never even seen a fistfight. College is supposed to have professors and exams and roommates, not dragons and knights!' She waved her hand at the black-and-white photos of Princeton knights. She scanned the wall, looking for the picture that had caught her mother's eye earlier. Mom had stopped right about ... Lily spotted it: a class photo with a familiar face. Smack-dab in the center of the photo was a young man in an oxford shirt and khakis who looked exactly like a younger version of Grandpa. He was surrounded by men and women ... except there had been no women at Princeton when her grandfather had been a student, and the hair and outfits in this photo were from the wrong decade. That man couldn't have been her grandfather, though he looked almost identical to him.
'Are you all right?' Jake asked.
Lily pointed at the photo. 'That's my father,' she said. 'William Carter. He's Grandpa's son.' Her voice sounded an octave too high, but she couldn't stop it.
Her father was Grandpa's son, which meant that Mom wasn't Grandpa's daughter. Her father was Grandpa's blood relation, which meant that Mom wasn't.
Her father was human, which meant that Mom ... wasn't.
CHAPTER Nine
Mom wasn't human.
Grandpa had lied to her. He'd lied about things so basic that Lily didn't even know how to process the information. She leaned heavily against the stairwell wall.
'Lily?' Jake said.
At least now she had an answer to how she'd survived: Grandpa hadn't fed her and Mom medicine; he'd fed them magic. Her stomach lurched. 'I think I'm going to be sick.' Lily clapped her hands over her mouth, and she barreled past Jake up the stairs. She ran under the eyes of the oil paintings and past the hidden compartments, the grand piano, and the marble fireplace. With Jake jogging behind her, she burst out the front door of the club.
Outside, she fell to her knees on the grass. Amber light from the setting sun poured over the back of her neck, and she heard the whispered voices of the lawn and the trees and the bushes. She buried her fingers in the grass. Green blades curled around her knuckles and crooned to her. Her chest loosened, and she could breathe again.
She heard Jake on the path behind her. 'Lily, are you all right?' he asked.
'No, I'm not all right!' None of this was 'all right.' The woman she'd spent every day of her life with was a dryad, and her grandfather—the bedrock of her life—had intentionally lied to her about all of it. 'I trusted him! Believed in him!'
'Who?' Jake asked.
'My grandfather, the liar,' she said.
'Your grandfather is a noble man,' Jake said. 'A hero—'
Lily interrupted him. 'You barely know him.' She wondered how well she even knew him. Wrapped around her fingers, the grass squeezed tighter.
Jake squatted beside her. 'Lily, are you okay?' He sounded concerned, as if he hadn't been the one to push her away on the chapel plaza. Since when did he care? She was the 'monster,' wasn't she?
'I'm not going to puke on you, if that's what you're worried about,' Lily said.
'I'm not ... I didn't mean ...,' he said. He reminded her of a puppy who'd had his nose smacked. She felt a twinge of guilt. Jake wasn't the one who had turned her world inside out and upside down and then (for good measure) shaken it vigorously.
She unwound her fingers from the grass. The blades continued to rub against her like kittens that wanted to be petted. Lily thought of how Mom always treated the plants in the flower shop like pets. She'd coo and croon to the roses and daisies. Lily felt a hysterical laugh bubble up in her throat, and she choked it back.
'Do you ... Are you feeling better?' Jake asked.
'My mom ...,' she began. She stopped. 'I need to talk to Grandpa. Is the battle over?'
He shot a look at the sidewalk. 'Shh!'
After all the lies, for them to expect her to care about protecting their secrets ... She saw Jake's expression, and she sighed. 'Sorry,' she said. 'It's not your fault that my home life is even more messed up than I'd thought.' She wondered how much of the truth Mom knew, or remembered.
'The fighting just started,' he said in a low voice, checking to be sure he couldn't be overheard. 'If we're quick, we won't miss much. But if you're too scared—'
'No, I'm fine now. Let's go to Forbes.' She got to her feet. It occurred to her that she'd been stupid to come outside so quickly. She should have delayed in the stairwell until she'd been certain that Tye had had enough time to reach safety.
Jake trotted down the sidewalk, and Lily trailed behind. Street lamps flickered on up and down Prospect Avenue—the sky was beginning to darken to steel blue. She tried to subtly scan the area for Tye. She hoped he was long gone. As she followed Jake up the steps to the 1879 Hall arch, she wondered what would happen when the council saw the bottle of magic.
'You really didn't know about this, about who you are?' Jake said.
She felt tears prick her eyes. Blinking fast, she looked away from Jake and at the monkey gargoyles on the arch. They remained stone, but Lily imagined the blank gray eyes watching her. 'Did you?' she asked. 'When you met me, could you tell?'
'Not a hint,' he said. 'I mean, it's not as if you have a tail or scales ... do you?'
She glared at him. 'No!' Picking up her pace, she marched through the arch.
He caught her hand. 'Listen, Lily. ... Earlier, by the chapel, I shouldn't have pushed you away,' he said. 'That was wrong of me. I thought ... I failed you, and I'm sorry.'
She met his intensely blue eyes.
'You're not a ...,' he said. 'You're an extraordinary person.'
'Extraordinarily freakish, you mean.'
'Other people would hide or deny, but you want answers. That's extraordinary.'
'Uh, thanks.' With him looking at her like that, her legs felt like Jell-O.
'Don't blame yourself,' he said. 'You aren't trained yet. You'll be one of us in no time. You're a descendant of Richard Carter. The fact that he raised you should compensate for any taint.'
By 'taint' he clearly meant Mom. Lily looked away from his angelic face. As they walked through Prospect Gardens, she kept to the center of the flagstone walk, as far as possible from the tulips and the rosebushes to avoid attracting their attention. Jake considered her tainted. Maybe she was.
Jake was struggling to piece together what sounded like an explanation. 'I should not have let the ... by the chapel ... it was just ...'
'Your parents?' she asked.
He nodded.
'I'm sorry,' Lily said. They walked by a trio of women, young alums, whose eyes fixed on Jake admiringly. One of them whispered to her friends, and all three giggled. Jake either ignored them or didn't notice.
Changing the subject, he said, 'The secrets are necessary.'
She didn't reply. There was no point in arguing with him about that. Grandpa was the one who had hurt her with his secrets. As they passed the 40th Reunion tent, music poured out from the fenced-in area. She smelled cheeseburgers from their barbecue along with the omnipresent smell of beer, and she glimpsed orange-clad alums and their families chatting, laughing, and eating. No one seemed at all concerned that there was a battle with fantastical creatures occurring across campus. 'How do you keep it a secret from all of them?' she asked.
'You'd be surprised what it's possible to hide if you have the resources,' he said with pride in his voice. 'We've had generations of practice at hiding this secret. See up ahead.' He pointed.
Campus security cars and construction vehicles were arrayed across a street. She saw an ambulance and a
