by Karen Lynch
I looked at Dad, who was watching me expectantly. Twenty-three years had passed since that photo was taken, and his face was leaner now with crow’s feet near his eyes and lines around his mouth. When I looked past those things, all I could see was the young man smiling up at me from the album.
“How did I not see it? The first time I talked to Prince Rhys, I felt like I’d met him before, but I thought that was because his face was everywhere.” I shook my head. “What about Bruce, Maurice, and your other friends who knew you back then? None of them saw a resemblance between you and the most famous faerie in the world?”
Dad shrugged. “I doubt they would remember exactly what I looked like back then without seeing a photo. That happens when you age together. As for everyone else, people don’t always see what is in front of them, especially when they aren’t looking for it. Who would think to make a connection between me and the Seelie prince? You didn’t.”
I looked down at the two photos. I knew from personal experience how easy it was not to see something that was right in front of your eyes. I still wondered how I hadn’t realized who Lukas was until Rogin Havas had let it slip.
I pursed my lips as I searched for the right words to phrase what had to be said. “Prince Rhys looks like you, but that doesn’t mean he’s Caleb. I mean…Caleb died. You and Mom saw him, and there was an autopsy and a funeral.”
I flinched internally and saw an answering expression on Dad’s face. He and Mom never liked to talk about that time, but there was no way around it now.
He shifted position and glanced away before meeting my eyes again. “The medical examiner said Caleb died from pulmonary atresia, which is almost always diagnosed soon after the baby is born. Caleb was two months old, and he didn’t have any of the symptoms. He looked like a normal, healthy baby. Your mom…” He swallowed. “She didn’t believe the dead baby she found in the crib was ours. She said a mother knows her own child, and that someone had switched her baby for a dead one.”
Dad’s voice cracked on the last word. Tears pricked my eyes, and I blinked them away.
“The baby looked like Caleb, and the M.E. said there was nothing suspicious about his death. I explained that to your mom, but she was too distraught to believe it. Nothing would convince her Caleb was dead.”
“What did you do?” I asked around the rock lodged in my throat. I had always seen the sadness in Mom’s eyes when Caleb’s name came up, but my parents had never gone into detail about his death, other than the cause.
He cleared his throat. “I thought she would come to accept it after a few days, but she refused to even make the funeral arrangements. And then she started going up to strangers with babies to check that their baby wasn’t Caleb.” Dad paused, his face etched in pain. “It was bad for the first year. After a while, she started to be more like her old self, but I don’t think she was happy again until we found out she was pregnant with you.”
“You guys never told me any of this,” I said hoarsely.
“Your mom didn’t want you to know. It was a very dark time in our lives, and she was ashamed of how she behaved.” His face twisted in agony. “No one believed her when she said the baby wasn’t Caleb – not even me. And all this time, she was right.”
Needing to do something, I laid the album on the coffee table and got up to walk around the room. It hurt too much to think about what my parents had suffered back then, so I focused on their disappearance.
“What happened the night you disappeared, Dad?”
He straightened his shoulders as if he was shaking off the pain. “Your mom wanted to see the prince in person. We called one of our contacts at the Ralston and found out he was doing a photo shoot in the small ballroom on the sixth floor. The odds of getting near him were slim, but we had to try.” Dad stared past me as he remembered the events of that night. “The moment we stepped off the elevator, I knew your mom was right. Prince Rhys is Caleb.”
A new wave of shock rolled through me. “You saw him?”
“Not the prince. The ballroom door was open and a group was leaving. There were two male faeries in front, and as soon as they saw us, they came to intercept us. They knew who we were before we could even show them our IDs. One of them said he knew they should have killed us twenty years ago when they took the boy.
I pressed a hand to my mouth as he continued. “They restrained us and told the prince’s guard to take him to his suite while they dealt with the problem. The next thing I knew, we were in the ballroom and they were calling Rogin Havas to dispose of us. They didn’t want the death of two well-known bounty hunters to draw any attention to Prince Rhys and risk reporters making a connection between him and us. They had no idea Rogin’s sister would intercept the call and save us.”
“You remember seeing her?” I’d told him that Raisa had been the one who gave them the goren to keep them alive. Until now, he had no memory of her part in it.
“Yes. I woke up in her house. She said she would do whatever she could to keep us alive. After that, all my memories are foggy. I can’t tell the real ones from the goren dreams.”
I continued pacing. I couldn’t think about the possibility that my brother was alive or about everything my parents had been through. It was too much for my brain to process all at once. Instead, I focused on the person at the root of it all, the one who had caused my family so much pain.
“What I don’t get is why? Why would Queen Anwyn steal a human baby, convert him, and raise him as her son? Her heir? One thing I know about Fae politics is that they only want the bluest blood in the royal line. I can’t believe any Seelie faerie with an ounce of royal blood would be okay with someone who isn’t even Fae-born being their king someday.”
“They would if they don’t know he isn’t Fae-born.”
