Managing Expectations

by Erin R Flynn

  Something about his wording was off, and I wasn’t the only one who caught it. Hudson locking in on the phrasing. “Came from? Not born?”

  Lageos slowly looked at and then seemed to study him. “This is a conversation for my daughter and I as we have lost much time we were meant to have. You truly love her and would give your life for her, so I want to get to know you and am fine with you here to support her, but please, let her and I speak.”

  “Fair,” Hudson conceded.

  “I have the same question though,” I muttered.

  “This is where your mother had trouble with accepting who I am,” Lageos worried. “I don’t have an answer. Memories fade and… I’m incredibly old, Tamsin. I am the last, but demigods were immortal. Truly immortal.”

  “So what happened to the rest?” Craftsman whispered.

  Lageos nodded, but kept my gaze. “They faded.”

  “How do you know that?” I challenged. “Maybe there are others still and they just didn’t give you their new addresses.”

  He slowly smiled, and I felt a warmth in my heart like I never had before. “Your mother said almost the same thing to me. Not in that vernacular, but the words of a child telling me I’d probably lost them, and I fell in love with her that moment.” He did a double take at whatever our expressions were.

  Mine was disgust. Deep disgust.

  He sighed. “Not her physical form. I am not a lover of children. I’m not mortal, Tamsin. I could feel her soul. I…” He scrubbed his hand over his hair again. “Can you see the runes of the portal someone travels from? Your mother used to speak of how she could see that and others couldn’t, how they didn’t understand when she spoke of the level of her magic.”

  I cleared my throat and nodded. “Yeah. I mean, it’s not like I see them, but it’s like… Mist? Yeah, smoke symbols around them.”

  He smiled at me again. “You are quite the poet. Your mother struggled to explain it to me. You are able to do it much younger than she could as well. But it’s like that for me. I can see your soul. It’s how I knew you. I’ve always seen your soul, and I see that before I register you are now a woman, not my young baby I saw last. That was how I saw you mother, not the child body she temporarily had.”

  Okay, weird, but not eating for twenty years and surviving threw me pretty hard too.

  “It’s a lot to digest,” I whispered.

  “You’d be a fool if you simply accepted it all.” He waited until I nodded. “All the demigods had a bond, almost akin to a pack, like your fae dogs. There was no Alpha of us—or we were all Alphas—but we could sense each other. I felt when the first of us faded. They no longer wanted to live in a world where we weren’t needed or… I cannot speak to their reasons, only my own for almost fading.”

  My soul ached for him. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  “I don’t understand,” Lucca admitted. “Why are you—”

  But Lageos understood. “My daughter knows the deep pain of being the only one and bearing the burden of that. She understands how standing on the outside of everything and never being a part of others in the truest sense is a sting others cannot understand.”

  He reached over and brushed the back of his hand against mine, not trying for anything more than that. Tears filled his eyes as he closed his hand in a fist and leaned away.

  “You were never supposed to know this much suffering. We could not chance what was to come, though we tried. We tried. Your mother gave her life trying to save everyone, including you. But I was meant to get free. I have opened the portals so many times, but I couldn’t this time. I couldn’t. I don’t know why, but I couldn’t get to you.”

  I gasped as what he meant sank in. “You left me with the humans on purpose, but you were going to come for me.”

  “Yes,” he choked out. “Everyone would think to look for you with Geiger. He was a logical choice to smuggle you out of Faerie, and that made him the biggest target. Hiding you where no one would think to look would protect you best. But the magic wasn’t going to freeze me, and I could come get you. I could protect you until you could save everyone, as your mother did.”

  So there had been a better plan that had gone off the rails.

  “Why not leave Faerie with Tamsin to start? Why risk it at all?” Craftsman asked gently.

  Lageos didn’t seem like he was going to answer, but I nodded that I wanted the answer too. The tears fell heavier then, and he leaned back in his chair. “I was to lose the love of my life that day, and I could not leave her. The visions were many and a few had her dying before she could counteract the curse. I could not risk the dark queen’s forces harming her before it was done.

