I sighed again, leaning into his hand. “Who gave you permission to know me this well?”
“Believe it or not, little fish…you did.”
I was mulling that over when the smell of calla lilies and sycamore smoke started to suffuse the room. I stiffened. “Everybody get ready!”
The words were barely out of my mouth when a hole opened in the middle of the ceiling and Chelsea tumbled out, like a lost Alice plummeting into Wonderland. She made a small, wounded sound when she hit the marble, scrambling almost immediately to her feet. Her eyes widened when she saw us.
“Stay back!” she shouted. “You have to stay back! I don’t know when I’m going to jump again!”
A second hole opened next to the first, and Etienne dropped through. Unlike his daughter, he landed on his feet. Both were dirty, with scorch marks on their clothing. Etienne was missing a shoe and looked like he was on the verge of collapse. Chelsea looked even worse.
There was no way I could get to them in time. But I didn’t need to. Pulling the jar of power dampener out of my pocket, I yanked off the baggie and shouted, “Etienne! Think fast!” He looked up just as I threw it at him as hard as I could. His eyes widened, and he snatched the jar out of the air.
Tybalt grabbed my arm. “The plan—”
“I don’t want you touching that stuff. No shapeshifters, remember?”
Across the room, Etienne was struggling with the lid of the jar. Passage through searing cold and magical portals seemed to have done an excellent job of tightening it; he was a trained knight, and the lid wasn’t even budging.
“Daddy!” wailed Chelsea. The air around her was starting to glitter again.
Etienne swore loudly enough for me to hear him, and he stepped closer to Chelsea before flinging the jar at the floor. It exploded, showering glass and power-dampening potion in all directions—including on Chelsea and her father. The glitter in the air died as the solution hit Chelsea’s skin. She stared at Etienne.
“What did you do? How did you stop me?”
He didn’t say anything. He just reached out, gathered her into his arms, and hugged his daughter for the first time.
I waited long enough for them to finish their embrace before starting toward them, stopping well outside the splash radius from the broken jar. “All better?”
Etienne looked up, raw gratitude painting his face. “Yes. Thank you, October. I don’t know how I can ever repay you.”
“Don’t thank me yet,” I said, holding up my hand. The gratitude in his expression died, replaced by broken- hearted understanding. “There’s still something I have to do.”
“I understand.” He let go of Chelsea. “Do what must be done.”
Chelsea looked up at him, confusion and betrayal in her eyes. “Daddy?”
It was amazing, and a little bit heartbreaking, how fast Etienne had become “Daddy” to her. She must have wondered all her life about the man who’d provided the genes that made her not quite human. I just hoped I wasn’t about to take her away from him forever.
“It’s all right, Chelsea. You need to go to October. She’ll make everything better.”
“I’ll try, anyway,” I said, and forced what I hoped would look like a sincere smile. “Hi, Chelsea. Can you come over here?” I paused before adding, “Wipe your hands really, really dry first, okay? I need to hold them, and it’s sort of important we not get any of that goo on me.”
“Is the goo why I stopped jumping?” I nodded. She smiled shyly. “Okay.” Chelsea started toward me, rubbing her hands against the seat of her pants as she approached. When she reached me, she held them out, showing me that they were dry.
“Good.” I took one hand, drawing my knife with the other. Her eyes widened, but she didn’t pull away. “I need to ask you a question, and I need you to give me an honest answer. It’s important. You have to answer for you, and not for your parents—either one of them. Can you do that here, or do you want to go somewhere private?”
Chelsea glanced back at Etienne, who was watching us with a silent, burning intensity. She turned back to me. “I can answer.”
“Okay. Chelsea, when you think about yourself, your place in the world…do you think of yourself as human? Or do you think of yourself as fae?”
It seemed like the whole room held its breath, waiting for Chelsea to answer. I know I wasn’t breathing. No matter how she answered, what I was going to do to her would hurt. I’d done it to my own daughter, but Gillian was unconscious at the time; she didn’t understand the source of the pain. Chelsea would understand. She’d know I was the one doing this horrible thing to her. I didn’t know her well enough to know whether she’d be able to forgive me.
Chelsea frowned, looking down toward her feet. A drop of the power dampener was on the toe of her shoe, glistening slickly. “When I was little, all I wanted was to be normal, so Mom wouldn’t have to spend all her time worrying about me,” she said slowly. “All the other kids got to have sleepovers and do sports, and I had to pretend I wanted to grow up to be Mr. Spock or one of Tolkien’s elves.”
“I bet you made a great Arwen at Halloween,” I said.
“Yeah.” She glanced up at me, smiling—a quick, shy thing that died just as fast. “But I’m not human, am I? I’ve never been human. All the wishing in the world can’t make me human.”
“Does it have to be one or the other?” Chelsea looked at me hopefully, eyes searching my face for an answer. My silence must have been answer enough. Chelsea sighed. “I’m fae. I wanted to be human, but I’m not. I wouldn’t know how to start. I’m me, and being me means being fae.”
“Okay.” I took a breath, not sure how to say what needed to be said. Finally, I settled for just coming out with it: “Chelsea, right now, you’re dangerous. The way you’ve been jumping isn’t normal for Tuatha de Dannan like you and your father. It’s because you’re half-human. Usually, being half-human means you’re less powerful. Sometimes it means the opposite. Sometimes it means you get all the power in the world and nothing to help you control it.”
Chelsea frowned. “So how do we fix that?”
Here it was. “I take the human out of you.”
“You can
“No. Once it’s done, it’s done forever, but you won’t be dangerous anymore. You’ll be able to learn to control your powers. You’ll have a normal life.” A life that would last for centuries, if not millennia.
Chelsea bit her lip. Then, marginally, she nodded.
I didn’t let myself look up. I didn’t want to see the look on Etienne’s face as I turned her hand so that her palm was facing toward the ceiling and ran the edge of my blade—clean, thanks to someone’s efforts while I was asleep, and keen-edged enough to slice through skin without a hitch—across the center of it. Blood welled up immediately, scenting the air with its presence.
I repeated the process with my own hand before sheathing my knife again. Raising my hand to my lips, I got a mouthful of blood. Then I bent, and pressed my mouth against the cut on Chelsea’s hand in a parody of a kiss.
My magic rose around us in a heavy cloud, the smell of copper all but overwhelming the smell of fresh-cut grass. There was a momentary pause as Chelsea’s body tried to figure out what happening.
Then Chelsea screamed like she was being murdered and tried to jerk her hand away.
Etienne was abruptly there, holding her in place. “No, Chelsea, shh, it’s all right, honey, you have to be still. Let October work. It will be over soon. Let her work.”
Chelsea screamed again. I did my best to shut her out and focus on what I was doing: reaching for the tangled threads of humanity that wound through her and pulling them free, one by one. I patched the holes with Tuatha de Dannan, expanding the other part of her heritage until it was all she had. She was still screaming, her voice growing hoarse, and I was getting lost in the dark tangles of her self, the places where human and fae collided and made her something unique in all of Faerie.
Somewhere in her was the answer to what made some changelings too powerful to live; the key to that