“That’s it!” I whipped my head toward my father. “That’s why her guard tried to have you and Mom killed, and why they don’t want you to remember. I thought they were worried you knew about them stealing the ke’tain, but all along it was about Prince Rhys…Caleb…”
My voice trailed off, and a knife twisted in my gut at the fresh pain in Dad’s eyes. I couldn’t imagine what he was going through. His son had been ripped from him and raised as a faerie with no knowledge of his real parents. Even if Prince Rhys somehow learned the truth and wanted to know his family, we could never get back the life that had been stolen from us.
I went back to pacing. “It still doesn’t explain why she would take a human baby and pass him off as her own. What could she gain from that?”
“I don’t know.” Dad stared down at his hands. “But she went through a lot of trouble to do it and to cover it up.”
He was right. Her guards had done a lot more than steal Caleb. They’d switched him with a changeling made to look like my brother, which required a lot of magic. They also would have had to glamour the medical examiner to make sure the autopsy report confirmed the dead baby was Caleb and that he’d died of a heart defect.
After all of that, the guards couldn’t bring a human baby to Faerie. Their magic wasn’t strong enough to do a conversion, which meant Queen Anwyn had secretly come to our realm to perform it herself.
But why Caleb? Of the millions of male babies in the world, why had they chosen my brother? Had they been looking for something specific, or were we the first family they found with a baby boy? We’d probably never know the answer to that, and I feared it would haunt my parents for the rest of their lives.
Helpless anger flared inside me. The Seelie queen had done nothing but bring pain to the people I loved, and she was virtually untouchable. Not that we had evidence of her crime. The prince’s resemblance to Dad could be passed off as coincidence, and we had no proof of his real identity. Once a human became Fae, none of our human DNA remained. It was one of the things I’d been struggling with this past week.
There was the body Mom and Dad had buried, but it would take a lot more than a crazy story about changelings to get the authorities to exh
ume it. And something like that would not go unnoticed. My family would be dead before the ink was dry on the order.
A soft whistle drew my attention to Finch, who stood at the end of the hallway. His eyes were wide and worried as he signed, Is Dad okay?
I followed his gaze to where Dad sat with his head in his hands, and then I signed back, Yes. He’s just figuring out something.
Okay. He turned and disappeared again.
Dad moved his head from side to side. “It’s my fault. I should have kept him safe.”
“How can you say that?” I went to sit beside him. “No human is a match for the Seelie royal guard. You know that better than anyone.”
“You don’t understand. I had the apartment warded, but only against the kinds of faeries we hunted. I never thought to protect us from Court faeries. If I had, they wouldn’t have gotten in and taken Caleb.”
“You can’t blame yourself for that. No one would have thought to ward against the royal guard.” I laid my head against his shoulder, lost as to how to comfort the strongest man I’d ever known. My father was a protector, and he’d carry this guilt on his shoulders forever. It was one more reason for me to despise the Seelie queen.
Neither of us spoke for a long moment, and it was Dad who broke the silence. “We need to make a plan.”
“A plan for what?” I straightened. Surely, he wasn’t going to suggest we tell Prince Rhys who he really was. As much as I wanted my parents to be happy, I was terrified of what the queen would do to them.
“To protect our family. If Queen Anwyn learns the prince has been here and met me, she’s not going to take it well. And if her guards find out I have my memories back, they –”
“No.” Fear sent me to my feet. “We can’t tell anyone about this. The Seelie guard will come after you and Mom, and I can’t lose you again. I can’t.”
“Jesse.” Dad stood and put his hands on my trembling shoulders. “I’m not talking about going public with this. But if the prince keeps showing interest in us, the queen will take notice, and her guard will come snooping around. We need to prepare for that.”
“How?”
He pressed his lips together, and his grip on my shoulders tightened a fraction. “The first thing we have to do is tell Lukas.”
“No.” I shook my head so hard it almost gave me whiplash.
Dad stopped me when I would have pulled away from him. “Listen to me. I know you’re still angry at him, but he cares about you. He’ll protect you.”
I had no idea what I felt for Lukas anymore. At first, I’d been furious at him because he’d made me Fae without giving me a choice, even though there had been no way I could have made that decision. Then I’d hated myself for being unfair to the person who had saved my life. I’d spent the last week alternating between hoping he would come assure me everything would be okay and not wanting to see him. Not that he had tried to see me – or talk to me. The others had been taking turns calling to check on me, but I hadn’t heard a word from him since the day he brought me home.
There was one thing I did know. If we told him about Caleb and what Queen Anwyn had done, he wouldn’t let me stay here. He’d most likely send me to Unseelie to keep me safe, and it could be months or years before I saw my family again. After everything I’d gone through to get them back, I wasn’t letting anyone separate us.
I shared my fears with Dad and waited for several long minutes while he paced the room deep in thought. His face was still pale, but he looked more like himself as he worked out things in his head.
He stopped walking midstride and turned to me. “We’ll tell people the doctor said our memories are gone for good. That usually only happens with long-term goren addiction, but we were given high doses and put into comas, so it will be believable. If the guard is watching, they’ll get wind of it.”
“What about Mom? What if she gets her memory back and tells someone?”
Dad nodded. “I’ll talk to her. She’ll be okay.”
