Faerie Blood (16 page)

As I got the words out my gaze slid off Christopher’s face, and I wound up peeking sideways at him to watch his reaction. He’d gulped down two of the Tylenol capsules, and had paused in the middle of drinking down the glass of water I’d brought him when I started speaking.

His eyes went wide, and it took me a moment to identify what I saw in them: shock. Pure, genuine shock. That surprised me in turn. The man didn’t blink twice at trolls, Sidhe, magic, and who knew what else existing for real in the world. Nor had the need to defend me tripped him up, or the little conference we’d all had tonight about my own mother being… not exactly from around here. So what was with the astonishment?

Then it hit me, and I wondered what it meant that a man who handled a staff like he did, a man who could rush in without hesitation to save someone’s life, would look so stunned and humbled when thanked for having courage. I wondered what might have happened to him, in Newfoundland or Seattle or somewhere in between, to make it shock him so; I wondered whether anyone had ever called him brave before, or if I was the first.

But I didn’t ask him any of those things. He looked like I’d hit him over the head with a baseball bat, and I strongly suspected that meant I should lay off asking any more awkward questions. Instead I took the glass of water from his unresisting hand, setting it down on the coffee table with the bottle of Tylenol in case he woke up again and needed them. Then I helped him get the quilt untangled, so he could settle back down again beneath it.

And he whispered, “You’re welcome.”

His tone wasn’t abashed, but his eyes were. Gently I whispered in reply, “Go back to sleep, big guy. It’ll do you good.”

With Christopher settled, I went back to the bedroom to take my own advice. This time, when I ventured back into sleep, I found no dreams lying in wait.

I didn’t rouse again until the morning
, when the smells of frying bacon, eggs, and waffles launched a bold incursion through the bedroom and into my slumbering brain. Sleep didn’t have a chance. Outnumbered and with nothing in its arsenal to match that triple-team campaign, it surrendered, fled the field, and abandoned me to the siren call of breakfast.

In the kitchen I found Jude scrambling eggs, Christopher fetching dishes from cabinets and utensils from drawers, and Aggie at the table with a cup of freshly brewed coffee at her elbow. My aunt smilingly pointed the two younger people towards everything they needed. But every so often she glanced Millicent’s way, worry crinkling the corners of her eyes, and that was my first sign that something was up.

The old Warder herself was my second one, though she took no notice of my arrival. She paced back and forth through the living room, scowling and looking two seconds away from snatching up her shotgun and blasting somebody. Very possibly the recipient of the words she barked into her phone.

“Do you want me to explain it to you again in small syllables, honey? Three members of your Court loose in my city have broken the Pact, and they’re going to break it again if we don’t—what? Hellfire and damnation, you heard what I said the first time! Yes, the girl’s a changeling! And she’s half Seelie and a baby mage to boot!”

She’s talking about me
, I realized, but to whom, I could not begin to think. My attention commandeered by her tirade, I watched her from the kitchen doorway, unable to tear myself away.

Millie turned and saw me, which stopped neither her pacing nor the irate tide of her words. “Yeah, you damned well better grasp the severity of the situation, girlie, and grasp it fast,” she railed into her phone, her drawl thicker now and yet razor-sharp. “Because I ain’t even started on how they also assaulted my brand new Warder Second.”

Two plates clattered out of Christopher’s hands onto the countertop, and I shot him a worried glance. Between his restive features and a certain wary stiffness to his frame, he had the air of a man in a jungle doing everything in his power to ignore a hungry tiger stalking along his path.

The domesticity of the morning, apparently, went only so far as the smell of bacon.

“Um, hi?” I piped up in greeting, hoping to defuse the tension vibrating through the room. “Can I do anything?”

With her egg-festooned spatula, Jude waved me to the table. “You can sit, because we’re about ready. And now that you’re up we need to talk about today’s game plan.” Her tone was steady, but her gaze was only slightly less nervous than Christopher’s.

Last night’s events, from the standoff at the bar to the nightmares that had awakened me in the middle of the night, came back to me then. I frowned as I claimed a chair. Some of what I remembered wasn’t at all bad, like talking with Christopher and seeing him almost at ease, as though the darkness was somehow a safe refuge in which to let down his guard. All his defenses were back with the morning light—or at least, most of them. He said nothing as he brought the plates and a pitcher of orange juice from the fridge to the table. But he paused at my side, and when I looked up, he held out the pitcher.

