Her response—slamming her head back so that her skull impacted with my forehead—was less of a bonus, and more of a predictable problem. Blood gushed from my nose, clearing my head almost instantly. I squeezed harder.
“Calm down,” I spat. “You think I care if you’re not human? I don’t care. I only care that you were apparently trying to keep me away from my own daughter.”
Miranda jerked away from me. She was surprisingly strong, and I didn’t want to hurt her, not when I was going to have to explain it to Cliff. “Hi, I beat up your wife because she likes to play with herbs . . .” wasn’t the sort of thing that was exactly going to fly with him. I fell back, wiping my bloody nose with one hand, and watched her warily.
“I am entirely human,” she snarled, and grabbed her purse from the edge of the counter, rummaging through its contents with one hand. I expected her to draw a knife, given what she’d been lunging for before. Instead, she produced a wicked-looking rose thorn with tin foil wrapped around its base. It was half the length of my thumb, its surface glistening like it had been dipped in something viscous and terrible. She pointed it at me, then at May, continuing to move it back and forth between us.
“You stay back.” Her voice was low, tight, controlled. “You stay back, and I won’t have to use this.”
“Do you regularly carry super jumbo thorns in your purse?” asked May. “Aren’t you afraid of stabbing yourself when you go for your checkbook?”
Miranda scowled at her. “Who uses a checkbook anymore? I do all my banking online.”
“How progressive of you,” I said. “What happens if one of us gets stabbed with your little gardening project?”
“Pray you don’t find out,” she said.
“Yeah, okay,” I said, and grabbed her.
As expected, she stabbed me with the thorn, embedding it in my wrist. A wave of dizziness passed over me. I stepped back, letting her go in order to pull the thorn out and jam it into my jacket pocket. The dizziness passed as quickly as it had come. If there was any charring or blistering of the skin, my human disguise hid it.
May rolled her eyes. “You’re not immune to poison, you asshole,” she said.
“Yeah, but I’ll recover.” I drew my knife, holding it in front of myself in a defensive position. “Drop the purse, Miranda.”
She dropped the purse, eyes gone incredibly wide. “How are you still standing?” she demanded. “That should have felled anything even partially fae.”
I considered lying to her, but I didn’t see the point. She knew too much. Somehow, she knew too much, and this was going to have to be dealt with.
Cliff would break if his wife disappeared right after his daughter went missing. He would never recover, and even if he never knew enough to blame me, I would know that I had done this to him. I’d never been Miranda’s biggest fan, but it wasn’t until that moment that I began to hate her.
She raised her hands, showing us that they were empty, that her inexplicable thorn had been the only weapon she possessed—or at least, the only weapon she had had access to. We were still in her home. We needed to proceed with caution.
“May, get her purse,” I snapped. “I don’t want her going for whatever else she might have in there.”
“Lip balm,” said Miranda dully. “Throat lozenges, painkillers, some tampons. No weapons. I have nothing else in there that can hurt you.”
“You’ll forgive me if we don’t take your word for that,” I said, while May grabbed the purse and retreated out of Miranda’s reach, starting to rummage through it. “What the hell are you? What did you do to Gillian? What did you try to do to me?”
“I didn’t do anything to Gillian. I love her. I’ve raised her like she was my own daughter, and I’ve never harmed her, not in the slightest.” Miranda looked at me, eyes pleading, like my understanding suddenly mattered to her. Like she needed me to believe her more than she needed anything else. “Whoever took her, they didn’t take her because of me.”
Oddly, I did believe her, at least about that. Whoever took her was much more likely to have taken her because of me. “How did you know to ward her room against the fae? What are you?”
“‘Who’ might be a better question,” said Miranda. “I—oh, God, I didn’t want to have this conversation today. Or ever. Honestly, I was aiming for ‘never’ as a good time. I’m so sorry.”
“Maybe you have good reason to be,” I snarled. “You were using something that could kill people to keep the fae away from Gillian, while she was on a college campus. You’ve made a lot of people sick.”
“They wouldn’t get sick if they kept their distance,” she said. “It’s just hedge magic. Really, October, I expected you to recognize basic charm design, after everything I know you’ve gotten up to.” The corner of her mouth twitched. I realized, shocked, that she was smiling. “I was always impressed by your marshwater work. I don’t understand why you stopped. It’s not like those pureblooded bastards would ever see it coming.”
May and I both stared at her.
“Lady, what the hell are you?” I asked. My voice didn’t shake. I was proud of that. “I know you’re not a changeling, so are you a merlin? Are you one of the Firstborn? What?” They were two different extremes, but both were more feasible than anything else. I would have spotted a changeling or a pureblood the second Cliff had introduced me to his new wife. As a merlin, she would know about magic while having so little fae blood in her that I wouldn’t necessarily be able to detect her through my usual means, especially when I wasn’t looking for anything out of the ordinary. As one of the Firstborn, she would have the necessary strength to hide herself from me without difficulty.
“Neither,” said Miranda. “I was hoping things wouldn’t come to this. I didn’t think you’d identify the sachets. That was my fault, and I take responsibility for it. I got sloppy.”