I didn’t ask what he would say to her. If he said he would take care of it, he would. My parents’ marriage was built on a deep foundation of trust and mutual understanding. They were best friends and partners and knew each other better than anyone else ever could. Whatever Dad told her, she would trust him and follow his example without question.
“That takes care of Mom. How do we protect you if the queen’s guard comes around?”
A gleam entered his eyes. “The guard took me by surprise last time, but now I know what I’m up against. I’ll make some preparations and call in favors from a few friends. Don’t worry about me.”
The pressure on my chest eased. “Are you going to tell Maurice the truth?”
“Yes. I’ll ask him to come by this evening.”
Maurice normally didn’t stay in town this long, and I’d assumed he’d be off on another big job now that the ke’tain had been found. He felt guilty that he hadn’t been there for us when Mom and Dad were missing, and he wanted to make up for that by sticking around for another month or so. I’d never been so happy to know he was next door.
“Now what do we do about you?” Dad asked, startling me from my thoughts.
“What about me?”
“It’s you Prince Rhys came to see. Even if the queen believes my memories are gone for good, she’s not going to allow you two to continue seeing each other.” Dad paused. “Especially if she thinks his interest in you is more than platonic.”
My stomach rolled at the mere suggestion that Prince Rhys might have any romantic interest in me. He was raised a Faerie, but he was still my brother. The fact that I’d never been attracted to him didn’t ease the ick factor one bit.
It made much more sense now why Queen Anwyn had sent her guards to warn me away from him. It had nothing to do with me being a lowly bounty hunter and everything to do with me being his sister.
“I doubt we’ll be seeing that much of him anymore. You heard what he said when he was here. He’s Seelie and I’m Unseelie, so it wouldn’t be right for him to visit me.” I let out a breath. “And I don’t think the queen will come after me now that I’m Unseelie. She knows I’m friends with Lukas, and after the whole ke’tain thing, he would suspect her if anything happened to me.”
“That’s true.” Dad smiled, but there was no mistaking the flicker of sadness in his eyes. His focus was on keeping our family safe, but at the root of all of this was the child who had been stolen from him. What turmoil he must be feeling. To protect the rest of his family, he had to pretend he didn’t know his son was alive and well.
He cleared his throat. “I’m going to the office to make a few calls.”
“I’ll make us some coffee,” I said a little too cheerfully. “That is if you haven’t used up my stash.”
“I wouldn’t dare.” He chuckled, and the sound warmed me.
As soon as he left the room, the weight of everything I’d learned pressed down on me again. I moved on autopilot as I put the coffee on and took down two large mugs. The last week I’d wallowed in my misery, thinking about what I’d lost. That was nothing compared to what my parents had suffered and the loss to our family.
Caleb is alive. I wondered how many times I’d have to repeat those three words before they sank in. I thought back on all the years of visiting his grave with my parents, of looking at that tiny, white headstone and imagining what my life would have been like if my brother had lived. Not in a hundred years could I have envisioned a scenario where he was stolen by faeries and raised as the crown prince of Seelie. Or that if I breathed a word of it to anyone, the monster he called a mother would have my entire family killed.
The coffee finished brewing, and I inhaled the rich aroma as I poured it into our mugs. At least some things didn’t change. I made my father’s just how he liked it and then my own. I had been so depressed for the last week I couldn’t even think about food, and the smell of the coffee made me realize how much I’d missed it.
I raised the cup to my mouth and close
d my eyes to savor the first sip.
And then I sprayed coffee across the kitchen.
I set the mug on the counter and ran to the sink, ducking my head under the faucet to rinse the awful taste from my mouth. It was bitter and ashy and made me think this must be what burnt dirt tasted like. No matter how much water I gargled, I couldn’t get rid of it.
Raising my head, I wiped my mouth with my sleeve and stared at the coffee left in the pot. Someone was pranking me. They’d switched out my coffee for this horrid stuff and…
Realization hit me like a blast of cold air, and I let out a cry that would have put a banshee to shame. Dad came running into the kitchen, wild-eyed like he expected to find the entire Seelie guard attacking me.
“What’s wrong?” he asked a little breathlessly.
“I hate coffee,” I wailed.
He stared at me in confusion until understanding dawned on his face. “I’m sorry, honey. It was bound to happen.”
I bent my head so he couldn’t see the tears burning my eyes.
“Jesse,” Dad said at the same time the doorbell rang. I grabbed some paper towels and cleaned up my mess while he went to see who else was paying us a visit. The way this day was going, it was probably Queen Anwyn.
I didn’t look to see who it was, but I could hear the murmur of male voices. Seconds later, footsteps approached, and I looked up at Faolin’s scowling face. I would have preferred the Seelie queen.
“Are you crying?” he asked brusquely.
I tossed the wet paper towels in the trash. “I’m just that happy to see you.”
He scoffed, but I caught a glimmer of amusement in his eyes, which only annoyed me more. His sharp gaze moved past me to the coffee machine and the two mugs on the counter. He quickly put two and two together, and in typical Faolin fashion, he said, “You’re crying because you can no longer drink that stuff?”
