Fae of Calaveras Trilogy Box Set

by Kristen S. Walker

  Akasha looked up at me with wide eyes. “What did you do?”

  I let out a heavy sigh. “I made a mistake and broke my promise to him. I wasn’t thinking at the time, and I pretended like I could keep it a secret—” I saw her look of puzzlement, so I gave her a squeeze and kissed her on the forehead. “The truth is that I fell in love with another man, and he’s your real father.”

  She jerked out of my arms and scooted away from me across the bed. “What?”

  For the second time that day, I saw eyes staring back at me full of confusion and betrayal. Rosa and Akasha had both gotten my brown eyes. I hung my head in shame. “I’m so sorry, sweetie. I always meant to tell you when you got older, but I never knew when the right time was.”

  “You’re telling me that Dad isn’t my dad?” She wrapped her arms around herself, and her whole body was shaking. “I’ve been missing him so much. Rosa, too. So he’s Rosa’s dad but not mine? Does he remember that now? Oh, no—does he hate me? Is that why he let you take me?”

  I could see her whole world crumbling in her deep brown eyes. Her image of herself had always been confident: the smart one, head of her class, teacher’s pet. She had trouble making friends her own age, but adults had always loved her quiet, polite nature. Now I was ripping away one of the most important relationships in her life. I could only imagine what she was going through.

  I tried to reach out to her, but she pulled away and stood up.

  “I hate you!” Now her eyes flared with anger, my own glare turned back on me. “If the only way that you could make me have a family that loved me was to lie and use magic to hide who I really was, then you never should have had me in the first place! Now I’ve got a fake dad who doesn’t want me anymore, a real dad I’ve never met, who probably doesn’t even know about me, and a liar for a mom! Thanks for nothing.”

  She stomped out of the room and slammed the door behind her, leaving me alone with my tears.

  3

  Akasha's True Colors

  Akasha

  I didn’t have anywhere else to hide in the strange house—Mom and I were sharing a bedroom again—so I locked myself in the hall bathroom and curled up on the closed lid of the toilet. It had one of those weird fuzzy covers on top, which didn’t really make it any softer, but I didn’t care just then. What was more important was having the toilet paper next to me so I could blow my nose from time to time. I was crying so hard that it felt like my brain was turning to mush and clogging up my sinuses.

  I couldn’t even begin to think about what Mom had just told me. If I wasn’t Dad’s daughter, then I didn’t even know who I was. And what was he to me? My sister’s father? Half-sister, I realized with a start. Rosa and I were half-sisters. Oh, man, my whole family was a wreck.

  Every family had their own secrets, but I’d never dreamed this could be possible. Dad—Samuel, I corrected myself—and I had so much in common. He was the one who taught me how to play chess, who helped me with my math homework, who helped me win the sixth grade science fair last year with a biology experiment on fruit flies. We were a team, the normal humans who used our brains, against Mom and Rosa who were all into that woo-woo magic stuff. There was no way that I wasn’t his daughter, no matter what Mom said. Unless she’d given me a paternity test, she couldn’t know for sure.

  And yet there was this nagging feeling of doubt gnawing away at my stomach. Rosa and I both looked like our mom—short and pale, with dark, curly hair and brown eyes. Dad was tall, with straight sandy blond hair and blue-gray eyes, and he tanned when he spent time outside. Rosa had his big nose, but I couldn’t think of any features that I shared with him in looks. That had never bothered me before, except for being so short for my age. Now I wished that I could think of something that proved my genetic link to him.

  There were other clues that something was wrong—the spell on us. The way that Mom had always tried to keep us from getting too close to Dad’s family. And now that our family was split up, I knew Rosa was trying really hard to get to me, but nobody had mentioned Dad doing anything to find me. Sir Allen, the faeriekin knight who spied on the Court for the Unseelie, said Dad was filing for divorce. Did he remember the truth now, and just didn’t care about getting me back? Could he push aside almost thirteen years of raising me just because I might not be his biological daughter?

  I stood up, splashed cold water on my face from the sink to calm myself down, and examined my puffy face in the mirror. A younger version of my mom’s face stared back at me. Nobody could ever guess who my father was just by looking at me.

  Would I know who my real dad was if I ever met him? Most people lived in Madrone their whole lives, so odds were that he was still in town—Mom never traveled, so she would have met him locally. Could there be some kind of connection between us, a subconscious feeling of belonging together even before we knew the truth?

  I thought about all of the men who Mom knew. It couldn’t be any of my teachers, because Mom wasn’t any friendlier with any particular one of them in the usual parent-teacher meetings. I briefly thought about the fact that we were staying with Tom and Frank now, but quickly discarded that idea. They’d been committed to each other since the seventies and they were completely gay. Her friends were other moms, and I couldn’t see her cheating with one of their husbands, either. Memory-altering spells or not, I didn’t think her friendship could survive after that.

  Most of the other people who my mom knew were magikin, working with the Unseelie. And magikin could have relationships with humans, but they couldn’t have children together. So that left me drawing a complete blank. It had to be someone I didn’t know at all, someone who had moved out of town, or from her past before she moved to Madrone. An old school sweetheart or something.

