She hadn’t hallucinated that.
Relieved, she drew the necklace from the bag and glanced at her parents.
Her faint, brief satisfaction died.
Her mother was as white as the sheets of the bed.
Her father’s handsome face looked haggard and old. “When did you get that? Who gave it to you?” he whispered.
CHAPTER 6
Her father stared at the chain in Cait’s hand as if he saw a ghost. She felt his recoil in her gut.
“May first,” Janet said suddenly. She looked at her husband for confirmation or reassurance. “She disappeared on May first.”
Ross nodded. “Beltane.”
Cait shivered. She needed the answers her parents could provide. But every response raised fresh questions. How much did they know? And how did they know it?
Janet clasped her hands together in her lap. “You told me once the sidhe’s world intersects with ours at times and places when we’re vulnerable. But why now? Why, after all these years?”
The sidhe. The people of the hills, Rhys had called them.
Ross’s mouth was grim. “She couldn’t touch us before. Not after you defeated her. But what better way to strike back at us than where we’re most vulnerable?”
Realization widened Janet’s eyes. “Through our daughter.”
Our daughter. They were talking about her as if she weren’t even here. Just like Rhys and…and his mother.
Frankly, she was getting tired of being treated like the only nonadult in the room. “Hello?”
Her father regarded the necklace coiled like a snake against the white sheets of her bed. “What are you doing with that…[ ]that thing?”
The light ran lovingly along the length of chain. Cait poked it with one finger. “I was hoping you, um, could tell me. What is it?”
“It is a sidhe bràighde,” Ross said. “A binding chain. Did you get it from her?”
“Her, who?” Cait asked. But she knew. She knew.
“The Queen,” Ross snapped. “Did the Queen give this to you?”
“N-no.”
“Ross, honey.” Janet touched her husband’s arm. “Caitlin isn’t wearing it. She’s all right.”
He glared. “All right? She’s in the fucking hospital.”
“But she’s here. With us. She’s safe.”
Cait didn’t feel particularly safe. Not with the cuts on her arms and legs still oozing blood and her father looking like thunder.
“She’s safe now. Who gave this to you?” he asked Cait again.
She had never seen her steady father so upset. She’d never given him any reason to be upset. She was the girl who was home before midnight, who kept track of her drinks, her purse, and the car keys.
Cait could only imagine how her dad would react if he found out exactly what had happened out there in the woods. Everything that had happened.
“It was a gift from…from someone I met on the trail,” she said.
“Male or female?”
“Male.” She stuck out her chin. “His name is Rhys. Rhys Danuson.”
Giving him his full name made their meeting seem more normal, more acceptable, as if Rhys were someone she could bring home to meet her parents instead of a trail hookup with a seriously scary mother and very bad karma.
But her father didn’t appear reassured. “The Queen’s Rhys?”
Cait’s jaw dropped. “You know him?”
“Another lover?” Janet asked.
Ross shook his head. “Her son. By her favorite before me.”
Cait’s heart pushed into her throat. Rhys was the son of the fairy queen. The man she’d given her virginity to wasn’t really a man at all.
And her father knew him….
“When was this?” she demanded.
“A long time ago. Before you were born.”
Cait struggled to do the math, but nothing added up. “So, Rhys was, what? Like, five?”
“When I first met him? Eight or nine. He was a young man when I left. The sidhe do not age the way we do,” he added, forestalling her question.
Rhys’s words burned in her brain. I haven’t seen my father since I was eight years old.
“What about Rhys’s father? Did you know him, too?”
“His father was…[ ]gone shortly before I got there.”
Janet caught her breath.
Cait moistened her dry lips. “What do you mean, gone?”
“He died.”
Unease formed an indigestible lump in Cait’s gut. “So, he was…mortal?”
“Yes.”
“Human?”
“Yes.”
That was something, Cait thought. Wasn’t it?
“What happened to him?” she asked.
“Does it matter?”
“Yes!”
Janet stirred in her chair. “Caity, honey…”
Her father still stared at the golden chain, his shoulders bent, his face drawn. Cait refused to feel sorry for him. She had to know. Rhys had sacrificed himself for her. She had to know why.
“Tell me,” she begged.
Ross turned his back to the room and stared out the hospital window. “The children of the earth, the sidhe, are immortal. They are neutral in the war between heaven and hell that plays out in humankind. But their neutrality comes at a price.”
Cait tightened her grip, clinging to the necklace like a lifeline. “What price?”
“Every seven years, they sacrifice a human soul to hell.”
Sacrifice?
“How do you know?” Cait whispered.
Her father turned from the window, and hell was in his eyes. “Because I was almost one of them.”
Cait felt her assumptions disintegrating like a sand castle caught in the tide. She had always looked to her parents for love, guidance, support…[ ]answers. Only her parents weren’t the people she thought they were, and the answers she had relied on were making things worse.
And yet her father’s responses made a horrible kind of sense.
Maybe there was someone else, Rhys had suggested.
I am the Queen. I will have payment of my debt.
