Chapter 6
We heard Olive before we saw her. Returning to the house after her fruitless examination—as I’d suspected, the perimeter wards were broken beyond repair—Olive had tripped over a loose brick in the walkway and stumbled. In trying to break her fall, her hands had gone down first, and both her palms and her forearms had made contact with a rusty rake Meggy had forgotten by a flower bed. Cut, burned, and blistering, Olive wailed at the pain, then tried to fight Meggy off when she ran to help her.
Dodging her elbows, I dragged Olive inside, pinned her to a straight-back kitchen chair, and ordered her to stop resisting. “You want an infection, is that it?” I said as Meggy carefully rolled Olive’s bunched-up sleeves away. “Those are open sores, kid—you get the wrong kind of bacteria in there, and you’ll lose tissue.”
“The wrong kind of what?” she snapped.
“Bacteria, honey,” said Meggy, beginning to press a washcloth against Olive’s arm. “They make you sick.”
The girl still seemed befuddled, and I moved to stand behind Meggy to distract Olive from the operation. “Here’s the truth,” I said, waiting until her glance turned away from Meggy’s unpleasant work. “You’re mostly human. And while there’s a chance that you may be immortal, we’re not going to risk it. So, you need to sit there, let your mother clean you up, and stop squirming.”
“It hurts,” she began to complain, then froze and looked at me strangely. “What do you mean, mostly? I thought you said I was a changeling!”
Meggy looked up at me over her shoulder. “Is this really the best time for this conversation, Colin?”
“She’s not going anywhere for the moment,” I replied with a shrug. “Yes, you’re a changeling”—Olive winced again at the word—“but not in the strictest traditional sense. You, uh . . .” I paused, trying to find the phrasing least likely to upset either woman in the room, then said, “As it turns out, I’m your father. So, you’re actually a quarter fae, which would explain your ability with—”
Her eyes flew open wide as I spoke. “No!” she shrieked, yanking her arm out of Meggy’s hands. Forgetting that she was in a chair, she pushed backward in an effort to get away and wound up flat on her back on the slate floor.
“Oh, baby, your head!” Meggy cried, scrambling to pick her up. “Is it . . . no, I don’t think it’s bleeding, but your head, are you okay?”
Olive blinked groggily at her for a moment, stunned by the fall, then groaned as the pain, or maybe the realization, hit. “This isn’t happening,” she mumbled, shielding her face with her wet arms. “Go away, this isn’t real . . .”
I flipped her and the chair upright, and gripped her shoulders to steady her. “It is, Olive. I didn’t know, but I would have come for you, I wouldn’t have let her—”
“Don’t touch me!” she shouted, slapping at me until I stepped back and let Meggy resume her work. “I’m not yours, I love Mother, I’m no traitor—”
“Olive, please . . .”
“My name is Moyna!” She breathed in furious snorts, as if her chest was straining not to burst with each breath. “And you are a filthy traitor, and you’re going to take me home right—”
Her rant turned into a scream as Meggy cleaned her wounds with antiseptic spray. “I’m sorry, sweetie,” she murmured, putting the bottle aside as Olive wailed. “I know it hurts, but it’s for the best. Almost finished, just need to wrap everything up . . .”
Olive jerked her arms away again, but managed to stand without knocking the chair over. “You have no right to touch me, you . . . dog,” she said, wrapping what remained of her sleeves around her wounds. “Coileán, you will take me home this instant.”
“I’ll do no such thing,” I replied, as Meggy, reddening, began to clean up without a word. “And you’ll apologize to your mother.”
“My mother is the queen!” she yelled, stamping her foot. “And you will take me home!”
“For the last time, she’s not your mother!”
“She’s her grandmother, though,” Meggy muttered.
Olive inclined her head toward Meggy—See?—and folded her wounded arms, the picture of pink-clad defiance. “Take. Me. Home.”
“You are home,” I said, fighting the urge to throttle her. “And I’m not going to drop you off in Faerie and let her kill you, okay? So go upstairs, do whatever you want to do to your arms, and we’ll talk about this when you’re calmer.”
