!  “No, just Lazyra’s.”  In the face of the unknown, who could not doubt
a little
.

He shrugged, “Yes, she protected him.  Ian was sent to watch over all three of you, though you were the only part of the prophecy.”

I was wowed at the soap opera my boring life turned out to be behind my back while I grew up under the assumption that I was just a freak stuck in an endless void of the everyday. 
Boy, was I wrong!

“Is there more?”

“No, that is all we had time for.  Pike is watching me closely and I had to leave.  She is expecting me again in two nights.”

Covert operations at work.  When could we all come clean?                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

I asked Ian to see my mom.  He readied our leave and we left before breakfast.  I was in such a total surprise that it didn’t have to be a planned visit that I didn’t stop to think why.

When we walked to the back of my yard where the jasmine was finally making a comeback, but not blooming due to the season, I saw Pike spying out for Kin at the back of the house.

I felt Kin near so when I turned abruptly and kissed Ian behind the gazebo too fast, it made my head spin.  I screamed in my head for Kin to leave at the same time using every ounce of my mind mojo abilities.   Kin knew at once when I rang out and was gone.  Pike turned just as fast in our direction and headed towards us.  Ian was livid. 

Ian and Pike knew what I’d done.  I opened my brainwaves to Ian and told him what Kin had been doing while he steamed.  I watched his eyes dance with silver swirls of other emotions from my too fast, very intense kiss.  I’d really had it now.  I didn’t try to make everyone mad, but I couldn’t make everyone happy either.  And I couldn’t even use the phrase
I was only human!
  Ha!

Standing in my own backyard, I admitted a few other things freely given from Kin.  It just hit me that Kin might not be divulging secrets for my benefit, but rather what it would do when Ian found out about them.  And how I got them.  Ian was livid
still
.

I turned to Pike for comfort.  Nope!  He was gnashing his teeth like Ian.

I traipsed through the back door of my house leaving the two Fey men to walk around the house and enter through the front door where they would be able to cross.  Only then did it hit me that I couldn't be labeled all Fey because I could cross salt lines.

“Did Kinsler put you up to this?” Pike whispered to me in the kitchen as I made myself some much missed Earl Grey Tea.  I hadn’t had it in days. Weeks.

“No Pike.  He actually asked me if it would be okay if he came to ask her some questions.  I told Ian though what he learned about my father.” 

“And you didn’t tell me?” he was hurt.  He grabbed the tea kettle and poured my tea for me. 

Maybe I’ve made too many alliances.  I threw my hands in the air, “I can’t seem to do anything right for you two.  Do you know how hard it is to just survive day to day around the both of you?”

“Am I interrupting something?” Ian appeared in the doorway to the kitchen.

Pike poured the one scoop of sugar in my tea and stirred never looking up.  He’d never been domestic in front of me.  How humanlike!

“No Ian.  I was only confessing my undying love for Pike and how we might run away with each other in the next two seconds before all hell broke loose.”

He stiffened, glared at me, and turned back to the living room running smack into my mom.

“Am I interrupting anything?”  Broken record syndrome.  Crazy ass men syndrome.  A heart attack might be good at this point.  At least it would release me from the tension floating around the air above.

“No mom.  Both of them know now that Kin has been visiting you and why.  I also know, I believe, everything about my father, but even that stands to be determined.”

She peered at me and then at the both of them somehow in one glance though they stood on opposites ends of the room.  She could do that but I never could.  She said now to all of us, “Let’s move to the sofa.”

Yeah, cuz’ sitting solves it all!

Pike still held my tea.  He looked like a frightened child but tucked it away fast with the way Ian’s jealousy roared from five feet away.  He pushed a smug smile to his lips and murmured seductively, “Your tea my sweet loving queen!”

He was laying it on thick.  I took it and stomped off to the living room as graceful as I could between stomping and holding hot tea in my hand. Immaturity surfaced again, but the two of them were just as much?

“Is father really the Unseelie court king before Sane?”

My mom hesitated but answered, “Yes.”

I wanted to be angry all over again, but decided they had a good reason to keep it from me.  It had better be a good reason. 

“Grace, you’d only get angry and try to save the world all over again,” Pike reminded me.  
When
one who honeyed their words but evil mindedly persuaded the mob, great woes befall the state
.  That is courtesy of Euripides and he must thinking of the winter court leaders in general for sure.  Should I remind Pike that I hadn’t really done much saving yet?

