There were windows located on both sides of the stairwell as we climbed, filling the air with a gentle, shifting light. No matter how hard I squinted, I couldn’t see anything beyond that light. Everything was a colorless gray that could have been mist, or clouds, or even frothy water. I was still squinting when the Luidaeg put her hand on my arm. I glanced up at her, startled.
She shook her head. “Don’t,” she said. “The things you could see aren’t things you want to see. Just keep walking.”
“Sometimes I think spending time with someone they used to write cautionary tales about is bad for my health.”
The Luidaeg laughed. “Honey, if you knew how many of those stories I’m in, you’d never leave your house again.”
“Sometimes I don’t want to leave my house anyway,” I admitted. I glanced over my shoulder. The curvature of the stairs meant the door at the bottom was long since out of sight. “The wards will still let Tybalt in, right?”
“As long as he doesn’t abuse my charity, I won’t close them against him, and that man could track the scent of you across an ocean if he had to.” The Luidaeg kept walking. “He’ll be back. As soon as he’s finished taking care of whatever mess you’ve made so that you don’t have to, he’ll be back.”
I wanted to feel bad about that, about running out on my friends and allies while there was still work to be done. The false Queen needed to be taken to Arden and forced to stand trial for what she’d done—and we still didn’t even know the full scope of what that was. Dugan was out there somewhere, unseen and only half-suspected. Kennis was a living citizen of Faerie who’d been used as a booby trap. I wanted to believe she was the only one. Somehow, I couldn’t quite manage it.
I couldn’t quite manage feeling bad, either. Losing Gillian had long been one of my greatest regrets, a shining centerpiece in a long chain of things I’d failed to protect, or do, or be. Now she was waiting at the top of this staircase, her life changed forever by something she had never chosen, something I’d tried to protect her from. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t the one who’d forced her into Faerie. This was still my fault. She already hated me. What if this was the moment when I really lost her forever, and we were trapped in the same world, unable to go back to the polite distance that had kept my heart from breaking up until now?
The Luidaeg smacked me on the shoulder. I turned to her, eyes wide and startled.
“Stop,” she said, not unkindly. “You’re chasing the tide again, and you’re never going to catch it.”
“Excuse me?”
“Your head. It’s got its own undertow, you know, and if you swim too deep, it can suck you down. You can’t chase the tide. You need to stay on the shore and let it come to you.” She shook her head. “I’m not going to tell you that everything is going to be fine. I wouldn’t do it even if I was still allowed to lie. Some things are too cruel even for a sea witch. But I will tell you that what’s on the other side of that door is never going to be as bad as the undertow in your own mind.”
I blinked. We had reached the top of the stairs. A closed door with a rounded top and a seashell design subtly worked into the wood waited in front of us, set into a frame that gleamed faintly in the light, like it had been dusted in pearl. I reached for the handle, then hesitated, looking back at the Luidaeg.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“You’re stalling,” she said. “We’re in my home. I live here. I’ve lived here for a very long time. Now go and see your child. Do what I can no longer do. Be a mother.”
I swallowed, and it felt like I was forcing a stone down my throat, something hard and unyielding that scratched my flesh as it passed. Then I grasped the handle, which moved easy under my hand, pushed the door open, and stepped inside. The door swung closed behind me.
The Luidaeg didn’t follow.
The room was small and round, as befitted a room at the top of a tower. The windows looked out on the San Francisco shoreline from an angle that I knew for a fact matched nothing in the part of the city where the Luidaeg’s apartment was located. There didn’t seem to be enough light pollution out there, as if the windows were somehow pointed at the past. Stranger things have happened in Faerie, and I knew that. I also knew that I was stalling. Taking a deep breath, I pulled my eyes away from the window and considered the rest of the room.