  I was grossing myself out just trying to think about who my mother could have had sex with. But something told me that knowing the truth was important. If I was going to shake up my whole belief system about the world and who I was, I needed to know all of it. I had to go back to her and demand the full story.

  I washed my face a final time, took a deep breath, and unlocked the bathroom door.

  I marched into the bedroom and found Mom stretched out on the bed. She looked like she’d been crying, too. But when I came in, she sat up straight, wiped her face, and looked at me hopefully.

  “I need to hear the whole story,” I said, folding my arms and planting my feet. “Who was the guy? Why do you think that he’s my real father and not Dad? I’m not ready to forgive you yet, but if you stop keeping secrets and tell me everything for real this time, that will help.”

  Mom patted the bed next to her, and I sat down reluctantly, but I wouldn’t let her hug me this time. “I promise to answer all of your questions, sweetie. You’re right that I’ve been lying for too long. You’re very smart, and I should have realized that you were able to understand this years ago.”

  I shook my head. “I didn’t say that I could understand this. What you did was wrong and we’re both paying for it now. But it’s my life, and I have a right to know the truth. Tell me all of it and maybe I’ll accept your apology.”

  She bit her bottom lip, a gesture that made her look a lot like Rosa, and looked down at her hands. “You know him,” she said softly, confirming my worst fears. “I promise that I haven’t been involved with him in a long time. He remembers the affair but he’s always respected my choice to stay with Samuel, so he only works with me as a friend. And I never told him that you’re his daughter. I—I don’t know if he ever suspected, because of the timing, but he’s never asked me about it.”

  Each fact she revealed felt like another shard of glass driving into my heart. So he was in my life, but he’d never even been curious enough to ask if I was his. But I forced myself to listen without reacting dramatically again.

  “What’s his name?” I said steadily. “Do I look like him at all?”

  She glanced up at me with a strange expression, as if she were looking through me. “Well,
no, not right now. I actually had to cast another spell when you were born—one that hid what you really looked like, so no one would figure out the truth. I need your help to take it off again.”

  My hands flew up to feel my face. “What do you mean? What do I really look like?” Everything about my face felt real. How could it be different without me even knowing about it? It sounded so weird.

  “Well—” Mom took a deep breath. “I’m not sure. But you look very human right now, dear. And your father is Sir Allen.”

  This time I froze instead of jumping off the bed. It was just too weird to even imagine. I’d slipped into some kind of alternate reality where up was down and I had a different father, or my mother was playing a really mean joke on me.

  Mom put her hand gently on my arm. “Did you hear me, Akasha? I said—”

  “No!” I interrupted her, pulling back from her touch. “You must have gotten it wrong. Sir Allen is a faeriekin and a traitor. I have to be human, I can feel it! I hate magic!”

  She let out a sigh. “I’ve been trying to convince you for years that magic is nothing to be afraid of. It could make your life so much easier if you just accepted it, especially if we unlock your powers—”

  I shook my head vehemently. “I don’t have any powers. I never wanted to be a witch like you and Rosa. I’m going to be a doctor, like Dad.”

  “Are you sure?” Mom stood up and picked up a rose off the side table. “I can show you.”

  I vaguely remembered her carrying the red rose into the bedroom with us earlier, but I hadn’t questioned it at the time. Now I stared at it like a venomous snake, as if it would strike out at me and kill the human side, revealing my true nature. “What are you going to do?”

  She bent and pulled three candles out of her trunk: red, yellow, and white. “Yellow for your mind,” she said, holding up that one. “Red for your heart, and white for your soul.” She placed them in candle holders already arranged on the shelves and lit them without matches, just by looking at them.

  I shuddered at the smallest use of magic. I didn’t even like to touch magitek. Something about it always made me feel funny, like my stomach was turning inside out. Could that be the pull of my true nature wanting to come out? Was everything that I knew really so wrong?

  Mom turned back to me and held out the rose. “If I’m wrong about who you are, this won’t do anything, and either way it won’t hurt, I promise. Think of it as a scientific experiment. Even if you don’t like the truth, isn’t it better to know?”

  That was the one thing that could have changed my mind. Looking at it logically, of course it was better to run the experiment and find out the truth. Once I knew for sure, then I’d figure out how to handle the implications. I took the rose from her, careful not to touch the thorns, and took a deep breath. “What do I do?”

  “Concentrate on the rose,” she said. Her voice shifted into an even chant, like a meditation tape. “Examine every aspect: the colors you see, the way it feels in your hand, the scent of its perfume. No matter what name you call it, no matter where it came from, this rose will always be the same at the heart. You cannot change it.”

  I turned the flower over in my hands and tried to do as she said. The line from Shakespeare came to mind, “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” But in my head, the quote from Gertrude Stein immediately countered with, “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” How could you separate the flower from its name? I wouldn’t feel the same if my name wasn’t Akasha anymore. And my father’s name made a huge difference, too, whether it was Samuel or Allen. And Rose was my mother’s name, short for Rosmerta, just like Rosamunde became Rosa . . . They were both named for the flower, and I wasn’t. What did my name mean? Empty space.