Ian’s heavily guarded thoughts surfaced a little with, “These things take time and require delicate measures to be taken.  Pike and I took care of what could be done.  Your interference with consulting with Kinsler doesn’t help, Grace.”

Boy was he mad!   

“Ian,” my mother never brought out her angry voice unless she really, really meant business.  “You will back off now.”

He ran his fingers through his mussed up hair. 
              “Kinsler asked my permission and I gave it to him.  My husband is from his court and was once his king.  He has a right to know if no one in his own court will tell him.  And you would do well, Pike, to back me on this since your mother was of the same consequence that my husband suffers from.”  My mother must have passed down that
she-wolf
ability hiding inside of me.  She was letting it show out giving me just enough gumption to be inspired.

Pike sank in his seat.  Whoever said women aren’t powerful hadn’t met my mother.  She didn’t have to command, she simply spoke.

“So you’re insinuating that he was not savable?” I scoffed. 

“No dear.  Once a memory has been wiped, it cannot be replaced.”  Pain flashed briefly behind her eyes. 

“And you’ll tell me why my father’s memory was replaced later, but not now?”  I reminded her.

“Yes, Grace.  When the time is right.”

I sulked.  Rats!  “Time.  Secrets.  Bullheaded Fey people.”

“Won’t work on your mother.  Never has,” she smiled at me like I’d just announced I’d won a trophy for hard-headedness.  She wouldn’t break with the same pouting that works on Ian.  Shame!

I thought on this long and hard for two days.  If my mother knew of Pike’s mother and my father’s memory had been wiped, I had to assume that my father had been in the same place where Pike’s mother resided at some point.  Which only means that my father was a slave to the Fey, his own people and demeaned from his own throne by a ruthless man who Kin calls his father.  But how did my father end up falling in love with my mother, remain alive, and able to return to the human world? 

I visited my mother again the next day by her request.  Ian escorted me there and spent the time in the kitchen eating my mom’s cookies without us. Pike joined him at some point, but we ignored his arrival.

I heard my mom’s story of how she met my father in the woods one day when he was hiking for herbs and then saw him at the Unseelie court group visiting the summer court when she lit the fire.  He took to her immediately.  They fell in love and she couldn’t let him live in what he did.  They sneaked around outside of the courts and she found out she was pregnant and the choice was made.  They ran away and were chased by the guards.  Mom only found out later that they gave up because of Lazyra.  Ian was sent to guard her leaving again and that turned into the prophecy I know today.  It was then she was told of his true identity, but it was too late for even the memories of their love much less his royal roots.

I have one undying question.  “Did you know he was the Unseelie king?”

She sheepishly blushed, “Yes dear.  I recognized him through the glamour but only after he and I—”

“How?”  That didn’t make sense.

She continued to blush, “A girl never reveals her secrets.”

So stinking tired of secrets. “Okay!”  Wait a minute.  Powers.  My mom had abilities she shouldn't. She hoped in bed with the king and got her own mojo.  It was my turn to blush. She knew at once what I figured out.  “You hide your,” Grace whispered, “abilities.”  Her mom nodded.  A million new questions just surfaced, but not now. No way.  Not in front of Ian.

“I said I’d keep coming back to be the Firebearer and that he would continue to funnel monies through the stock market in exchange and keep that part of his memory.  This left both courts open to free reign on the comings and goings of no legal boundaries to each court which is why Kinsler has his camp a mile from the court without retaliation now because you are the go between.  Ian cannot ask him to move until you do.”

OH!

“The lighting of the Firebearer represents the separate courts and their seasons as well as boundaries.  Without one of us, the seasons do not move.  And until the Unseelie one steps up, it is up to us.”

But there is only one.  At least that’s the way it’s always been.  Now there are three. "Mom," I whispered, "did you know Kin was the Firebearer?"

"Yes, Grace," she patted the sofa looking away, "one Firebearer always senses another."

I’d had enough new tidbits of knowledge for the day.  I wanted to just go home, make up with Ian, and well, make up with Ian.  Home was not here anymore.  One glance at him told me he wasn' cross anymore, but was unsure what to make of his silence.