The furniture was old, heavy oak that should have seemed like it was too much for the space, but it was saved by the combination of its own delicate carving and the gauzy curtains that softened and blunted the walls. A wardrobe; a dresser; a desk; a bed. The curtains around the bed were thicker, allowing the occupant to shut out the better part of the light, and they were drawn, transforming her into an outline that could as easily have been a pile of pillows in a comedy as my daughter. My heart hammered. My head spun. I took a step forward.
That first step seemed to break the seal on the rest of them. It wasn’t easy to move, but it was possible, and once I’d done it, the next step came a little easier, and the one after that, and the one after that, until I was standing next to the bed. I pulled the curtains aside, and there she was. My girl. My Gillian.
The Luidaeg had changed her clothes, dressing her in a simple blue sweater and a pair of dark pants. I should have been annoyed, but all I could manage was gratitude. I wasn’t sure my heart could have handled seeing my daughter soaked in her own blood. Her chest rose and fell in a slow, easy rhythm, the breathing of someone sunk into a deep slumber.
There was a seal’s pelt draped around her shoulders, burnished silver dotted with patches of deeper gray. She would be beautiful in the water, like all the Selkies were, like Connor had been. I put a hand over my mouth, smothering any sound I might have made. Elf-shot had taken my Selkie lover from me, reduced him to so much meat for the night-haunts to claim. And now elf-shot had, however unintentionally, given my Selkie daughter back to me.
The signs of her renewed fae heritage weren’t in her face yet, but they would be. Her eyes would darken; her ears would take on subtle points. Maybe she’d have spots in her hair like Connor had, or speckled rosettes ghosting along the skin of her back and arms. The change would come on slowly, keeping pace with her ability to disguise herself from human eyes.
Not for the first time since I’d learned the true origin of the Selkies, I thought the Luidaeg had been kinder to them than she’d had any cause to be. She needed them to keep the skins of her dead children alive, yes, but she could have punished them far more severely than she had. In her own way, she still loved them. In her own way, she still tried.
I knelt, taking one of Gillian’s hands in mine, and paused at the first real sign of change. A thin membrane of skin had formed at the base of her fingers, connecting each of them about halfway to the first knuckle.
“It’s a good thing you weren’t studying to be a surgeon,” I murmured, and laughed unsteadily. Somehow my laughter turned into tears, great, racking sobs that rose up from my toes and traveled through my body in waves. I bent forward, forehead to the mattress, and wept.
A hand touched the crown of my head. I sat up with a start.
Gillian’s eyes were open. The edges of her pupils were beginning to bleed black into the foggy blue of her irises, washing the color away, making it something else for her to mourn. I wondered, for an instant, whether she would ever be able to look at her recolored eyes without hating me a little, the way I hated my own mother for changing me to save me. Then the moment passed, and I was staring at my daughter, and she was staring back at me, and there were no illusions between us. No illusions at all.
“M . . .” she started, and stopped, swallowing the syllable. It was such a familiar gesture that it ached. She tried again: “Toby?”
“Hi,” I whispered.
“I . . . your ears.” Her eyes widened as she struggled not to stare. “I thought I dreamt it. I thought I dreamt . . .” She started to shiver, sitting
upright and clutching the blankets over her chest. “This is a dream. I am dreaming right now.”
“You’re not, honey. I’m sorry, but you’re awake.” I stood, taking a step back and giving her as much space as I could without leaving the room. “This is all really happening.”
“No, it’s not. This can’t be happening.” She clutched the blanket tighter. The motion caused her fingers to brush against the edge of the sealskin wrapped around her shoulders. She flinched away from it, and my heart broke.
Hearts are resilient. They can heal over and over again. That’s the good part. The bad part is that having a resilient heart means it can be broken so many times that it feels like it should never recover, like it should be nothing but a pile of shards in my chest. I forced myself to keep breathing as I took another step back, putting even more distance between us. Making it clear that I wasn’t trying to pressure her.