She glowered at us both, then flounced upstairs. “Why don’t you both just drop dead!” she shouted down the staircase, and a door slammed.
Falling back into a well-worn groove, Meggy and I ordered Chinese and made camp on the gray futon in her back room, hoping that the smell would draw Olive out. But our daughter showed no sign of emerging—as if to hammer the point home, she’d managed to enchant a lock onto the door of the bedroom she’d appropriated—and so Meggy and I settled in for a long evening vigil.
Around nine, Meggy cocked her head toward the ceiling and frowned. “Quiet up there. Think she found a way home?”
“Doubt it,” I replied. “It takes a little practice to open a gate. If she’s still distraught, I doubt she can focus long enough to make one open—if she’s strong enough to do it in the first place.” Seeing Meggy’s uncertain frown, I murmured, “I’m not dumping her on you. If you can’t handle this—if you don’t want to handle this—just say the word. I’ll take her back to Rigby, try to sort her out, and maybe with time—”
“I can handle it. She’s my baby, I can handle it.”
I couldn’t tell whether she was trying to convince me or herself. “She does have some talent,” I cautioned. “Like I said, I haven’t tested her, but I know she can do more than just glamour. And I . . . uh . . .”
Meggy watched me fret, then finished, “You’re worried about me.”
“Yeah, I am. I know you want to keep her, but if she’s too much . . .”
“She’s not some vicious puppy I can just hand off,” she replied, rubbing her elbow. “Is there some way to, I don’t know, put a damper on her until she grows up? Give us a chance to get to know each other without her trying to kill me in my sleep?”
I hesitated. “There . . . is a way to put a bind on her, but it’s difficult, risky. Not something I’d attempt. Mother could probably do it, Mab, Oberon . . . but not me. You’d need one of the Three for something like that, or else someone significantly older and more experienced than I am.”
“Probably stupid to ask, but—”
“There’s no chance of getting help from the Three. I have no idea where Oberon is these days, and there hasn’t been a reliable sighting of Mab in fifty years.”
Meggy twirled her hair, deep in thought, then ventured, “What about the Arcanum?”
“You want to take a partly fae child to the Arcanum and ask for a bind?” I asked incredulously. “More specifically, you want to take my partly fae child to the Arcanum and ask for a bind?”
“We could ask nicely,” she said with a little shrug. “Or . . .”
Her voice trailed off, and I waited, fighting the urge to look at her thoughts. “Or?”
Meggy pointed to the floor. “The diary,” she whispered. “The one you got all bent out of shape over—what about a trade? I give it to them, they . . . do what they can. Just temporarily, I mean, until she adjusts . . .”
She chewed her lip and watched me mull it over, and I finally said, “Honestly, I hate the idea of doing that to her, but . . .” I sighed. “Binds are possible with spellcraft, and I could ask Greg. He’d at least hear me out.”
“You know the grand magus?”
“You sound surprised.”
“I thought you didn’t consort with wizards,” she retorted.
“I don’t, but it’s wise to know your competition. Anyway, I could probably get a word with him within the week. But I can’t make any promises. Even for the diary, Greg might not do it. It’s . . . distasteful, you understand?”
Meggy nodded. “Like sh
ipping your kid off to boot camp.”
“Actually, no, it’s more like cutting off her arms and saying you’ll give them back someday if she’s a good girl,” I snapped. “It’s just about the worst thing I can imagine doing to her, short of actual torture, and this certainly comes close.” I paused, wrestling with my temper, and found Meggy watching me with worried, guilty eyes. “But I’ll do it,” I muttered. “It’s either this or she lives with me. You’re not safe alone with her, not now.”
“Or you could move in.”
I jerked, stunned. “Sorry, what did you say?”
“If you wanted to,” she mumbled. “For Olive. You could stay here until she’s, you know, better. Or whatever. Never mind.” Her face burned.
“Why don’t we take it a day at a time?” I replied carefully. “I’ll do my best to talk to Greg this week, and until then . . .” I glanced around the room and sighed inwardly. “I could camp on the futon, if that’s agreeable to you.”