  I was lost in thought, contemplating the flower in my hands, so I didn’t really hear what she said after that. But then she called me back by putting a silver knife in my hand. I blinked and looked up at her, afraid of the sharp edge. “What do I do with this?”

  She smiled and shook her head. “Not what you think. Just use it to cut a piece of your hair, then wrap that around the stem.”

  The nice thing about having a crazy amount of curly hair is that I wouldn’t miss a little of it. I did as she said. Mom handed me a red string to tie it all into place.

  “Now start pulling off the petals one at a time, working from the outside in, and repeat after me.”

  I began plucking petals, saying each line after Mom:

  Reveal myself

  Show myself

  My glamour will fall

  Like these petals now fall

  My own true self

  Will be revealed

  For all to see

  Naked and raw

  So mote it be.

  I shuddered at the naked line—it sounded like that classic nightmare of walking into school without any clothes on, and only realizing my mistake after the other students started laughing at me. I’d had that dream a few times. But I did exactly as she said, and when the rose was naked, she opened the window for me to scatter all of the petals outside. The cold wind blew them out of my hands.

  When she closed the window again, I shivered, but frowned. “I don’t really feel any different.”

  She pulled out the little travel cauldron from her chest. “Now you burn the rose. And I want you to start the fire this time.”

  The cauldron had three cast iron feet on the bottom, and she set it on top of a clay tile to keep it from scorching the end table underneath. I dropped what was left of the rose inside and looked up at her. “I don’t know how to light it.”

  Mom stood facing me. She placed her left hand on her chest, on the left side, and then put her right hand over my heart. It started beating faster, but still, I didn’t feel any different from my normal self.

  “Reach deep inside you, Akasha,” she whispered. “Find the place of calm at your core. It might be the feeling that you get when you’re wrapped up in a good book, or right before you fall asleep, but in some way, you’ve felt it before. It’s always been with you, waiting for you to call on it. It’s who you truly are.”

  I tried to concentrate like she said, and I did feel a weird sense of calm settling over me. Usually even thinking about magic would make me nervous, but this was more like holding onto a childhood memory or something from a long time ago that I’d almost forgotten. A tingling feeling started in the center of my chest and spread outward, running down to the tips of my fingers and out the top of my head.

  Mom, gazing into my eyes, saw the change and began to smile. “Now look at the flower in the cauldron and just picture it aflame.”

  I was afraid that it would be too hard, or that it would feel weird to do magic, but when I tried to picture it as she said, a warm feeling flowed through me—and then the flower was burning almost before I even realized what had happened.

  I watched it burn down to ashes, then looked up at my mother. “What now?”

  Mom reached into her purse and pulled out a compact mirror. She held it out for me. “Brace yourself,” she said with a sad smile.

  With a frown, I tipped my head down and looked in the mirror.

  The girl staring back looked sort of like me. I recognized my dimpled cheeks even while frowning. But the skin was too smooth and perfect—no freckles or pimples. The hair wasn’t frizzy, but just seemed to fall perfectly in waves of black so pure it almost glowed blue. And those piercing green eyes—they looked like they belonged to a creature from another world, with rings of gold in the center. The whole face was strikingly pretty. No human could possibly look that beautiful, not with all the make-up and plastic surgery in the world.

  I reached up to touch the stranger’s face and watched with a kind of sick fascination as the girl in the mirror also touched her nose, her cheeks, even stretched open her eyes to look at the color more closely. It was me, after all. It felt like me still, I could even see a glimmer of my old self underneath, and yet—it was a face t
ouched by the Fae.

  I turned away and covered my face in my hands. “Put it away. I don’t want to see it anymore.”

  Mom was right—I wasn’t human.

  4

  Court Arraignment

  Rosamunde

  The Faerie Court worked over the President’s Day holiday weekend to deal with the sudden accusations of treason and dangerous magic. I wasn’t allowed to see Zil or any of the other people who had been arrested; Glen and my other friends weren’t part of the official investigation, so I couldn’t get any more information. Everyone was gossiping at the castle and around town, but no one knew real details about what had happened. I wasn’t sure if the Court was just trying to avoid a panic or if they really wanted to keep the whole incident a secret. Either way, it felt weird that what my mom and I had done was the topic of conversation everywhere—because news travels fast in a small community—and yet no one knew the truth.

  Worse, I couldn’t explain what I knew to anyone, even to Dad. The faeriekin wanted to keep us safe while Mom was still at large, so they brought him up to the castle with me on Saturday night. He’d asked me a dozen questions, and I wanted to tell him everything—what Mom said about Akasha’s real dad, how I couldn’t see Mom get arrested, why I’d been lying about my involvement with the Unseelie—but Glen told me I wasn’t supposed to say anything to anyone until I’d given my statement to the Court. So I just gave Dad yes or no answers about the things he’d already been told by the Court. Yes, I saw Mom. No, I didn’t know where she was anymore. No, I didn’t find Akasha.

  He looked hurt, but eventually he stopped pushing me for details when I told him that I was upset about how little I could tell him.