Tooth and Nail (35 page)

He didn’t respond. Instead, he walked over to a pile of hand pads in the corner of the room, picked through them, and found a matching pair. He tucked them under his arm, then dropped his jacket on a folding chair. He came to stand in front of me again, slipped the pads onto his hands, and tapped them together with two muffled thumps. Then he looked at my face for a long moment, and held them up.

I hesitated only for a split second before slamming my left glove into his left hand. It should have toppled him, but his feet were boulders, and he didn’t move, didn’t blink. I punched again, this time with my right, and I connected hard. Then my left.

“Slow down a little,” he said. Then, “It’s true I had a choice all those years ago, and I made it. It wasn’t what I wanted. But when you’re a parent, your strongest instinct is to protect your child.”

I bent my elbow and came in hard with a hook, and he stepped out of the way, but I stormed into his space. “Is this your game now?” I snarled through gritted teeth. “Telling me you ran out on me to
protect
me?”

“I did.”

“Well,
Dad
, I can’t wait to hear your bullshit rationalization.”

He didn’t back up, and he didn’t back down, and a grudging part of me gave him credit for at least that.

“I left,” he said, “because he said he knew what you were, and said he’d turn you over to the fae if I didn’t leave my family for good. He said he’d deliberately create an Olde Way threat and force the fae to recruit you to fight him, then he’d win. He said he’d kill you.”

“Who?”

“Gemma, he meant it. He hated me. You were only eight years old. I couldn’t …”

“
Who
?”

“Guy named Riley Clayton.”

A rush of lightheadedness caused me to stagger back. Clayton?
What
?

“He was a man who used to be in love with your mother. He blamed me for stealing her away, but that was crazy. Bethany had mentioned him to me when we first met and she said then that it was nothing serious.”

“No,” I said, and my ears felt cloggy, and my voice sounded like I was underwater.

“Then one day he turned up, out of the blue, and I didn’t even know who he was. I was walking home from the corner store with English muffins for your mother. He approached me and introduced himself as Riley Clayton, the man ready to ruin my daughter’s life if I didn’t listen to what he had to say to me.”

I tried to clear my mind and retain my power of logic. “What did he say?”

“He said he was a half-fae, like you.”

Apparently, I’d gotten something right.

“He said he hated both sides of himself, said humans and fae were both inferior, and as a hybrid, it made him—and you—twice as flawed. I told him that you were only a child, that you thought you were human and that your mother and I had told you nothing. He said he lived in secret also. He asked me why we kept you away from the fae. He said, ‘Is it because of what they might make her do for them?’” Dad met my gaze dead on. “I said yes.”

“Then he said as a hybrid, not only did he have the power to protect the fae, he had the ability to bring them down, and he hadn’t made up his mind about his own destiny yet. But there was one thing he knew for sure he wanted to do: Hurt Bethany for leaving him, hurt me for supposedly stealing her away, and hurt you for merely bring born.”

When I’d played the scene over and over in my head of this reunion with my father, I didn’t expect this. I expected to hear apologies and excuses, sincere or otherwise, and I would sanctimoniously declare him dead to me.

I didn’t expect this. I didn’t expect to begin to feel
for
him, and I didn’t expect to believe his abandoning us was anything other than a careless whim, and I didn’t expect to want and need to hear the rest of the story.

“So he gave me a choice.” Dad’s lips stretched into a thin-lipped, grim smile. “He told me to pick up and leave my family, just go away without explanation and never return. If I did, he said, I’d be securing your safety. He said there hadn’t been a serious threat to the Olde Way in decades, and that the only real threat was him, and if I appeased him with my leaving, he’d refrain from causing any trouble. But if I didn’t leave, he said, my daughter would be as good as dead, because he’d make her—you—his archenemy.”

I walked over to the row of folding chairs and lifted his jacket to sit down. Instead of draping it across the back of a seat, I laid it in my lap. It warmed my legs. Dad sat beside me. “The fact that you’re sitting, and the fact that you haven’t taken my head off,” he said, “makes me hopeful that you believe me.”