“Only if it’s no trouble.”
“It’s not.”
Meggy’s smile spoke more of relief than happiness. “It’s not a bad futon, really. I’ll get some blankets from upstairs. There’s a guest bedroom, but Olive . . .”
“Don’t worry about it.” I briefly considered remodeling her back room with a decent mattress, but I decided that Meggy had seen enough magic for one day. “A blanket will be fine.”
As she headed out, she paused in the doorway and glanced back. “You can drop it,” she said softly. “The glamour, I mean. If you want to. I, uh . . . I don’t mind.”
I don’t sleep much, as a rule. Two or three hours is usually more than sufficient to see me through the day, but the old futon and my guilty mind conspired that night to deprive me of even that short stretch.
Trying not to think about what I had promised Meggy was like telling my tongue not to probe a sore in my mouth. Oh, I had little doubt that Greg would see me, especially if I brought tidings of the long lost diary, but surely he would find my request as repugnant as I did. He was a father, after all, and what father would condemn his child to binding unless said child had set out upon a promising career in supervillainy?
This one, apparently.
The girl—Olive, Moyna, whomever she wanted to be—would never forgive me if I went through with it, that much was plain. And she wasn’t likely to thank her mother for the spell, even if I took full blame for the procedure.
It wasn’t a permanent thing, I mused, trying to convince myself that I wasn’t the worst parent to walk the earth. Just for a few months, maybe a year or two, long enough for the girl to get to know Meggy. Once she learned to like her mother, once they got along . . .
Fat chance, my head insisted. Olive would never love Meggy, not the way that Meggy loved her baby’s memory.
But what if I took Meggy up on her offer and moved in? The idea became sweeter every time my thoughts circled back to it. We wouldn’t need the bind if I was around to keep Olive in check. I could change my name, my face, start over here with Meggy. Do what I should have done sixteen years before.
But for how long? my head cut in. Fifty years? Sixty?
I could give Meggy the illusion of her youth back, but in the end, it would only be smoke and mirrors. Even if she loved me, even if she wanted to be with me, Meggy would leave me, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. Someday, not too many years away, she would be a fading memory and a face in photographs. And for the rest of my life, I would carry her with me, her eyes and her smile and the unfillable void she had created in my soul. A few decades of domestic comfort with Meggy would be bliss, but the cost would be dear.
I sat bolt upright to the sound of Meggy screaming my name, scanning the dark room for the source of the muffled noise as I tried to reconcile the sound with reality and calm my racing heart. After a few seconds, I realized that it was coming from downstairs, and I ran through the unfamiliar house, trying to remember how to get to the basement. Two wrong turns later, I found the basement door, half-tripped down the staircase, and found Meggy standing on the edge of the strangest gate I had ever seen, straining to hold on to Olive’s arm.
“Help me!” she cried, and I grabbed her around the waist to anchor her to the floor.
On the other side of the gate, my mother stood beside her golden filigreed throne, her perfectly arching eyebrows scrunched together in befuddlement as her guards took up positions around her. Olive, halfway through the gate, reached for Mother as she tried to pull herself through. “I’m coming!” she yelled in Fae as the unsteady gate crackled around her like lightning. “Take me back, don’t leave me here, Mother, I love you!”
“Colin, I can’t hold her!” Meggy screamed, trying to grip Olive’s bandaged arm. “It’s too strong, it’s sucking her in!”
I dug in my heels against the carpet and fought the strange pull of the gate. This was nothing of the girl’s creation, and certainly nothing of Mother’s—gates are passive things, but this one threatened to wrench all of us across the border. “We’ve got to back up!” I said, yelling to be heard over the noise. “Pull back with me!”
“I can’t! It’s too . . . no!” she howled, scrabbling in the air as Olive finally freed herself and raced into Faerie. “No, come back, Olive! Olive!”
The girl tumbled out of the gate at Mother’s feet, beaming, her pink ensemble once again a black dress. Mother cocked her head and frowned at me in puzzlement. “Coileán?” she called, almost inaudible over the crescendoing noise of the failing gate. “What is this you’ve done now?”