“You’re still not answering my question.”
Miranda sighed, looking away. “I suppose you’re right, and I suppose you’ve the right to know,” she said. “I really am human. I never lied about that, although I may have omitted a few things. But my name isn’t Miranda. It’s Janet. I’m your grandmother.”
THIRTEEN
EVERYTHING FROZE. IT FELT like my heart stopped working properly, each beat thudding through my body like a hammer blow. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t do anything but stare at this woman—this utterly human woman, with her golden hair and her eyes like blue heather growing in the Scottish hills, with her frizzy braid and the freckles across the bridge of her nose—who was claiming the impossible.
“Janet” is a common name. It has been for centuries, falling in and out of fashion but never disappearing. And humans change their names all the time. They don’t share the fae reluctance to have a name someone else has already used. There were plenty of explanations that didn’t have to mean anything.
None of them explained why she was claiming to be my grandmother, or why she said the name “Janet” like she knew what it meant. This wasn’t possible. It didn’t make sense.
“I thought I recognized you,” said May. Her voice was shrill, even filtered through my hammer heartbeat and overwhelming confusion. “I told myself it wasn’t possible, that it was just that you look sort of like Toby—which is creepy, by the way, and says bad things about your relationship with Cliff—and I was seeing things that weren’t there, but I wasn’t. I recognized you. I saw you in Oberon’s hall the season before he disappeared. You were dressed like one of his handmaids, and no one questioned your right to be there, or explained why the father of us all would want some random mortal woman in his knowe.”
“You demand to know what I am, but what are you?” said Miranda—Janet—sounding dismayed.
“Like we said before, I’m her sister. I’m also her Fetch,” said May. She glanced at me. “I thought I was seeing things, Toby, I swear. I would have told you if I
’d realized there was actually something strange about her.”
I believed her. I still couldn’t take my eyes off Janet, my mortal lover’s mortal wife, standing there with raised hands and a strangely hopeful glimmer in her eyes, like this conversation somehow meant that we could come to an accord.
“Fetch?” demanded Janet, the hopeful glimmer dying, replaced by horror. She turned her attention on me. “Do you know what that means? She’s a death omen, she’s—”
“My sister,” I said flatly. “She’s been more family to me than any of the people I’m actually related to. Don’t worry about her. She’s none of your concern.”
“If she’s riding with you while you search for Gillian, she’s entirely my concern! A Fetch is a harbinger of doom! You’ll die, and you’ll leave that sweet child stranded in some hell she had no part in making!”
“You don’t even know the fae took her!” I countered—even though I was fairly sure, by this point, that no one else could have done it. The smell of rowan. The house with the chicken legs. There were just too many impossible elements. “With as much poison as you packed into her dorm room, all we’d need to do to find a fae kidnapper is look for the person in the coma with the backpack full of Benadryl! May is not. Your. Concern. She is my family. She’s the only real family I have, since you swept in and stole my daughter.”
Janet’s face fell. Root and branch, why was that name bothering me so much? “It was a mean trick, coming in while you were gone and taking Gillian for my own; I’ll own that.” Her voice took on a pleading note. “But please, try to understand. No one knew where you were. I thought you’d taken your mother’s example and run away rather than facing your responsibilities. Anyone with eyes could see the girl was mostly human. She was never going to be offered that spiteful bargain your people call a ‘choice.’ I thought you’d thrown her away. I was trying to do right by the blood of my blood, and you were gone so long, I truly came to love her as if she were my own child, and not my great-granddaughter. Then you came back, and I . . .” She spread her hands. “I couldn’t handle losing another child to Faerie. I told myself it was the right thing to do. That she deserved a mother who could stay, who wouldn’t be led astray by a society she would never belong to.”
I stared at her. “That sounded almost like an apology.”
“Because it was.” She looked me squarely in the eyes. “I am not sorry to have been her mother, but I am sorry I didn’t make room for you. I’m so sorry.”
“What the hell is happening?” My lips were numb, but my voice was working fine. That was good. I suddenly had a lot to say. “You can’t be my grandmother! You can’t know any of this! You’re a human! You—”
“I was Oberon’s lover,” said Janet. Time seemed to stop again. “There’s a long story as to how that happened, and I’ll be happy to tell it to you. Later. This isn’t the time. He loved me, and we had a daughter, and we named her ‘Amandine,’ because he knew I missed the almond trees that grew in my father’s orchards. He knew how much I missed my father, and Oberon was always kind, when the world gave him room to be. That’s what I hold to most, so long after. That he was kind, even when it wasn’t necessary. But then he had to go away, and he decided it wasn’t safe for me to be associated with our daughter, not with my history. He had her placed in a blind fosterage. By the time I found where he’d put her, it was too late.”
“Too late for what?” I whispered, horrified. It was like listening to my own story turned on its head. The missing parent, the child removed and raised by someone else . . .
“Too late for me.” Janet tipped her chin up. I saw my mother in that gesture, stubbornness and pride mixed up together until they became indistinguishable. I saw my mother, and August, and Gillian, and myself.
That was the moment when I started to believe her.