“Thanks,” I murmured, accepting it.

Christopher stared down at me; then, the edge of his mouth curled up, just a bit, and I gave him a little smile of my own in trade. He seemed to need it. Sleep had done him some good, but a shadow of strain still darkened his eyes.

“You do that,” Millicent snapped into her phone, then jammed the device into a vest pocket and stomped over to join us. “Did somebody say something about a game plan?”

“She did,” my aunt said, gesturing at Jude. “I suggest we start with breakfast.”

Out of deference to Aggie, I turned my chair into place as the others sat down. But I couldn’t muster any interest in the food laid out on the table, not when nervous speculation about Millie’s phone conversation crept across my mind. “Breakfast is good, but I’d like to start with who you were talking to.”

Millicent slid me a considering look. She hadn’t yet put on her fedora this morning; without the shadow of its brim obscuring them, her eyes glinted at me like chips of polished flint. “Verlaan,” she said. “Seelie Court seneschal. Terms of the Pact say I have to report transgressors of either Court to their Queens, especially when there’s a changeling involved.”

“Oh,” I said, disturbed by the sound of that.

“You can call up the Seelie Court on a smartphone?” asked Jude, furrowing her brow.

It was a good question, and I latched onto it. “Doesn’t seem any stranger than emailing an Unseelie,” I pointed out, trying not to babble, and then grimacing at my own words. “Scratch that, they both sound bizarre. Do all the Sidhe use human technology, Millie?”

Aggie cleared her throat. “I suggest,” she repeated, a little more loudly than before, “we start with breakfast.”

A childhood spent under her roof had taught me all about that look my aunt was wearing, an expression that belonged on stern but fair schoolteachers, with or without rulers to smack errant young hands. But this morning, it made me think of a fragment of insight not my own, a memory of a dream:
a wise-woman or a shaman
. I blinked. I looked at Aggie as if seeing her for the first time. And I wondered if that had truly been what my mother had seen in my father’s sister—and why it had come into my sleeping brain.

Chastened and just a bit spooked, I turned to pay better attention to Aggie so she could say grace over the food. “Sorry, Aunt Aggie,” I mumbled.

Christopher hunched in his chair as if he expected it to swallow him whole. Then, seeing Aggie bow her head and close her eyes, he relaxed just a bit and followed her example. So did Millicent, though she didn’t so much relax as scowl a little less. Jude and I, Wiccan and agnostic respectively, simply fell patiently silent and waited.

Knowing what I did now about our family history, I was no longer surprised that Aggie hadn’t blinked when I’d taken a different religious path than hers. After the jolt Elanna of the Seelie must have given her, it was no wonder that nothing had shocked her since. I gave Jude a quick, reassuring smile. Then, with a suspicious fullness welling up somewhere in my throat, I watched Aggie pray.

“O Lord,” she said, eyes closed, “we are gathered here this morning with hearts that give different names and faces to the divine Power that watches over us all, but we are united in our desire for the safety and health of our loved ones. Thank you for this meal that has been laid before us, Lord, and let it bring us strength to meet the challenges of this day and days to come. Watch over us and grant us the wisdom to make the choices we must to keep us safe, healthy, and able to honor and cherish that Power that cherishes us. Amen.”

Christopher and Millicent murmured ‘amen’, and half a beat after, Jude and I did the same. Safety, health, and wisdom were concepts I could get behind praying for, even if I had no specified divine listener in mind. I’d always found prayer tantamount to emailing somebody without a To: line, but today, I was all about sending out a spiritual S.O.S. if something friendly out there was paying attention. From the look on Jude’s face, she seemed to be right there with me.

Once we started passing the food around, Millie answered my question as though we’d had no interruption. “Times past, the Sidhe never needed technology—they had magic,” she said with a smirk, spearing a waffle for herself with her fork. “These days, they’ve got their purists, but most of ’em will use a phone or a car right along with us mortals.”

“Or a computer,” I said, thinking of the card the singer called Elessir had given me, and Millicent nodded.

