Her breath caught in her throat as she sat down. Was that why Nikolas was afraid of Theo?
Nikolas rocked in his seat, while the congregation shuffled past to taste their grief at the weeping cup. Melia leaned as close to him as she dared. “Did Daddy give you the salt?”
Nikolas stopped rocking. His right hand fluttered. Then his head jerked once.
Yes.
What had happened? She could imagine Theo messing up Nikolas’s schedule and then trying to soothe him with salt. A spoonful would do no harm. Two might have been all right. But Dora would have begged for anything that Nikolas got and she was too small to eat as much as Nikolas. It didn’t matter if he hadn’t planned on it.
Theo knew what the lethal dosage was. He knew what the symptoms were and he let her children lie in bed, dying, for a week. Because he couldn’t admit he had made a mistake.
And he was coming for her son in three days.
Melia dropped Nikolas off at the house with the sitter and went to the salt factory. She measured out some of the salt from Dora and entered the lab. Working methodically, she isolated the sodium from the salt’s sodium chloride. With the pure silvery element, she went through each of the steps, combining it with hydrazine hydrate to make a small quantity of sodium azide.
She packed the crystals in an airtight jar so there was no chance of water touching them. Then Melia carefully wiped all equipment with oil to catch any stray granules. Melia did not want to chance killing any of Seven Seas’ workers if the sodium azide got wet. Just a few grains would be enough to make a cloud of odorless poison gas. It would dissipate quickly, and leave only the signs of a sodium deficiency, which was common enough on New Gaea. The oil kept it inert, but water would kill.
When Melia was certain the room was clean, she picked up the jar and left the lab.
Theo opened the door himself, when Melia knocked. He looked astonished to see her. Before he could say anything, before she could have a second thought, Melia held the jar out to him. “I brought you some of Dora’s salt.”
He stared at the jar for a moment before taking it. “Thanks.”
“Since you missed the weeping cup, I thought you might want to make one yourself . . . ” Her voice trailed off. She had given him the salt, and now she just wanted to get away from him.
Theo leaned against the door. “Forgive and forget, huh?”
As if it were that simple. “No. But I found a way to move past it.”
He seemed to recognize that she wouldn’t bend, but he still said, “Do you want to come in and share it with me?”
Melia shook her head slowly. “I can’t. Nikolas needs me.”
She drove home to her son. After she sent the sitter away, Melia sat with Nikolas. He stood in the living room, with his head cocked to the side watching dust motes in the sun. She held her phone in her lap, as she watched them float with him, and waited for Dora’s laughter.
American Changeling
Half-consciously, Kim put a hand up to cover her new nose ring. It pissed her parents off no end that she could tolerate touching cold iron and they couldn’t.
Iron still made her break out sometimes, but didn’t burn her. It had taken forever to find someone to make an iron nose ring, but the effort would be totally worth it.
“Kimberly Anne Smith,” Mom’s voice caught her in the foyer as surely as if she’d been called by her true name. “I’ve been worried sick. Do you know what time it is?”
“Eleven forty-nine.” Kim dropped her hand and turned to face Mom, her Doc Martens making a satisfactory clomping on the hardwood floor. “I’m here. Home before midnight. No one with me.” Sometimes she thought about bringing friends home to show them what her parents really looked like after their glamour dropped.
Everyone thought Mom was so pretty, so Betty Crocker, and Dad was all Jimmy Stewart. Whatever. Maybe if people saw that her parents were freaks like her they wouldn’t look at her with such pity.
“I specifically asked you to come home straight after school, young lady. I tried calling your cell I don’t know how many times. You have no idea how worried I’ve been.”
“I was hanging out with Julia and Eve on Hawthorne.”
Mom took a step closer, wearing pearls, even at home. “What’s that in your nose?”
Kim blew her dyed-pink hair out of her face. “It’s called a nose ring.” Having people stare at her for the piercings and hair and leather was way better than having them stare at her because she looked prematurely old like a Progeria victim.
