Mom stiffened and shook her head. “Samuel isn’t your sister’s father. He can have you, but he has no right to take her from me.”
“What?!” I couldn’t believe it, yet even as the word came out of my mouth, I realized that it was possible. If I was right about the age I’d been when the affair happened, then the timing was right for Akasha’s conception. No wonder Dad had been angry if he found out Mom was carrying another man’s baby.
I struggled to get ahold of myself. “You still can’t drag her around in hiding with you. It’s got to be awful for her. She can’t even go to school.”
Mom shook her head again and grabbed Akasha, who had been standing there staring in shock. “I’m sorry, Rosamunde,” she said, her sad expression hardening into a cold look of determination. “I know what’s best for my daughter.”
And then, before I could stop her, she snatched the broom away from me and flew off again.
I collapsed on the ground with my head in my hands and cried. I’d had just one chance to get Mom to give up Akasha, and I’d blown it. What’s more, since I’d let her escape, she was sure to disappear from the county this time, with no hope of me tracking her down a second time.
How could I face my friends again after what I’d just done? For all of his talk about giving me a cover story as a double agent, I doubted that Glen would be able to understand why I’d just let her go. I knew it was the wrong thing to do and she would no doubt try to do something even more dangerous next time, but I couldn’t be responsible for her capture. But I had no idea how I was going to explain that to anyone else.
Finally, I stopped crying and took several deep breaths to calm myself. There was nothing to do but give myself up and tell them what happened. Then my fate would be in the hands of the Seelie Court.
Heather and Ashleigh were both standing outside the post office when I got there, while Glen was off with the faeriekin guards, escorting the Unseelie into several official vehicles. Heather looked up in surprise and waved at me. “Hey! Did you see which way your mom went?”
I landed beside them and shook my head. “She escaped me,” I said. I looked up at the sky. “I don’t know where she went, so we have to be careful. She may come after us again.”
Heather shook her head. “Everyone else is going to be locked up, and her plans are ruined. What can she do now? I bet she’s just going to run off and hide again.” She looked behind me and frowned. “What about your sister? You didn’t get her, either?”
I looked down at the ground sadly. “She went with Mom. I talked to them, and then I let them go.”
Ashleigh reached out to brush my arm. “I’m so sorry, Rosa. That was the whole reason why we did this thing.”
“Yeah.” I kicked up some snow with the toe of my boot. “I have no idea how to track her down. They’ll be long gone by the time we get back to Madrone.”
Ashleigh sighed. “Glen and his grandfather won’t be happy to hear that. He’s already upset that the dragon scale wasn’t here, and we all came so close to getting hurt.” She looked over at the SUV with the smashed back window. “Did your mom take the keys to the car, too?”
“Oh, yeah—sorry.” I looked way from the broken glass. “I had to get in a different way. Do we need to call someone?”
Heather held up the keys to the car she’d driven to follow us. “I can drive you guys back. Someone from the Court will worry about the other car later, and get your stuff back. For now, let’s go back to the castle and get warm.”
I let out a sigh of relief. “That sounds like a great idea.”
Witch Gate
Fae of Calaveras #3
In memory of Grace Derossi
Contents
Prologue
1. Rosa's Confession
2. Rosmerta's Next Move
3. Akasha's True Colors
4. Court Arraignment
5. Hard Choices
6. Visit the Guardian
7. I'll Go It Alone
8. Growing Pains
9. Keep Silent
10. Making the Cloak
11. The Traitors' Trial
12. Open the Gate
13. Run Away
14. Is This a Nightmare?
15. To Catch a Crow
16. The Other Faerie Queen
17. Lost in the Void
18. Sisters
19. Loyalty
20. Jail Break
21. Fleeing the Castle
22. Shadows of the Past
23. After the Attack
24. Investigate the Tear
25. Forbidden Fruit
26. Find Daddy
27. Face the Guardian
28. Meet Morrigan
29. Scattered
30. Akasha Surrenders
31. Sneaking Out
32. Argue with Morrigan
33. Santa Cruz
34. The Gate
35. Akasha Steps Up
36. The Verdict
Epilogue
Prologue
Rosmerta
After our attempt to open a gate to the Otherworld had been busted by the Seelie Court guards, those of us in the Unseelie who hadn’t been arrested managed to regroup. Afraid to meet anywhere that we’d been before, we went to Tom and Frank’s house, the owners of the downtown coffee shop. They’d given a hiding place to my daughter Akasha and I before the ritual, and now that our plans had fallen apart, the remaining co-conspirators met there under the cover of darkness.
I’d finally managed to calm myself after my encounter with my older daughter, Rosamunde. Although she let me go in the end, I had been shaking with rage after our fight. It took a long talk with my friend Angelica to get over my anger and disappointment about just how badly things had gone, and how little compassion Rosamunde had for my plight. I’d been a fool to think that I could get through to her when she was so deeply involved with the Seelie Court.