“Or a computer. Just because you’re a mage doesn’t mean you have to be a technophobe.”

The words sounded sensible enough, but they spooked me all over again. Millicent had called
me
a mage. The scary part was that I wasn’t at all sure I could argue with her. “Good,” I proclaimed, determined to sound nonchalant even if I wasn’t. “Because magic and Sidhe and trolls or not, I still have to eat. So I still have to work. And—”

Hell. I did still have to work.

As I jolted and looked up at the kitchen clock, Jude froze in the middle of claiming her share of the scrambled eggs. “We did just ship,” she blurted. “Half the team’ll be taking the day off.”

“Does that half include us?” I worried. “I didn’t ask for a vacation day, did you?”

“No. Crap. And somehow, I don’t think ‘acts of the fey’ are covered in the employee handbook under reasons for a leave of absence.”

“Kendie baby, I don’t think you should go anywhere,” said Aggie.

“Definitely not.” Millicent ate the same way she drank brandy: serving herself up portions that might have daunted a much larger person, yet consuming them with almost delicate care. She pointed her fork sharply at me nevertheless. “It ain’t safe to let you out of this house. Not while the Seelie are on your case and not until we figure out what’s churning up in that blood of yours.”

“No debates here,” I assured both the older women, holding up my hands. “But I don’t want to get fired, you know? And Jude has to work, too.”

Aggie’s eyes were sympathetic, but her expression was resolute. “I am not above telling your boss you have the flu if it’ll get you permission to stay home.”

“I don’t want to lie to him.” Even as I said it, I recalled what Millicent and Aggie had said the night before about the Sidhe never lying. I tried not to think about whether it meant anything about me. You didn’t have to be fey to think lying was wrong, right?

“He probably won’t buy both of us coming down with a case of the post-ship ‘flu’ anyway,” Jude chimed in, making a droll face.

“We’ll think of something,” Aggie replied, and then nodded at both Jude’s plate and mine. “In the meantime, you girls eat your breakfast.”

“Every bit of it, too,” added Millie. “You’re going to need the energy.”

That was not exactly encouraging, but I dug in anyway. I wasn’t ill—but I still felt enough off-kilter, with those odd flares of sensation all over me, that I could buy that many of my inner systems were whacked. Nor did I need an actual answer when I asked the old Warder, “Because my blood’s trying to make me change?” I already knew what she would answer.

And I was right. Mostly. “Yeah, but that’s only part of it,” Millie said. Her white brows crinkled as she looked me up and down. “You’re also going to need nourishment just to keep up your strength, mental and physical both. You got fey blood in you, girlie, that means you got magic in you. The trick is, making it answer to you rather than the other way around.” A crooked smile spread across her face, and for the first time since she’d crossed my path, she looked almost gentle. “Seen it happen to a couple other kids. One of ’em wished herself right back to looking so normal you couldn’t pick her out of a crowd. Other ’un… well, let’s just say, last time I saw him, he had wings.”

Jude and I both blinked, Aggie raised her eyebrows, and even Christopher lifted his attention off his plate to peer at the older Warder. Millicent waved a hand at the lot of us and went on to me, “Don’t worry, honey, he wasn’t one of the Sidhe. You won’t have to worry about throwing out all your shirts.”

“Good,” I croaked. I didn’t want to know what exactly the winged person of Millie’s acquaintance had become.

Nor did she tell me. Instead she eyed Christopher, whose glance she had not missed, and with a soft humph she gave him a more critical once-over than she’d given me. “And I suppose I’ll have to figure out what to do with you. Big strapping boy like you should be able to help me patch up the holes in the Wards, at least. What branch of the line are you out of?”

In the middle of a drink of milk Christopher paused, the strain in his eyes growing more distinct. As he put his glass down and began cutting up more of his waffles his fingers trembled. “Damhnait MacSimidh,” he said roughly. “St. John’s, Newfoundland. Daughter of Michael Hallett. Son of Gregory Hallett.”

The generational listing rang oddly in my ears, but it had a far greater impact on Millicent. Her eyes went wide and her features crinkled up into a look of extreme consternation. “You’re
her
son? Good God, boy, do you realize every Warder between here and Port aux Basques has been on the lookout for you for the past sixteen years?”