“Gillian . . .” I stopped. What was I supposed to say? That she’d lost her humanity, but it was okay, she still had her life? How well had that line worked on me? I was more human than my own changeling daughter, now. A Selkie is either a Selkie or they’re not, and if she set her skin aside, she wouldn’t be a Selkie anymore. She’d just be a dead girl.
“That woman, that awful woman, she stabbed me.” Gillian looked down at her hands and flinched again at the sight of the webs between her fingers. She closed her eyes, looking at nothing as she continued, “She stabbed me with an arrow and I thought I was going to die, and why can’t I remember what she looked like? She nearly killed me. Why can’t I remember?”
“She’s a pureblood, and humans have trouble looking at the fae,” I said. “You were too human before. Your head couldn’t handle looking at what she really was.” The false Queen’s beauty had always been the kind that tore people down, rather than building them up. Looking at a pureblood as a human or a thin-blooded changeling could be dangerous, because the mortal mind was never intended to behold things that far outside the natural world.
Gillian froze. I reviewed my words and winced as I realized what I’d said wrong.
“What do you mean, I was too human before?” she asked.
I counted carefully to ten before I replied with a question of my own: “What did they tell you when they woke you up?”
Gillian opened her eyes. The black had progressed in just those few seconds, slithering across the blue like smoke, clouding and concealing it. Soon enough, it would be gone forever. “The other woman, the one with the green eyes, she made me drink this stuff that tasted like seawater, and then she said, um.” She paused before reciting, “‘This isn’t a perfect solution, and I’m sorry, but you deserve better, and so does your mother, and some debts are too old to ever be paid.’ Then she tied this thing around my shoulders and told me to go to sleep again, and I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I wasn’t even tired, and I fell asleep.”
“That was the Luidaeg,” I said. “You may hear people call her the sea witch. She needed you to sleep so you could get used to the skin.”
“The . . . skin?”
Oh, oak and ash, I didn’t have the vocabulary for this. Maybe no one did. The Luidaeg had told the Selkies what they were going to be and then they had told their children, but the knowledge had been passed, over and over again within a closed loop, parent telling child, everyone expecting it. This was new. I took a deep breath.
“Faeries are real,” I said. “Fairy tales get a lot of things wrong, but faeries are real, and when you were born, you were part-faerie, because I was half-faerie. Do you remember a few years ago, when the woman with the red hair snatched you from your bedroom?”
Gillian’s face tightened. “I have nightmares about it.”
“Do you remember the dream you had, before the police found you and brought you home?”
“I . . .” Gillian stopped, staring at me with sudden understanding. “I was in a meadow, and you were there too, only you didn’t look the way you looked in pictures. You looked like you were something else. Like you were my fairy godmother.”
Not exactly the description I would have used for myself, but I nodded anyway. “Yes. Exactly. What happened in the meadow?”
“There were two more versions of me. One of them who looked like you, and one who looked like Daddy.” She hesitated, her face screwing into a look of deep concentration. “You told me I had to choose, because you could only save me if I chose. You looked so sad, and I wanted to be the kind of person who could choose to stay with you, but I couldn’t do it. All I wanted was to go home. I wanted my dad and Miranda. I wanted my room and my things, and I guess that’s why I’m being punished now, isn’t it? Because I chose wrong.”
“Oh, baby, no. No, you’re not being punished. You’re not . . . you did nothing wrong. The choice was yours to make, and you asked for what you needed. No one should ever be angry with you for that. I’m not. I never was.” I’d cried myself to sleep because she hadn’t wanted to be with me, but I had never been angry with her. “That meadow, though, that choice . . . I was there with you. It wasn’t a dream. It was the magic letting you see what you needed to see in order to understand what I was asking. You had been shot with a sort of poison that only kills mortals, whether human or changeling—um, fae who have some human blood in them—and in order to take it out of you, I needed to be able to change your blood. When you asked me to make you human, I did.”
She looked at me with wide, bruise-colored eyes. “That’s why my skin stopped breaking out when I helped Dad work on the car, and why I stopped being so tired in the mornings. Because you took the alien out of me.”