We were all upset about those who had been arrested—Sir Allen, our only faeriekin supporter; Marzell and his mother, Esther; the dryads who had set up the spell that blocked magical interference; and the satyrs who had prepared the ritual site for us to open the gate. We hoped that they wouldn’t turn the rest of us in under pressure to make a deal with the Court, and we feared that other evidence would turn up to link us to the incident. The Seelie would be out for blood now that they knew what we had tried to do.
Mary, who had been watching the ritual and managed to get away without being seen by Glen or his avenging army of faeriekin, explained the whole situation from her perspective. Since I’d been there, only the last thing she said stood out to me. “After the others were arrested, he kept questioning them about how they knew what to do and where they were hiding the material. ‘The scale,’ he said over and over. ‘Do you have the scale?’ I have no idea what he was talking about.”
I frowned. “Could we have overlooked some component that we needed to make the gate work properly? What could a scale do?”
Angelica shrugged. “Measure something, I guess. Sorcery uses precise measurements a lot of the time. Just the right amount of something or the whole spell can go wrong.”
Mary’s daughter Elizabeth stood up and cleared her throat. “I think they mean a dragon scale, from the guardian.”
I turned to stare at her. Elizabeth had shown up earlier that day, begging for sanctuary, after she’d also somehow escaped from the ritual bust. I wanted to let her get arrested—after all, we’d kept her from being involved in anything illegal for just that purpose, and she would get a slap on the wrist at best—but my promise to Mary had forced me to take her in. Now she could prove her value if she’d gained more information from Rosamunde and her friends than she’d originally told us.
“Where did you hear about the guardian dragon?” I demanded. Even those who had attempted to cross the Veil without the Seelie’s permission didn’t always encounter the guardian or know about her presence. “Why would her scale be important?”
Elizabeth shr
ugged. “Well, I just thought that since the guardian is kind of in between both worlds, and she keeps an eye on people going through the Veil, one of her scales might have some kind of powers.”
I smiled warmly at the girl. “Why, that’s a brilliant idea. Yes, a creature of both worlds would be able to serve as a bridge, just like someone with Fae and human blood. But how would you get your hands on one of her scales? She’s very fierce.”
“Well, I guess she must be missing one, if they’re so keen on finding it again,” she said smugly.
I saw her satisfied grin and laughed aloud. She was boasting about her own accomplishment. “You don’t have to tell us how you got it,” I said, sidling over next to her and putting my arm around her shoulders. “But, my clever girl, you must tell us where it is. Otherwise we may have to flee the state or even the country.”
Elizabeth glanced at Mary, who was looking ready to explode in anger at her daughter’s reckless behavior. “Well, if I can’t go back to the house, then my mom will have to pick it up. I—I hid it under my bed,” she stammered, looking down at her feet.
I gave her a big squeeze and nodded at Mary. “Wonderful! We may still have hope of opening a gate after all—and then we’ll rescue those who got caught today.” I bent down to whisper in the pookha girl’s ear. “I only wish you’d said something sooner, dear. You could have saved all of us a great deal of trouble.”
She stiffened under my touch. “Yeah, well, you didn’t want me getting directly involved, and you thought I couldn’t handle dangerous stuff like that anyway, remember? If you’d asked me what I could do, I might’ve told you.” She looked up at me. “One thing you gotta promise me, though. If you can use this thing to open the gate, and we get to take over like we want, then you have to punish Rosa for what she’s done. She’s hurt too many people with her games.”
I smiled. “Of course.” My smile faded and I shook my head sadly. “She deserves to learn a lesson for what she’s done.”
1
Rosa's Confession
Rosamunde
I used to have the perfect family. Then witchcraft made everything fall apart.
Just earlier that day, I’d confronted my mother at last. When she ran away from the law of the faeriekin after I turned her in for performing illegal magic, she took my little sister, Akasha. Since then, everything I’d done had been trying to get Akasha back. I’d lied, stolen, traded Court secrets, and even let Mom kidnap my best friend, Ashleigh, and almost open a gate through the Veil to the Otherworld. I risked every relationship I had and my own personal safety. That all culminated in today, when I finally had the chance to stop Mom once and for all.
Well, things didn’t exactly go according to plan. And now I had to explain why I’d let things go so wrong to the people who had helped me, the ones on my side: my friends. I didn’t know if they’d still be my friends once they knew the truth.
I’d spent the day running through the snow and flying in freezing winds, so I needed to warm up. Curled up in a huge overstuffed armchair in Ashleigh’s rooms at Doe’s Rest Castle, with a fuzzy blanket and a mug of hot chocolate, I felt like I was finally starting to thaw out. In that comfy warmth, the stress of the long day was melting off of me, and I wanted nothing more than to close my eyes and drift off to sleep.
Ashleigh, Glen, and Heather were all there, waiting patiently for me to be ready. I looked around the semi-circle we formed in front of the fireplace to see where everyone was sitting, because I was secretly curious about where their complicated relationship stood today. Ashleigh and Glen had been betrothed for years because of Fae politics, while Glen had tried to get Ashleigh to fall in love with him. She considered him a close friend, but never returned his affections. Recently, Ashleigh confessed to me that she thought Glen was finally giving up on her because he was attracted to Heather—which added all kinds of problems, because Heather was a human, but her parents were vampires, and they planned to turn her when she became eighteen, the legal age of consent. And if there was anyone who didn’t get along more than the Seelie and the Unseelie, who were really just rival political factions, it was Fae and vampires.
