I picked up my stuff, went to the mailbox, and pulled the LM’s photo album out of my backpack. I looked through it for a few moments until I found the perfect picture of Alina, standing in front of the arched entry at Trinity College. She was smiling, openmouthed on a laugh. I smiled back.
I turned it over and scrawled on the back:
She was happy.
I love you, Mom and Dad.
I’ll be home as soon as I can.
Mac.
You may find you have need of me, MacKayla,” said V’lane, as we materialized in the street outside BB&B.
I’d been thinking that very thing. There was no disputing that V’lane was the fastest elevator in the building. Dani was great on the ground but not across oceans. Sifting was an invaluable tool. Even if V’lane appeared only half the times I called him, it would be better than nothing. I would never count on him again, but I would use him if I could.
“I cannot always be checking to see if you do. When my queen does not have me occupied with her tasks, I am busy battling with other Seelie against our dark brethren. They do not consider your earth enough. They seek to wrest our court from us, as well. My queen is in ever-increasing danger, as is my home.” He turned me in his arms, tilted my face up, and ran a gentle finger over my lips.
I looked up at him. I was still numb from seeing Mom and Dad, from the conversation I’d overheard. I wanted him to give me his name back, and quickly, so I could drag myself inside, shower, and crawl into a warm, familiar bed. Pull the covers up over my head and try with all my might to fall asleep instantly, so I wouldn’t have to think anymore.
Doom the whole world.
No way. Not me. They had the wrong person, wrong prophecy. I shook my head.
He misinterpreted it. “It is a gift,” he said stiffly.
Wounded, proud prince. I touched his face. He’d given me my mom and dad, my whole town, the entire state of Georgia back. “I was shaking my head at something I was thinking, not your words. Yes, I’d like to have your name, V’lane.”
He gave me that brilliant smile again, then his mouth was on mine. This time, when he kissed me, the unpronounceable Fae name slid sweeter than tupelo honey across my tongue and pooled there, warm and delicious, filling my mouth with a feast of taste and sensation beyond description before melting into the meat of it. Unlike the other times he’d implanted his name in my tongue, it felt natural, unobtrusive. Also unlike those times, I wasn’t battered by an erotic attack, forced into orgasm by his touch. It was an extraordinary kiss, but it invited without invading, gave without taking.
He drew back. “We are learning from each other,” he said. “I begin to understand Adam.”
I blinked. “The first man? You know about Adam and Eve?” V’lane didn’t seem the kind to study human creation myths.
“No. One of my race that chose to become human,” he clarified. “Ah, Barrons comes growling.” He gave the startling equivalent of a human snicker and was gone. I reached instinctively for my spear. It was back in the holster. I frowned. I’d forgotten to check. Had it ever been gone?
I turned. “Growling” was a mild word for it. Barrons stood in the doorway, and if looks could kill, I’d have been flayed alive in the street.
“One would think you’d have gotten all the Fae shoved in your mouth you could stand, Ms. Lane.”
“One would think that I’d gotten all the male shoved in my mouth that I could stand. One day I’m going to choose to kiss a man. Not because I’m being raped and not because I’m being scraped up off a street named Pri-ya and not because I’m being given the mystical equivalent of a cell phone with all the usual cell phone service problems but because I bloody well want to!”
I pushed past him. He didn’t move an inch. Electricity sizzled where our bodies brushed.
“Tomorrow night. Ten o’clock. Be here, Ms. Lane.”
“I’m fighting with the sidhe-seers,” I tossed over my shoulder.
“Call it an early night. Or find somewhere else to live.”
At noon the next day, Dani, all the other sidhe-seers at the abbey, and I were gathered in one of their enormous cafeterias, seated around tables, listening as Rowena addressed the crowd, and, oh, did the woman know how to sway sentiment!
The canny GM was the consummate politician. I listened, committing her tactics to memory. Analyzing the words she chose, how she strung them together, how she played emotion for everything it was worth.
Yes, she said, she would put aside her differences with the young rogue sidhe-seer who’d never been properly trained and whose sister had betrayed the entire world by helping her lover—the villainous Lord Master—free the Unseelie to kill billions of people around the globe, including two hundred of our own. Yes, she would agree to do whatever they felt must be done to win the most important battle humankind had ever faced. She could not in good conscience step aside or take off the robes she’d been wearing for forty-seven years—more than twice as long as the rogue sidhe-seer had even been alive—but she would extend her hand in welcome, if that was what her beloved daughters felt was imperative she do, despite numerous and compelling arguments to the contrary.
After her little speech, I could see doubt on some of the women’s faces again, so I stood and delivered mine. Yes, I would put aside my differences with the old woman who’d turned me away the first night she’d ever met me, without even asking my name, who’d told me in no uncertain terms to go die somewhere else and leave her alone—when it had been obvious I was a sidhe-seer in desperate need of help. Why hadn’t I been one of her “beloved daughters” that night? Was it my fault I’d been raised with no idea what I was? Why hadn’t she taken me in?
But I would forgive her and, yes, I would work with the woman who’d withheld the weapons that could kill Fae, refused to let the sidhe-seers do the job they’d been born to do, and run a constant slander campaign against my sister, whose greatest mistake was being seduced by a Fae-turned-human with hundreds of thousands of years of experience creating illusions and seducing women.
Who among us might not have fallen under such circumstances? They’d met V’lane. If they wanted to throw stones, now was the time to do it, or never. Alina had ultimately seen through the Lord Master’s act and had paid with her life. Again, where had Rowena been when my sister was struggling to understand what she was? How had Alina and I gotten lost in the sidhe-seer shuffle, abandoned to a life with no training?