“About Peadar, and about this preoccupation you have with Emmet.”
“Yes, Emmet,” she responded, taking a seat at the table with the best view of the front door. She motioned for me to join her, and I sat across from her. “I cannot warn you away from that one firmly enough. He isn’t what he appears to be.”
“And what if I told you that I already knew that?”
Her head tilted back slightly and her eyes widened as she took in my words. “You know?”
I knew Emmet was not human, even if I wasn’t sure what she believed him to be. “Yes,” I said, justifying my half-truth by holding it up against the years Claire had been keeping secrets from Peter and me. “But I don’t understand why you think I should be afraid of him.”
Her face grew taut, and she leaned into me, grasping my hand in hers. “Because he’ll try to take your son.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Mercy, hear me. I knew the first time I saw Emmet that he spelled trouble. I should have come to you then, but I had hoped to deal with the situation myself, sparing you. I thought I’d found someone who could help me. Someone who could convince Emmet to take off and leave our family alone. When they found Peadar’s body, I knew I couldn’t keep it from you any longer. I had to share the truth with you, for the baby’s sake. I don’t understand why his people need our children, but they find you when you are hopeless. They come to you when you are too desperate to tell them no. They come with their deals and their promises and their lies.”
I pulled my hand from her grasp. “What did they offer you in exchange for your son?” I, of course, had no idea who they even were, but now that Claire was finally sharing her secrets, I wasn’t going to say anything that might stop her.
She was taken aback by my words. Her skin grew ashen, and she leaned forward suddenly, almost as if she were about to pass out. “They promised me,” her words came out in a ragged whisper, “that he would live.” She raised her eyes to meet mine. “He was dying. Blood cancer. The doctors could do nothing for him. Only their kindness forced them to admit this to us and let us bring him home at all. When we got to the bar, she was waiting here for us.”
“She?”
“I have no name for her. Never laid eyes on her before and never laid eyes on her or her kind since, until this Emmet. She was such a beauty. A beauty so perfect I found it impossible to believe her to be anything but good. I thought we’d left her kind back in the old country, but it looks like they followed us here too. She said it was our music that had attracted her to Magh Meall. When she spoke, her words had such power over us.” Claire paused. “Or maybe it was only the hope they offered that affected Colin and me so. She promised us that our boy would live. He would know a life of love and luxury. Her people would raise him as a prince,” she said, her eyebrows knitting together over her sad smile.
“She promised us we would see our son again before we died. It never occurred to us that they would send him back to us a shriveled-up old man. A desecrated corpse.” She began to shake, and I reached out to her. “I don’t know why they would have done that to him, my girl.” She shook her head, her eyes imploring me for an explanation, even though she couldn’t really think I had one to give. But I did, and I could not let her go on thinking her son had been murdered in cold blood.
“They didn’t,” I said, the weight of my guilt collapsing my fear of confession.
“But how could you know that? How could you know what his last minutes were like? What he was thinking as they ripped his heart from him?”
“Because, it didn’t happen like that.” I got up, and then knelt before her. “You know that my family is different, that I am different.”
Her expression turned wary as she looked down at me. “If by that you mean you are a truckload of witches, yes, I’ve always known. I’ve got a bit of the sight myself.”
“Peadar, your son, he didn’t die alone,” I said, reaching up to smooth her hair. “And no one murdered him.”
“Then you tell me what happened to him.” Her voice grew stern. She stopped my hand from stroking her.
“He was lost, confused, and dying when I found him.”
“You found him?” she echoed me.
“He wasn’t alone. I was with him,” I said, trying to ease her pain. “I tried to help him. To restart his heart.”
She pushed herself back with great force, knocking her chair over as she stood. “You? You did this to him?”
“Not to hurt him. To help him,” I pleaded. I stood and took a step toward her, but she raised her hand as if she would slap me.
Her palm quivered as her fingers curled in toward it, leaving only the pointer aimed at me. “Don’t come near me. Not right now. Don’t come near me.”
“Claire, you must know I’d never intentionally hurt your son. I didn’t kill him. I swear. He had no pulse. I was only trying to help. You have to believe I’d never hurt Peter’s brother.”
Her hand fell to her side. Her mouth fell open, and then she laughed. A hard and bitter laugh. “Oh, you stupid girl. You stupid girl. You don’t understand at all.”
“Understand what?”
“The deal Colin and I made. That’s what,” she said and drew nearer. “Peter has no brother. The man whose heart you burned out, he was my son. My only son. My Peter.”
SIXTEEN
Shock sent the sensation that I was falling from my head to my feet, and then back up again. My mouth gaped open, but no words came out.
“That’s the deal we made, my girl. They’d take our Peter, and in return for keeping him alive, we would raise her son. The boy we raised, the boy we love as if he were our own true son, the boy you let fill your womb, he’s one of them, the daoine sidhe. One of the gentry. That is why he can never know any of this.”
“Come on. This is crazy. It can’t be true. There’s no such thing as fairies,” I said. The words came out by reflex, but I myself had encountered stranger things. Even so, even if fairies existed, it was not possible that my Peter could be one of them. That my baby could be half Fae. I placed my palm over my stomach. Ellen had not sensed anything unusual about my son. At least nothing she had told me about.
“And there is no such thing as witches either, but here you stand before me.”
I couldn’t argue that away. “Okay.” I said. “Accepting for the moment that this is possible, how can I keep it from Peter? If it’s true, he has the right to know.”
“But there’s the rub. If you tell him, if he ever learns the truth about his nature, we will lose him. He will go to them. He won’t be able to resist, no matter how much he may love you and his son. Trying to resist would only drive him mad or kill him. No, Mercy, you have to lay aside your opinions of right and wrong and do what I tell you. This secret, the truth about Peter—whom I very much consider my son in spite of it all—you have to take it with you to the grave.” Wow. Twice in one morning. I was still trying to process the fact that Emmet had been right all along when a loud knock rapped the door and both our eyes darted toward it. “They’re here. They don’t know about Peter, so keep your mouth shut about him.”