“So, what happened to you?” Cait demanded. “Did you just get lucky or something?”
Janet made a choked sound of protest.
Ross dropped his hand to her shoulder. To comfort her? Or steady himself? “You could say so. Your mother saved me.”
Cait looked at her safe, round, comfortable mother, with her sensible short hair and the crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes, and felt another assumption topple and slide away. “How?”
“I loved him.” Janet reached up and squeezed her husband’s hand. “I went to the fair folk on Midsummer’s Eve and I…Well, after that, I wouldn’t let go.
“Honey, we’re so sorry,” Janet said. “We never thought this would affect you.”
Remembering their vigilance all through her childhood, Cait wondered if that were true. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Her mother gave her The Look, the one she used to hush noisy patrons in the library. “What could we have said? We didn’t want to scare you. And we never dreamed the Queen would take revenge on us by sending her son after you.”
“Did he hurt you?” Ross asked sharply.
The long scratches on Cait’s thighs pulsed and burned. Her mind pulsed and burned. Rhys licking the tears from the corners of her eyes, his cheek hot against her own, his voice whispering, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I hurt you.”
Her insides contracted.
“No,” she said breathlessly. “No, he was—”
She recalled that moment by the fire when some unidentifiable emotion had flickered in his eyes. You will take no hurt from—You will not get sick because of me.
“He was very careful and—and kind,” she said.
Janet’s gaze was soft and penetrating. “Are you sure?”
Cait flushed, uncomfortable with what her mother might see. Or guess. “Yes.”
“At least y
ou’re safe now,” Ross said. “Thank God you escaped.”
Janet leaned forward and patted her hand. “It’s over.”
Cait was safe, but she hadn’t escaped, exactly. Rhys had saved her. And it was far from over.
Cait bit her lip, looking down. Her mother’s hand rested on the hand that clutched the necklace. The links were warm against her palm.
This was one problem her parents couldn’t fix for her.
She had to go back. To save him.
Her parents argued with her, of course, because they loved her and they were afraid. Her mother cried.
“You’re not going,” her father said adamantly. “You survived the last time. There’s no guarantee you’ll survive the next.”
“You don’t understand,” Cait said.
“I understand. I was with the sidhe for fourteen years. They will destroy you, baby.”
“Daddy, I have to try. Rhys sacrificed everything for me.”
“Why would he do that?” Janet asked.
“Well, he…” Cait floundered. Confessing to her parents Rhys had been her first lover didn’t seem like a good way to get her father on her side. “He felt sorry for me, I guess.”
“Good for him,” Ross said. “That doesn’t mean you have to kill yourself for him.”
“But I care about him.”
“Any feelings you have for this…fairy, the Queen will use against you. You don’t know what you’re up against.”
“So help me.”
“No.”
Cait cast desperately for an argument that would convince him. “You said you knew the sidhe. Maybe one of them could help.”
Janet turned troubled eyes to Ross. “Do you think Puck might…?”
“The minute she sets one foot off the trail, Puck will take her straight to the Queen.”
“Who’s Puck?” Cait asked.
Her parents ignored her.
Cait appealed to her mother, who could usually be counted on to see both sides of every argument. “I have to go.”
“You can’t,” Janet said.
The Queen’s words echoed in Cait’s head. There is more of your dam in you than I realized.
“Why not?” Cait cried, exasperated and afraid. “You did.”
“I loved your father. We were already lovers by then.”
Cait opened her mouth. Shut it.
An uncomfortable silence filled the hospital room.
“You’re not going.” Ross exchanged a long look with his wife. “Nobody is going. And that’s final.”
They didn’t know Rhys, Cait reasoned. They didn’t care about him. They loved her, and they loved each other, and the fairness of one half-mortal’s fate didn’t even enter into their decision.
But Rhys had loved her, too.
Or at least, Cait thought, torn between hope and anguish, he had cared for her enough to sacrifice himself for her sake. The debt he had taken on was her parents’; but the responsibility for his fate was hers.
Even if she hadn’t exactly figured out what to do about it yet.
I went to the fair folk on Midsummer’s Eve…
Cait let her parents bring her home. She gave herself time to heal. She made an appointment to have her stitches removed and endured four more rabies shots spaced over the next month. She called Jill to congratulate her roommate on her engagement and to beg off their rendezvous in Hot Springs. She even applied to the graduate program in Library Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, to begin in the spring semester.
And on June twenty-first, Cait packed her bag for a campus visit, said good-bye to her parents, and walked off the trail south of Wayah Bald.
The sun slanted gold and green through the trees. The air was warm and still, with the stickiness of an approaching storm. Cait trampled the rioting wildflowers, trying not to think. She didn’t look for the trail blazes. She wanted to get lost.
Under the shadow of a deep rhododendron, a little man waited on a fallen log like a lump of lichen, his clothes the color of fallen leaves and feathers in his hair.
Cait’s steps dragged. Her heart rocketed to her throat. She coughed to clear it. “Puck?”