From the den, her father called, “Is she home?” A piece of ice clinked against glass. She so did not want to deal with Dad if he’d been drinking. He got maudlin about the old country and if she had to hear one more story about how life was so much better in Faerie, she’d scream.
“Yes!” Kim shouted. “I’m home and I’m going to bed so I don’t have to look at myself.”
She ran up the stairs two at a time, Utilikilt swinging against her legs. Mom hollered up the stairs at her, but Kim didn’t care. She hopped over the salt line on her threshold, slammed the door to her room and threw herself on the bed without even bothering to turn on the lights. What was the point?
The mantel clock downstairs chimed midnight.
Kim’s mom knocked on her door. “Kim? Come out honey, your father and I need to talk to you.”
“Why don’t you come in?”
“If you’ll sweep the salt aside.”
Rolling her eyes, Kim dragged herself off the bed and opened the door. With midnight, the glamour masking her mother’s appearance had dropped. Mom had shrunk and twisted, aging one hundred years in the stroke of the clock. Gone was her carefully coiffed platinum hairdo in exchange for sparse, dry hair. The hall light gleamed off her scalp. Her nose nearly touched her chin, where a wart sported more hair than was on the rest of her head.
The thing that burned Kim like cold iron was that, aside from her dyed hair, she knew she looked just like her mother. All changelings were born looking old. That might be fine if you lived in Faerie with other people of your species, but here, Kim was just a freak. “What.”
Mom smiled, showing her scraggly teeth, but her chin trembled and her eyes were moist. “We’ve had a message. From the old country. Come downstairs so we can talk about it.”
Despite herself, Kim stepped over the salt line, into the hall. The only time she could remember Mom crying was when their dog had died. She’d held Buffy’s head and wept like her heart had broken. Dad had said the golden retriever had been the first mortal thing Mom had ever loved. Death wasn’t common in Faerie.
Seeing her on the verge of tears now freaked Kim out. She followed Mom downstairs without speaking.
Dad sat in his easy chair, holding a glass of whiskey loosely in his left hand. The reading lamp lit his arm and lap, but left his face in shadow. On the walnut end table beside him lay a piece of parchment at odds with the magazine-perfect living room.
The cream Berber carpet and the cranberry French toile curtains and the tan leather couch all seemed dirty and smudged by the introduction of this one thing from Faerie. It forced itself into her vision with a crisper focus than anything of mortal origins.
Her father set his drink down and leaned forward into the light. Like her mother, he looked scary ancient. His gray wool sweater hung from his shoulders as if he were a first grader playing dress up. His broad, pitted nose was bright red. Dad wiped his hand across his face and covered his eyes for a moment.
He inhaled deeply and dropped his hand. “This is difficult.” Dad picked up the parchment. “We knew it was coming, but . . . Do you want to sit down?”
“No, sir.” Kim bit the inside of her cheek, uncertain about what was going to come next.
Even though her parents had always told her they’d come to the mortal world for the sole purpose of conceiving her, even though her childhood had been filled with fairy tales in which she was the chosen one, even seeing their glamour, Kim had never fully belie
ved them. Because the alternative, that she was the first fairy born into the mortal world since the gate closed, was crazy. She gestured at the parchment. “Can I see it?”
Dad handed it to her and took another sip of his whiskey while Mom dabbed at her eyes with a tissue.
To Mossblossom, daughter of Fernbrooke and Woodapple
Right trustie and welbeloved, wee greete you well.
Grat is the task which wee must aske of you, but wee know you will fulfill it in such a way as may not onely nourish and continue our love and good will towards you, but also encrease the same. Our good and most loving Subjects, your worthy parents, have striven to raise you out of the sight of certaine devilish and wicked minded enemies of ours. These enemies who style themselves the Unseelie Court, have most wickedly and unnaturally conspired to have stirred up (as much as in them lay) a generall rebellion throughout our whole Realme. It pleases us to . . .
“I don’t get this.” Kim lowered the parchment. “I mean, she can’t even spell.”