“Not alien: fae,” I said. “And yes. My kind of fae is . . . we’re a little odd. We work with blood. We can make it do what we want. But we can only work with what’s there. When I took the fae blood out of you, I couldn’t ever put it back again.”
“And you took it out of me to save my life. Because I asked you to.”
“Yes.”
Gillian lifted one hand, fingers spread to show the soft new webbing between them. It would thicken and get tougher as it spread, until it connected her fingers all the way to the first knuckle. If the other Selkies I’d known were anything to go by, her manual dexterity wouldn’t be that affected, but all those other Selkies had been raised knowing that one day, if they were lucky, they might go to the sea. They might earn a skin. Gillian . . .
Hadn’t.
“So what the fuck is this?” she asked, voice small and wounded. “Why does everything feel wrong? Why is there fur tied around my shoulders, and why can’t I take it off? What did your weird monster friends do to me?”
I took a sharp breath, forcing my tone to gentle before I said, “The woman whose face you can’t remember stabbed you with the same stuff you’d been shot with before. The stuff that kills humans. It’s called elf-shot. It was tearing you apart, because that’s what it does. You were dying, Gillian. So my friend Tybalt brought you here, at my request, to find out whether there was anything that could be done to save you. I was hoping . . . I don’t know what I was hoping for. I was hoping for a miracle. What I got was a loophole. That skin you’re wearing, it belonged to the youngest daughter of my aunt, the Luidaeg. The woman with the green eyes. When her children . . . died, she put powerful magic into their skins. Anyone who bonds with one of them becomes what’s called a Selkie. A kind of fae. Not the kind you were before you asked me to change you, but still fae, and if you’re fae, the elf-shot can’t kill you.”
She stared at me. “You’re lying.”
“I’m not.”
“You—you orchestrated this whole thing! You wanted this to happen! You wanted me to have to come and live with you!”
“That’s not going to happen.” She was my daughter, I loved her, and I would have been lying if I’d said I had never dreamt about it, never closed my eyes and seen her sitting across the table from Quentin, the two of t
hem close as siblings, arguing over who had stolen whose toast and who had to go make more. But dreams were exactly that: dreams. “You may need to take a little time off from school to adjust to the change, and I apologize for that. It’s still better than dying. And you’re not coming to live with me. You won’t even have to see me if you don’t want to. Your . . . ”
My voice caught in my throat, lodging there like a stone. I couldn’t speak. Gillian narrowed her eyes, looking at me warily.
“What?” she asked.
I swallowed the stone. It settled heavy in my stomach, and I said, “Your mother is here. J—Miranda. She knows about Faerie. She’s always known. She’ll take you home and tell you how to hide yourself from your father until someone can teach you how to spin illusions, and she can take you wherever you need to go.” Probably to Half Moon Bay, to the rambling house occupied by Elizabeth Ryan and her small clan of Selkies. She’d be able to help Gillian adjust to her new reality, and I’d be able to stay far away, missing yet another milestone in my child’s life.
But my child was going to have a life. Maybe not a human life, and maybe not the life she’d been expecting, but a life all the same. That was so much more than I’d expected. I wasn’t going to complain about it.
Gillian sat up a little straighter, some of the worry going out of her face. “Miranda is here? In this weird place?” She paused. Her eyes widened. “Miranda knows about fairies?”
She wasn’t pronouncing the word quite right yet—there was a subtle wrongness to it that told me she was still thinking more Tinkerbell than Blind Michael. She’d have time to learn the difference. I nodded.
“She is,” I said. “When the bad woman took you, she tried to make us think Miranda had done it, that she was the one who’d hurt you. I think she wanted us to fight, to give her more time to get you into hiding.” But that didn’t make sense, did it? The false Queen hadn’t made any effort whatsoever to hide Gillian: if anything, she’d been disappointed that it had taken me so long to follow Jocelyn’s note.