CHAPTER 7
The little man grinned, revealing pointy teeth. “Ay, Puck.”
Cait raised her chin. “Or should I call you Goodfellow?”
“Puck or Hob or Robin Goodfellow, it’s all the same to me.” He hopped off the log. “Took you long enough to get here.”
Cait tried very hard not to feel offended. “It’s Midsummer’s Eve. I thought that was the best time to find you.”
“Unless I’m wanting to be found. You’re nearly too late.”
Her heartbeat quickened. “Too late for what?”
Puck shambled through the woods at surprising speed. “We’ll have to move quickly.”
Cait fell in beside him, her thoughts and her feet struggling to keep pace with his. “Are you taking me to—” Hot breath, white fangs, flaming golden eyes. The healed cuts on her arms and legs burned with remembered fire. The gold chain pulsed in her pocket.
Cait swallowed. “—to Rhys?”
Puck shook his head. “I wish I could. But he’s wild now, and wary of the Queen.”
Cait was feeling pretty damn wary herself.
“So are we going…” Her voice failed. She tried again. “Are you taking me to the Queen?”
“Horns and hooves! No.”
She was a little reassured. But only a little. “Then where are we going?”
Puck stopped and shot her a curious look from the corners of his bright black eyes. “You mean, you don’t know?”
“I don’t know anything,” Cait confessed. “I just wanted to find you.”
The sidhe smiled—not his usual mocking, mischievous smile, but something warmer, almost affectionate. “And so you have. But if you did not know what you were seeking, how did you know where to look?”
“My father said…” The minute she sets one foot off the trail, Puck will take her straight to the Queen. “He seemed to think you would find me,” Cait said carefully.
“Miles from where we met before.” His tone made it a question.
“Yeah, well…” Cait puffed as she followed him up a rough slope littered with branches and dotted with pink and yellow flowers. “I looked at the map. Wayah Bald…Wayah means wolf in Cherokee. I figured that was, like, a good place to start.”
“You are more clever than I thought,” Puck said.
Cait flushed. She hadn’t felt clever. More like “desperate” and “grasping at straws.” Simply getting this far had tested her ingenuity and resolution, and the main task, whatever it was, still lay ahead. Approval, even approval from the Queen’s stooge dwarf, was ridiculously encouraging.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Are you also brave?”
She was scared to death.
“I’m here,” she said as steadily as she could. “And I’m willing. Is that good enough?”
“It will have to be. Or your lover is lost.”
Cold fingers traced down Cait’s spine despite the oppressive heat and the sweat she was working up climbing the mountain. But she felt a spark of anger, too. “She’s his mother! Hasn’t she done enough? She’s already cursed him. Does she have to kill him, too?”
“The Queen does not kill her young,” Puck said matter-of-factly, in the tone he might have used to say, The Queen does not eat her young. “But she will not save him.”
“Save him from what?”
“The Wild Hunt rides tonight. And their quarry is the Queen’s son.”
The Wild Hunt.
A memory caught Cait of Rhys’s voice rising and falling in the firelight while the snow fell outside their shelter and he told her the story of the Wild Hunt, who harried the damned across the sky.
She stumbled. “What do you want me to do?”
“You must ride with them,” Puck said. “You will never find young Rhys else, or keep up with the pursuit.”
>
Her heart quailed with the impossibility of what he was asking.
“I’m not much of a horseback rider,” she said.
Puck grinned, his teeth very pointy. “It’s not a horse I’ll be giving you to ride.”
Like that made it any better.
“And then what?” she asked.
Puck was silent.
“What do I do then?”
He gave her another sidelong look. “Why, then you must do as your heart bids, for I’ve no better guidance to give you.”
Daylight faded as the sun sank in a bloody welter of clouds. Cait’s legs ached, her feet were swollen, and she had a stitch in her side. After six weeks off the trail, she was out of shape.
You’re nearly too late.
She dragged herself up by gripping the trunk of a sapling. Puck scuttled ahead. At least concentrating on her sore feet and tired muscles as they climbed took her mind off what would happen when they got to the top.
She had always been stubborn. Like her father, her mother said.
She tried to be compassionate and fair-minded. Like her mother, her father said.
But pity or fairness or pure pigheadedness weren’t all that drove her now.
It was the memory of Rhys’s rigid shoulders and taut, white face as he confronted his mother for her sake. Take me in payment. And let her go free.
It was the way he said her name, standing in the waters of the pool, the silver reflection sliding lovingly over his upper body and his eyes molten gold. Caitlin.
Just her name in his dark, fluid voice.
Caitlin.
I’m coming, she told him, tears pricking her eyes, her breath sobbing as she climbed.
No. The answer came forcibly enough to make her slip. It is too dangerous. You don’t know what you’re doing.
Cait took a deep breath to steady herself. It’s okay, she thought back tentatively, although it wasn’t, really, and if she was hearing voices in her head she probably had lost her mind. Puck is helping me.
No answer.
Cait crested the hill, trying not to feel bereft. At least she wasn’t crazy.
Over the Moon Page 14