But my three friends all sat in their own chairs, each an equal distance apart from the rest, and no one was touching or looking at anyone but me. So Glen wasn’t pretending to be attached to Ashleigh, but he also wasn’t showing any interest in Heather. I didn’t know if Glen and Heather were already having a relationship in secret, or if they were still in denial about their feelings, and I didn’t think I’d get many details from Ashleigh. She was loyal to both of them and didn’t want to betray their trust. What a mess.
But I couldn’t stall any longer. I took a deep breath and looked down at the swirls of pale brown chocolate liquid in my mug, and prepared to explain what I didn’t fully understand myself.
“I let my mother go.”
No one made a sound, and I didn’t dare look up to see their faces, so I rushed on to finish before I lost my nerve again.
“She told me that the reason she used the spells was to keep my dad from leaving her after she had an affair. I was trying to force her to tell me where my sister was, but then she said that Dad has no right to take Akasha from her because he’s not her real father, and I—I let her go. I couldn’t believe it, but at the same time, I remembered when it happened. She’d buried all of our memories, but mine came back when she said it.”
I felt numb as I talked, as if I were watching myself speak from somewhere outside my body, or telling the story of someone else’s tragedy. The impact of my words wasn’t penetrating my heart. I didn’t try to question that, because it just made it easier to keep going.
“She told me that I was just like her, because I—I cheated on Kai, too. That’s why I broke up with him. With Zil, even though I knew she was working for the Unseelie. So I thought, what if Kai and I had been married when it happened, and we had a child? And then I finally understood why she did it. It was wrong, but she felt like she didn’t have a choice. Dad was going to leave her and take me with him, and she would have lost everything. I didn’t think that the Court should punish her, because she already feels guilty for it every day of her life. So I let her go.” I hung my head. “So basically every choice that I made was really bad, and I screwed it all up.”
I’d expected them to yell at me, or at least to give me some kind of lecture about how I’d thrown away months of work to let a dangerous criminal go free, but when I finished telling everything that had happened, Ashleigh touched my arm and smiled warmly.
“We’re not surprised, Rosa,” she said in her soft, gentle voice, and melted away a piece of icy fear that had lodged in my heart when I thought about how my friends would react.
I blinked rapidly, trying to hold back tears, and stared at her. “Really? Because I promised everyone that I’d stop her for good this time—”
She rubbed my arm under the blanket. “I was afraid that it was too much to ask you to turn in your own mother, and I guess I was right. You’re always going to have a soft spot for her because she raised you. She was a huge part of your life for a long time and you can’t just switch off your feelings for her, no matter how much you want to.” Ashleigh glanced at the others. “Dealing with my own mom is simple by comparison, because she’s never given me a reason to like her.”
I stared at her, shocked that she’d used the word “simple” to describe her own mother-daughter relationship. All faeriekin had a Fae relative somewhere in their family history, but most of them were like Glen, who came from old bloodlines of mixed Fae-human heritage. Ashleigh’s mom was the Duchess Auriana, a terrifying Fae noblewoman. Ashleigh’s human father raised her alone, and her mother only showed up to tell Ashleigh what to do with her life or show disapproval. I couldn’t imagine having that kind of pressure.
But there were more important things to worry about right now. I looked over at Glen. “I know you tried to cover for me with the Faerie Court by telling them that I was an undercover spy
for you in the Unseelie,” I said. “Am I going to get in trouble now because I let my mom go?”
Glen coughed and looked over at Ashleigh, who sat back and hid her face. “I don’t think it’s your fault. It sounds more like your mother used her typical manipulation tricks on you so you would let her go.”
“Hey!” I put down my mug on the table next to me. “There’s no way she had a spell on me.”
He shifted in his chair uncomfortably. “I’m not saying it was a spell. Rosmerta never just used magic to get her aims. She used emotional and psychological blackmail, too. I think she was trying to make you feel guilty so you wouldn’t turn her in.”
I shook my head in disbelief. Mom said harsh things sometimes, but that didn’t mean she was psychologically manipulating me. “You just don’t know her like I do,” I insisted. “You don’t know what our family is like. And I mean, don’t all families do that? You know stuff about each other and you can use it to hurt them when you’re angry or desperate, but that doesn’t mean you’re plotting to.”
I’d hurt my friends before without really meaning to. And surely they were all hurting each other with their own messed up love triangle. None of them had planned on being in that situation, but it happened, and sooner or later there was going to be fallout from it. I was afraid that my whole group of friends, the only support system I had since my family fell apart, would be wrecked by their heartbreak when whatever was happening between Heather and Glen finally came to a head.
Fae of Calaveras Trilogy Box Set Page 51