  “I stayed to be at her side in her last moments and do as she asked of me as she gave her life for every fairy. I felt her die, sacrifice herself for her people and the people who fought to kill her and her realm, and then I failed her by not protecting our daughter as I promised. I spent twenty years locked in the dark magic, fighting to reach every portal to see if one would let me out, but I couldn’t.

  “We never considered that would happen, and I’m so, so sorry, Tamsin. You have no idea how sorry we both are. We did everything we could so this was not the future you had or lived with. This was not to be the life you had, and we were to have more time together, all these years we were to be together, so you were ready. How you survived and turned out as you have amazes me.”

  I got hooked on something he said again. “More time?”

  He wiped his eyes even as tears kept falling. “I tied my soul to Meira’s. The moment you unfreeze her, she will finish dying and then so will I. I will fade with my soul mate. It was the only way we could have you. We had to be bonded soul mates to have children.”

  Needless to say, I fainted again.

  It was just us when I woke again.

  “They gave us space when I asked them to,” Lageos explained quietly. “Darby set a thermos of your fae juice and fae tea infusion by your head. He thought it might help.”

  “Thanks,” I whispered. I didn’t sit up, blinking at him. “Not sure I’ve ever fainted twice in a day when I didn’t have a concussion or two from fighting.”

  “I would think it was that damn world doing damage to you again more than the way I’m shocking you,” he bit out.

  I did sit up then and retrieved my large metal water bottle. “So I was right? The queens and heirs don’t call on Faerie because it takes over, not because of whatever bullshit line others give.”

  “Yes.” He let out an annoyed huff. “It’s a planet. It doesn’t have morality, even less than I do as a demigod. People assign feelings and emotions according to their frame of reference. A planet won’t, no matter it’s level of sentience or magic. You are a way to get what it wants. Nothing more. Yes, it will stop from killing you and will heal because it probably understands you’re the last but—”

  “Yeah, I won’t trust it again for sure.” I took a few long sips, feeling better as I did. I mulled over what he’d said and nodded. “I did it too though. I thought it was annoyed, but it was from my frame of reference. It was the closest—”

  “It was the closest way for you to describe it,” he finished for me. “You’re not wrong, but there is normally morality or certain progressions you are used to hearing in someone’s thoughts when you feel that annoyance. You won’t with a planet, and too many assume that level of intelligence of Faerie, and they are wrong to.”

  “No, I didn’t think intelligence, and I certainly wasn’t drinking the juice that it’s all rainbows and roses like the others,” I grumbled. “I did believe that Neldor and the others told me the truth that Faerie was reacting badly because it was dying. I could feel a sort of desperation from it.”

  “Again, you’re not wrong.” He let out a heavy sigh. “Your mother used to say Faerie’s first, second, and third priorities were keeping the world and her people alive. Sacrificing a few isn’t a problem. She always knew sacrificing her once an heir was born wouldn’
t be a problem. Or maybe with another queen alive. Faerie will protect you above all others until there is another and you’re expendable.”

  “Lovely.” I scrubbed my hand over my hair and realized it was the exact same gesture he kept making. Not simply we both did it, but how we both went from the back of our heads towards the front and sort of dug the heel of our hands into our scalps.

  Weird.

  “You were trying to tell me you… You didn’t remember if you were born or made? Did I get that right?”

  He shrugged. “I’m so old, I’ve forgotten my age. I’ve forgotten much. I was on the cusp of fading. I thought I truly might, letting go of the other world, but then decided to see it and all the worlds one more time before choosing. I met your mother then. I know I said something strange about her being a child—”

  “No, it’s fine,” I interjected. “Unconventional, but fuck, so is a lot. There are also lots of levels of love. You could have loved her right then and fallen in love with her later when she was a woman.”