“I don’t understand why you didn’t just …” I stopped. What I’d been about to say—it was the same assumption Svein had made about me, and after defending the human race so vigorously, I was mortified that I had been about to ask, quite as a matter of fact, why my father hadn’t just killed Clayton.

“He threatened you,” he said. “I couldn’t go to the police, because why would they believe a man who had no connection whatsoever to my family had threatened my little girl? It would have been my word against his. I couldn’t kill him, and I wanted to. I wanted to. But more than I didn’t want you to not have a daddy, I didn’t want you to have a daddy in prison for the rest of his life.”

He sighed. “Clayton knew too much about you, about the fae, about everything, and I knew he meant every word. And your mother, she …“

He stopped and looked away from me, looked at the two men in the ring who were taking a break with water bottles and conversation about the NFL draft.

“Don’t tell me that part,” I said. “I don’t want you to tell me what it took to leave her. I think I know how it felt to leave her because I know how she felt when you did.”

He nodded, and squeezed his eyes shut and open once. “Then I stayed away, because I didn’t know how to come back. I didn’t think I should, because I didn’t know how long Clayton would be watching. But even if I found out he was gone forever, I wouldn’t have known how to come back to you. For years, I sent money to your mother for the house, and for you.”

“She didn’t tell me that,” I said.

“Her husband left her in the middle of the night because he couldn’t tell her why, and he couldn’t bear to say goodbye. That’s something a person has to deal with in her own way. A marriage is not for a child to understand, so I’m sure she made her choices too.” He shook his head slowly. “I lived without you and Bethany and I managed to do it because with every moment I spent alone, I had the assurance that you were safe, that I’d saved you.”

He looked at me again, and something in me broke apart. It might have been my heart. “Gemma,” he asked quietly, “why did your mother tell you who you are? Why are you working for them? Because now, all this time, I’ve been hurting our family for nothing.”

“If that’s how you feel now,” I said, just as quietly, “I can’t imagine how you’re going to feel when I tell you that Clayton lied. He tried to contact me only months after you left, and tried several times throughout my life to get to me. I didn’t know. Mom protected me, never told me. But I was recruited a few weeks ago to specifically stop Clayton’s plan.”

Dad’s face changed without moving so much as a muscle. A fog fell over him, darkening his eyes, deepening the lines at his temples and between his brows. A blackness wrapped around his shoulders at the revelation that his justification for leaving us, the reason that kept him strong enough to do what he did, was gone and the years behind him were an empty, dry desert.

“I wasn’t going to tell you this,” he said flatly, “but I was there for some things. I went to your high school graduation. It was outdoors, and your hair was long, and when they called your name, damn if you didn’t strut across that stage, like you didn’t care who knew how proud you were of your own accomplishment.”

I listened. I couldn’t bear to hear, but I had to.

“I’ve seen you in the paper once or twice lately with your boyfriend. He seems like a smart guy, but the smartest thing he did, I think, was to find and hang on to you.”

I tried to ignore the stab in my gut as I glanced around the room for Avery, even though he was probably at the airport by now.

“And,” Dad said, “I went to a couple of your fights.”

I wasn’t sure what was on my face, but he added, “I was at the one where you lost in a decision to that girl—I forgot her name, an Italian name. Who was it?”

“Mancini. Geri Mancini.” He’d been there?

“Yeah, she was good,” he said. “She was tough, but you were better, and the crowd agreed very loudly. But you were gracious. You lost like a winner. I said to the guy next to me, ‘That’s my daughter,’ and he said, ‘So why are you sitting way back here?’” He paused. “And now you tell me Clayton’s out there making trouble for the fae and for you, despite our agreement, and now I wish more than anything that I’d been sitting ringside that night, that I could have told you how proud you made me—how proud you make me.”

Watching the hurt take harsh hold of him, the scared, sad, abandoned little girl in me was finally satisfied.

And suddenly, the adult me knew that I would forgive him. Maybe not this second, maybe not this week, but I would forgive him.

I wouldn’t be forgiving him because Clayton wouldn’t want me to. I would forgive him because
I
wanted to.

It seemed I wasn’t aware of the rock that had been sitting on my chest for more than two decades until it rolled off and I could breathe again. Freedom and lightness filled me.