Her mother winced and took the parchment out of her hands. “The Faerie Queen is using the high court language from before the gate closed during Bloody Mary’s reign. Your father and I had to learn modern English as a second language, of course we were both very young, but—”
“Fern, we need to get moving.” Dad nodded at the brass and mahogany mantel clock. “She wanted us at Saint Andrew’s after mass.”
“What?” Kim scanned the parchment again, but the spelling was so poor she had trouble making any sense of it. The cathedral was five blocks from their house, and though she knew it held the key, they weren’t supposed to open the gate until her sixteenth birthday which was still months away. “But it’s after midnight.”
Her mother sniffed. “If you’d come home when I asked this wouldn’t be a problem.”
“Yeah, well, you didn’t tell me why.”
“I didn’t want to distract you at school. Your grades have already been slipping and—”
“Oh, as if that matters. What? My SAT scores will get me into the best schools in Faerie?”
“Stop it.” Draining his whiskey, Dad stood and pulled the letter from her hands. “The Unseelie Court know about you.”
That cut her retort off. The rebel faeries who formed the Unseelie Court had nearly torn the realm apart three hundred years ago when they closed the gate. The only people through since then had been a handful of changelings, like her parents, who’d worked a complicated magic to change places with mortals. “When you say know . . . ?”
He snapped the parchment at her. “There’s a traitor in the Queen’s Court. She knows not who it is, but it is clear that they have found out about you and the plans to reopen the gate. If we give them any time at all, they will send a changeling and kill you rather than let that happen.”
“Woody, you’re frightening her.”
“What would you have? A child not frightened, but without the information to make good decisions? Fern. We can’t go into the church with her. She has to know that the Unseelie have likely alerted the Catholics and that someone might be there.”
“Let’s just go and get it over with.” Kim flipped the hood of her sweatshirt up to give herself at least a semblance of privacy. Underneath everything, a film of sweat coated her body. Her joints ached with anticipation. “Opening the gate is what I’m here for, isn’t it?”
Even though it was only five blocks to the church, her parents drove in case they needed to make a quick getaway. They stopped the Prius across the street from Saint Andrew’s and got out with her. Farther down the block, the laughter of late-night hipsters drifted down Alberta Street. Mom put her hands on Kim’s shoulders and kissed her forehead. “I want you to know that your father and I are very proud of you, no matter what happens.”
Kim’s heartbeat rattled through every bone of her body. She knew their allergies meant that her parents couldn’t go into the church with her, but for a second, she wished they could. “Any last words of advice?”
Her dad leaned in close enough that she could smell the whiskey on his breath. “Just be safe. You see a priest, you hightail it out of there. We’ll figure out some other plan.”
“Right . . . ” It had only taken the Faerie Queen five hundred years to cook this one up. Before she could chicken out, Kim got out of the car and crossed the street to the cathedral. She’d read everything her parents could find about the place, knew all about its French Gothic style of architecture, had studied the floorplan until it was printed on the inside of her eyelids, but she had never set foot on the property before.
Once, when she was six, she’d run the five blocks from their house to the cathedral. Her mom caught her just before she got there. Kim had wanted to work the magic so she could get the key out of the altar. She’d thought her reward would be to get wings like the fairies on TV. Mom had set her straight, explaining that there might be alarms set if any of Faerie blood approached. Since then, she’d always walked down the other side of the street rather than chance it.
Not tonight though. Tonight, she walked straight up the marble steps and pulled out the keys Dad had gotten hold of years ago. It would suck if they’d changed the locks. She put the keys in the lock, braced for something to scream or an alarm to go off.
The door wasn’t even locked. All Dad’s effort to get the keys and she didn’t even need them. Kim hauled open the heavy door and slipped into the nave. She had been to the church’s website dozens of times, but the photo galleries had not conveyed the arcing height of the ceiling. Despite the simple beauty of the oak carvings, which adorned the plaster walls, her pulse ratcheted up to quad-espresso rate.