  He blinked at me several times. “That is exactly what happened. I loved her soul, the extreme intelligence she had even as a child that allowed me to see so much differently. When I met her again at seventeen and she had blossomed into a woman, she stole my heart as a man and I was hers.”

  “I’m sorry you lost her.”

  “I’m sorry you’re so angry at her,” he whispered, clearing his throat and resting his ankle on his knee. “I was there when she had the first vision of having you and never was a woman happier than she was. She wasn’t even a woman by the age of today, months from turning eighteen, and all she wanted was to hold you.”

  What he said made me realize there was so, so much I was still behind on. “How long were you two together?”

  He smiled. “Decades. We had thirty years together before you were born. How I wished it was longer and we’d gotten to live as a family like we deserved, but thirty years with Meira was filled with so much happiness, I cannot regret my immortality. I feel as if I never truly lived until her, no matter how much I’d seen or witnessed in history.”

  I didn’t say anything for a while. “So that’s it? I unfreeze her and you just leave me?”

  “No, I was hoping you might not unfreeze her for…” He let out a slow, long breath. “There is no easy answer to this. I do not think her soul suffers where it is, but it has been there for twenty years. Meira would let it be forever longer so we had more time and you were not alone. I wish for more time with you, but I do want to see her again one day.”

  “But?” I whispered.

  “In some ways, I feel like it was yesterday that we went into that last battle,” he rasped, a single tear falling. “While I wasn’t frozen like the fairies, the magic did affect me in odd ways. It was disorienting. There was no night and day, only darkness I fought like tar. I couldn’t constantly struggle against it, too exhausted to move for… I have no idea how long, but then I would try again.”

  “How you kept your sanity is a miracle,” I muttered, my heart aching for him. I felt bad I was so forgiving of him but not my mother, but I could feel how upset he was, how heartbroken and… Watching him break from that darkness and seeing the panic in his own eyes helped a lot.

  I couldn’t even imagine how twenty years in that would feel. Plus, my anger with my mother was slowly cooling, Things hadn’t been what they had seemed. I’d been right but also wrong. It happened.

  I simply hadn’t enough hope in me left to give her the benefit of the doubt with how much else had gone wrong.

  “I’m not sure I have,” Lageos admitted softly. “I would like to stay with you and help protect you. Part of me feels as if I might be a danger to you and I don’t deserve to know you after how I have failed you. I—this is too much and I know I should be the adult here, the parent, but I don’t have the emotional range of mortals, and I’m worried I’m too broken.”

  “I say the same thing all the fucking time,” I admitted, wincing how horrible that was to say, as if downplaying his valid feelings.

  But he simply smiled as if amused we shared a secret or something for just us.

  “Well, I’m sure you’ve noticed that I’m no longer in diapers, so I’m not sure how much parenting I’ll need,” I offered, focusing on my water bottle. “But I’m in trouble pretty much every day and the danger is real, so backup I know doesn’t have an agenda would be seriously nice. Plus, being the weirdest freak around would be a title I’d gladly give up.”

  His laugh was so deep and loud, it made Hudson’s sound almost like a human’s. “Glad I could be of use like that.”

  I shrugged. “We all have our parts to play.” I had so many questions to ask him. Glancing at him though, I had no idea where to start.

  “I think I was born,” he offered, as if knowing where my mind was. “The others thought so too. We had fragments of… Comfort. What I felt with your mother, I had a sliver of that once. I think it was from feeling family. I think we were born. Of a human with a god sounds unlikely in compatibility to produce an offspring, but we are our own species.”

  “How do you know that?” I asked, more fascinated to learn about the topic than because it was about him.

  “You touched the species crystal when you were found? Someone told me that was how you found out you were a fairy.”

  I nodded. “It turned red and shattered.”

  He chuckled, wiggling his foot resting on his knee. “People do not pay attention as they should. Those crystals were meant to register fairies. Why have it turn red for them only to shatter? That would be silly and costly.”