“Olive, come back!” Meggy wailed, and struggled against my grasp. “Let me go, I’ve got to get her back, I’ve got to—”
“It’s suicide!” I shouted in her ear. “We’ll get her back, but you can’t go through that gate, there’s something wrong about it!”
Desperate and enraged, Meggy ignored me. She fought with a strength I’d never seen in her before, and before I realized it, she had pulled us to the brink. “Let me go!” she shrieked, and then she pivoted and employed the one defense tactic taught to all women.
Her knee aimed true, and I barely managed to keep hold of her wrist as I fought the urge to simultaneously crumple and throw up. “Meggy, no,” I groaned, clinging to her against the pull of the gate. “No, not like this, I’ll get her back, I promise—”
“Not my baby. Not again,” she said, and slipped free.
“No!” I yelled, but by then, it was too late. The gate was pulling Meggy through.
I stood a few inches from the border, buffeted by the wind, and watched helplessly as she was carried away from me, straight to my mother’s feet. And when Meggy raised her head and looked back at me, the face I saw wasn’t the face I had seen an instant before. It was younger—not that of the woman I had last known, but of a younger version of Meggy, scared and suddenly quite small with the distance between us. “Colin!” she called, and stretched out her hand. “Colin, help me!”
“I’m coming!” I yelled, and sprang for the gate.
I leapt through empty air and plowed into Meggy’s folding chairs, then hit my head against the plastic table and sank onto the carpet. When I looked back, dazed, the gate was gone.
As if from a great distance, a voice at the top of the stairs called down in Fae, “Who’s the stronger now?” Its owner laughed, and before I could shout a reply, I was alone.
Chapter 7
Dawn found me kneeling on the basement floor with a knot on my temple, trying to figure out why the universe had stopped working as I pushed down waves of panic. Opening a gate isn’t difficult, not for someone like me, but I couldn’t do it. In the past, it had been as simple as pushing on an invisible wall. Now, not only would the door not budge, but the wall itself had disappeared. There was simply nothing to push against, and my efforts to run to Faerie proved futile. And that wasn’t the worst of it.
My first clue that something was awry, other than the massive problem of the gate, was when the basement wards co
llapsed. I felt them go down, like a battery running out of power, then paused and sniffed deeply. The wards hadn’t failed purely due to their shoddy construction, I realized. They had failed because the magic that was powering them was ebbing.
As a test, I started a fire in my palm and watched with relief as the flames danced, but they were smaller than usual, paler and colder, and I quickly put the fire out.
What had opened in the basement hadn’t been a gate; gates didn’t pull, they didn’t throw you through ungracefully, and they didn’t close that quickly. If the look on Mother’s face was to be trusted, whatever it was had been a surprise to her, too. And the fact that no one had come after me in the intervening hours gave weight to my suspicion that the worst had happened.
Faerie was closed off, which meant that the little magic left on this side was fading away.
And something told me that the same wasn’t true for the other realm, the Gray Lands.
The Arcanum had done its best over the years to plug up the naturally occurring gates into that realm, but those plugs were created with concentrated magic. Once they failed, the gates would reopen, new gates would continue to form, and the strange etheric force of the Gray Lands, known to us as dark magic, would flood across the border—and, in all likelihood, so would that realm’s denizens.
There were nightmares in the Gray Lands. Without magic to fight back, I would be a sitting duck. The entire mortal realm would be.
So there I knelt, by halves terrified and despairing, unable to rescue Meggy and Olive, but at a loss for a better move than remaining where the gate had last been. My last glimpse of Meggy wrenched at me, her fear, her eyes . . .
Younger.
It made no sense.
Passing into Faerie strips away illusion. You can’t come through and maintain a disguise, and anyone burdened by a bind or aided by a spell or enchantment quickly finds himself unburdened or unaided on the other side, as the case might be. Sure, you can do whatever you want once you’re in Faerie, magically speaking, but the process of going through makes you momentarily vulnerable, naked of glamour.
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