Oh, I was angry. I had a feeling that if Svein handed that gun to me right now, I wouldn’t be so quick to defend humanity’s honor. I believed I still wouldn’t kill Clayton, although right now, I really, really had the motivation.

But the inner rage that defined me, that guided me through every day from the moment I swung my legs out of bed to the moment I slipped back under the blankets had dissolved. I wasn’t familiar with the Gemma it left behind. One thing was clear: The Gemma I was now had a father.

“I’m sorry,” Dad said.

“Are you going to see Mom?” I asked.

“I hadn’t planned on it. I thought I could come here, talk you out of working for the fae, duck your angry shouts and fists, and go home. I had no idea he was still out there doing … doing whatever. I had no idea he reneged on our deal.”

“Listen,” I said. “I took care of him. Keep an eye on the news today. If I succeeded, you’ll hear Clayton’s name. But you have to go see Mom. You have to.”

He twisted his hands in his lap. “What am I going to say to her?” he mumbled. “What is she going to say to me?”

“Tell her what you told me. Tell her the truth,” I said. “Then, well, my advice ends there. What comes after that has nothing to do with me.” I looked down at my feet. “For what it’s worth, I’m in your corner.”

He put an awkward hand on my shoulder, and I let him. I let myself feel close to him again. “It’s worth everything,” he said.

>=<

I spent most of the day in front of Avery’s computer. Usually I wouldn’t spend more than ten minutes there. My polling job had required constant monitoring of the Internet and I couldn’t stand being at a keyboard when I wasn’t being paid.

But being online was marginally better than the only thing I really felt like doing—crying all day because I didn’t know whether my boyfriend was ever coming home.

As it turned out, I had plenty of reading to keep me busy. Greg Mahoney had been efficient, breaking the story late last night on the D.C. Digger blog that Dr. Riley Clayton, local dentist, had created a toothpaste that was potentially dangerous for kids. My Root sources must have supplied him with the sample of Smile Wide, because he now had new, named sources who had tested the toothpaste and discovered some kind of calcium compound plus another ingredient not listed on the tube. They said daily use could eat away at teeth, raising a risk of infection. Riley Clayton refused comment.

The Digger stopped short of recommending action, but he didn’t have to.

Several online news outlets picked up the story, with headlines like, “Could brushing teeth be
bad
for your kids?” All the reporters credited the Digger for breaking the story, and many ran the photo of Clayton from his practice’s Web site. The picture was professionally done but I was certain the photographer hadn’t had to touch up one bit of his flawless face.

Late in the afternoon, I was gratified to see CNN reporting on the headline-making dentist, and confirming that TV-Spree did cancel Clayton’s scheduled appearance, citing their commitment to selling safe, high-quality products.

Luckily for both the Digger and myself, it was otherwise a slow news day, which was why a couple of children’s health advocates and dental experts earned their day in the broadcast sun, speculating how the toothpaste got past the FDA and what toothpaste brands they personally recommended for healthy teeth.

No one charged the dentist with criminal negligence, but several parents whose children had been using Smile Wide from patient goody bags expressed interest in taking legal action. Even still, Riley Clayton refused comment. Though by this time, he had retained a lawyer who, blinking behind thick glasses, said, “Dr. Clayton stands by his integrity in creating Smile Wide.”

I wondered about Clayton’s glamour, and why he didn’t pull off a press conference that would leave viewers reeling at his beauty, but then it hit me the way it must have occurred to him as well: If there was only one power stronger than fae glamour, it was a mother’s protective instinct. There wasn’t one mother out there who would fall under his spell about anything concerning her child’s safety.

So, was I victorious? Yes, indeed. Smile Wide would never be sold, and if it was, it wouldn’t be until after the most careful public scrutiny, and I doubted Clayton would bother trying to slip something under the radar again. I was certain that every last one of his young patients would be finding new dentists. His career was over within twenty-four hours, because of one tip to one blogger. Speaking from unfortunate experience, Johnson McCormack had been right—armed with the smallest piece of unsavory information, the media could break you in one day.