Her parents had refused to teach Kim any spells but those she needed to open the gate, because glamour would interfere with her ability to handle iron. Well, after tonight, baby, that restriction would be lifted and she’d be working it like any good Fae.
Kim sauntered down the middle of the church. Beyond a few guttering candles visible in the side chapel, the building was still and empty. At the altar, Kim put her hand on the cold marble.
All around her, wood splintered as the oak carvings forced their mouths open and shrieked.
Panicked, Kim lifted her hand off the altar, ready to run out of the church—but if she did, her chance to get the key out of the altar was blown. Whoever had set the alarm already knew she was here.
She pressed her hand back on the altar, crooked her little finger into a fishhook and shouted the words she’d learned as a nursery rhyme:
“Stone, stone, earth’s bone,
Once hid, now shown!”
Under her hand, the center of the stone burst. Its halves tilted and thudded to the ground. In the exposed middle, was a small, ornate iron casket, no larger than a paper-back. Above her, the carvings still screamed bloody murder.
A door on the side of the church slammed open and a priest, tousled white hair sticking out like a halo, ran into the sanctuary.
Kim grabbed the casket, leaped over the broken altar, and sprinted down the aisle with the reliquary tucked under her arm like a football.
She hauled open the church door. Yelling incoherently about thieves and sacrilege, the priest chased her. Kim vaulted down the steps of the cathedral, momentum carrying her forward to her knees. The pavement tore through her striped stockings.
Before Kim could rise, the priest grabbed her. “What did you do?”
Kim tried to shrug free, but the priest had a grip like a bulldog. “Let me go!”
“Stealing is a sin and what you’ve done to the altar . . . ” His other hand grabbed for the iron reliquary.
Kim kicked and twisted to keep him from taking the Key.
Out of nowhere, her father punched the priest in the nose. He staggered, blood streaming down his face.
Dad yelled, “Get in the car!”
Kim tore down the sidewalk. Hipsters and neighbors gawked in the street.
Dashing into the road, Kim headed for her parents’ car. When she
stepped off church property, the carvings went silent. The cessation of noise rang like tinnitus.
Their Prius pulled away from the curb. Her mom leaned out the window, “Hurry!”
Kim opened the back door and scrambled into the seat. Dad half fell in after her. As people ran for the car, Mom peeled out, which Kim didn’t even think a hybrid could do.
Mom dodged the on-lookers and drove down Alberta to the I-5 on-ramp. Kim stared out the rear window at the crowd milling around.
“Do you have it?” her mother asked.
Kim turned around to face the front. “Yeah. It’s what I was born to do.”
“Don’t get cocky.” On the seat beside her, Dad had his head down, trying to catch his breath.
Mom peered at her in the rearview mirror. Seeing only her eyes, it was easy to forget how old she looked right now. “We still have to get to Stonehenge to open the gate.”
Kim leaned forward. “I didn’t bring my passport with me.”
“No, no, dear. The replica at Maryhill. We should be able to use it as a mirror with the real one.”
“Oh.” That was a change from the original plan. Kim had been looking forward to going to England, but she’d practiced the ritual every summer at the replica.
“Dammit.” Dad leaned against the seat, still gasping for breath. His face was swollen and puffy.
“Dad?”
He tried to smile, but his breath wheezed in his throat. “Allergies. It’ll pass.”
It sounded like he could barely breathe. His left hand had swollen to water balloon tightness. “Mom . . . ?”
Dad put his hand on her knee. “Don’t, you’ll worry her for no reason.”
“What is it, dear?
Kim bit the inside of her cheek. “How much farther is it?”
“Mm . . . an hour and a half, I think. Why don’t you take a nap, hm? It’s been a long day for you and not over yet.”
As if napping were an option. “You should have seen me. It was ten types of awesome. The rhyme worked like you said and boom!” Kim leaned forward and rested her chin on the seat. “How did they make the carvings scream? I mean, this church was built way after the wall went up, right?”
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