  I blinked at him several times. “No one ever noted that, only it was red. I assumed that breaking part was related to me being a fairy, but why there wasn’t a fairy dorm at Artemis, so the crystal wasn’t for fairies.”

  “Smart. Logical, but those are for meant fairies too. The crystal shattered because you’re also half demigod. It would instantly shatter if I touched it. That’s part of how I know we’re our own species. There are ancient writings about us. Witches and warlocks can tell species by aura as much as shifters can scent. If I was part god and part human, they would know.”

  “I don’t get that,” I admitted.

  He didn’t reply right away, mulling it over. “Lucca can tell Zack and Ray are wolf shifters because he smells a blending of wolf and human. It’s both, but neither. It’s like that.”

  “Okay, but you’d have to have some reference of the gods to know that you weren’t some blending then.”

  “You’re not wrong except they do have the reference of humans and other supe species, and I’m no part of that. Whatever demigods are, we overtake the DNA of our mothers. Or we simply came into existence. I cannot tell you for certain either way, just as I don’t know which god I came from. I’m sorry, but I won’t lie to you.”

  I nodded after a few moments, accepting the explanation. Sometimes the answer was there wasn’t an answer. People might not accept that, but god or the gods themselves, were exactly like that. We wouldn’t ever know the truth in our lives. How old people were. We couldn’t ever know with precise certainty.

  And I had too much else going on in my life to focus on one answer I couldn’t ever have. “I don’t know” was a viable answer in my world, and I appreciated honesty.

  However…

  “You should have told me,” I said to Iolas when I felt him and several others return.

  “Maybe, but how would you have seen that conversation going, Your Highness? ‘I was in love with your mother, we were childhood sweethearts, and I say this not as one of the fiercest known light fairy warriors, but your father is a demigod and stole her from me. That’s not recorded or anything, and few people knew of it and they were true mates, but well, please don’t run from that crazy.’”

  “He makes a valid point,” Hudson muttered.

  Yeah, I had to give it to him and I admitted as much.

  There was still a lot to process from all Lageos
had told me and a ton of questions I would have but right then, I only had one. “So Faerie won’t heal my mother if I unfreeze her because I’m alive?”

  Lageos swallowed loudly, moving both of his feet to the ground and leaning forward with his forearms on his knees. “It’s more complicated than that. Your mother made a choice. She—the magic to counter the curse required a sacrifice to happen. It’s done. There is no saving from that. She might have a few final breaths or the last beat of her heart.”

  “We felt her death before we froze, not that she was dying,” Iolas interjected. “And Faerie cannot do anything. Of the thirty today, twenty-three were saved. That is miraculous and the healers are amazed but—”

  “Tamsin will not be doing that again,” Lageos warned, his tone ice cold.

  “We’re all in agreement on that,” Taeral assured him.

  But guilt ate at me. “If it could save more—”

  “No, there are other ways,” Lageos argued.

  “You always say there are other ways as well, love,” Craftsman added. “There’s only a matter of time that limits people. You have the time to find another path. More can be done and other options discussed. Your aura is all over the place for you to even have considered that.”

  He was right. I nodded, shooting him a grateful look. I would risk myself to save lives, of course, but it was stupid to think that was the only way.

  “There’s more to this,” Darby surmised.

  “There is,” Lageos agreed, shooting Taeral and the other dark fairies a quick look. “I mean no disrespect, and you know Meira respected your queen. But there were many who thought part of the madness that consumed her was her calling upon Faerie to save her mate. It was said that that was not the first time and the magic—trying to take all that magic into her was—”

  “Yeah, I could see it,” I whispered, swallowing loudly when I felt all the eyes on me. “It’s terrifying and too much to even work with. Instinct is to try and get control. I wanted control just enough to shut it down but somehow it was like… I knew there was an option of something I shouldn’t touch. A part of me wanted to touch. I didn’t, but I did. Or my magic was curious.”