“Amandine didn’t need a mother. She certainly didn’t need a human mother, and the implications that carried. She didn’t need a family at all, apart from the fosterage her father had arranged. She had no place for me, and I’m not foolish enough to go against one of Oberon’s Firstborn, even when that Firstborn is my own daughter. Maeve’s curse aside, she would have crushed me.”
“Maeve’s . . . ?” Once again, I was starting to feel like I needed a flowchart to keep up with everything. I realized I was still holding my knife in front of me. Grudgingly, I lowered it. Somehow, I didn’t think stabbing her was going to do me any good. It might make me feel better, but it wouldn’t help.
“Oh. Did I leave that part out?” Smile turning wry, Janet tucked her hair behind one ear and said, “Until she returns, until she releases me, I don’t age, and I don’t die. At least not of anything I’ve been able to discover thus far, and believe me, I’ve discovered a lot of things. Plague, blood loss, poison—I recover. Until Maeve lets me go, here I am, preserved like a body in a bog.”
“Most people would go for the ‘mosquito in amber’ metaphor these days,” said May.
Janet shrugged. “Most people haven’t been through a hundred years of speech therapy to stop sounding like they belong in a part of Scotland that barely even exists anymore.” She paused and cleared her throat. Her next words were draped in a brogue so thick it should have sounded like a parody. Instead, it sounded like the world finally coming clear. “They forbade us maidens all who wore gold in our hair to come nor go near Caughterha; said young Tam Lin was there. More fool me, who never once learned how to listen.”
The floor seemed to drop out from under my feet. “You’re Janet,” I whispered.
Janet looked relieved. “Yes,” she said, brogue vanishing back into her carefully-schooled California accent. “I am.”
I didn’t say anything. It didn’t feel like there was anything left that I could say.
“Wait.” May held up her hands. We both turned to her. “You’re really Amandine’s mother?”
“Yes,” said Janet. Then she frowned. “You swear you’re not here because October is marked for death?”
“She was, once, but she got better,” said May. She glanced at me. “I mean, she still runs into danger like it’s her damn job, but it’s not because she has some predestined fate waiting in the wings to eat her.”
“That’s because it is my damn job,” I said. “I’m pretty good at surviving, though. May’s been living with me for years. Since just before I took down Blind Michael.”
Janet blanched, becoming so pale she looked like she was on the verge of passing out. There couldn’t have been any blood left in her head. “Blind Michael?” she repeated. “The horror of the hills, and you stopped him?”
“I had to,” I said simply. “He hurt my family.”
Janet blinked. Then, bitterly, she laughed. “As have I, is that what you say next?”
“You know, for someone who’s presumably been shopping on Amazon and yelling at the cable company for the last decade or so, you sure do talk like a romance novel,” said May.
“My apologies.” Janet shoved her braid back, grimacing. “It’s a bit automatic when speaking to the fae. Even when Oberon was here to protect me from his own people, I was human. I always have been: there’s no changing that. I learned the best way not to get hexed or hurt was to be as polite as possible.”
“You weren’t polite when you shoved your way into my home and accused me of kidnapping, or when you covered my daughter in something that would literally poison me,” I said. My frustration was starting to get the better of me. I stopped, forcing myself to take a deep breath.
Janet was the source of the sachets. The sachets were one of the only clues we had. Therefore, Janet needed to answer some goddamn questions.
“When did you start dipping my child in herbal toxins?” I asked.
“After she was stolen by your world for the first time,” she replied. “She came back changed. I assume that was your work?”
I nodded, the w
ords catching in my throat until I swallowed them and said, “I offered her the Choice. It was the only way to save her life.”
Janet sighed. “I thought . . . when that happened, I thought that was you ceding her to me. You pulled Faerie from her blood. I thought you were saying I was her true mother, and it was my responsibility to keep her safe. So I kept her safe. I started making teas for her to drink and scents for her to wear, anything that would keep Faerie just that little bit at bay. And it worked! For so long, it worked.”
“Except for the part where anyone fae who touched her got sick, which meant they could figure out something was up with her,” I countered. “Best case would have been her getting reported to the local nobility as a human who knew about the fae—and I say ‘best’ because that would have been run up the chain of command to the queen, and I might have heard about it before she wound up turned into an apple tree or something. This wasn’t subtle.”
“She attends Berkeley,” said Janet. “There is no local nobility.”
May and I both stared at her. Finally, carefully, I asked, “How do you know that?”
“Before he left, Oberon promised me that wherever I chose to settle would have no one watching over it, no ruler tied to the land more directly than whatever king or queen claimed it as part of their domain.” Her lips twitched, like she was trying not to smile. “He wasn’t quite ready to make a queen of me. Said it might send the wrong message, given everything that had happened, and given I’m immortal solely because his absent wife decreed I should be. A pity. I would have been fetching in a crown.”
It took me a moment to find my voice again. “The people who stole Gillian used her clothing—her bloody clothing—to lay a false trail into a courtyard that shouldn’t have been there, full of things that shouldn’t exist. No one had used magic there since it was created, and apparently, all the local royalty know about it but don’t tell anyone, because there’s an agreement that predates any of them. Is that . . . ?”