Sirensong

Chapter Four

This was officially Not Good.

I tried to twist away from Keane, to pull the torn T-shirt back over the mark, but he turned me with rough hands, pulling aside the strap of the tank top so he could get a better look.

“Let go of me!” I snapped while trying to introduce his face to my elbow. I missed, of course, but Keane let go and took a couple of hasty steps away from me, like I had a contagious disease or something.

“What the fuck?” he said again, his face ashen. “Dana, what did you do?”

I considered my options. I was a pretty good liar—years of trying to cover up for my mom had given me plenty of practice—but I wasn’t sure I was creative enough to come up with a plausible explanation for the Erlking’s mark. Other than the truth, that is, and there was no way Keane was getting that out of me. Which left stonewalling as my only option.

“It’s none of your business,” I told Keane, rearranging the strap of my tank top so the mark was mostly covered despite the rip in my shirt. It came out harsher than I meant it to, and Keane actually flinched at my tone.

I let out a heavy sigh, trying to let the tension ease out of my body while I did. It didn’t work too well.

“Look,” I said, “if I wanted to talk about it, I wouldn’t be keeping it hidden like this. It’s between me and the Erlking, it’s complicated, and it doesn’t affect anyone but me. That’s all you need to know.”

Keane shook his head, the horror in his eyes slowly mixing with anger. “You’ll have to do better than that.”

I jutted my chin out stubbornly. “You’re not the boss of me, and that’s all you’re going to get.”

“Fine,” he said, eyes boring into me. “I guess I’ll just have to ask your father.”

Like I said, I’m a pretty good liar, but my poker face failed me just then. My dad was the absolute last person I wanted to know about the Erlking’s mark. If he found out about the mark, he wouldn’t rest until he’d wrested every single detail out of me about how I’d gotten it. And if he learned I’d snuck out of my safe house, I’d be grounded for the rest of my life. Maybe even longer.

Not that I felt bad about keeping secrets from him, mind you. He was still keeping what he thought was a whopping secret from me. He was bound by his ties to the Seelie Court not to tell me what would happen if I gave the Erlking my virginity. Thanks to the agreement the Erlking had made with Titania, there was a geis—a magical restriction—that prevented my dad from even talking about the Erlking’s secret.

But when my aunt Grace had tried to kill me, she’d been so determined to hurt me before I died that she’d severed her ties with the Seelie Court just so she could tell me the horrifying truth of what I’d agreed to. That was when I realized that as much as my dad loved me—and he did love me, I knew that—he was a Seelie Fae, too deeply devoted to his Court to consider leaving it, even to protect me.

He had to know what I’d promised the Erlking in order to free Ethan. And yet he hadn’t been willing to renounce the Seelie Court so he could warn me. If he was going to keep a secret like that from me, then I didn’t feel bad about hiding the Erlking’s mark.

“Shall I go talk to your father right now?” Keane prompted. “Or are you going to explain why you have something that looks suspiciously like the Erlking’s mark on your shoulder?”

I considered calling his bluff. He wasn’t generally what I’d think of as a tattletale kind of guy. But like just about everyone else in my life, he’d do any crappy thing you could name if he thought it was for my own good.

“You’re blackmailing me?” I asked, stalling as I tried to make up a half-truth that would get him off my back.

Keane shrugged, but the gesture was tight and tense. “Call it what you want. But if you’re the Erlking’s creature, then I think I have a right to know it before I travel into Faerie with you.”

“I am not the Erlking’s creature!”

“No? Then why do you have his mark, like a brand, on your skin?”

“You mind if I go change before we have this conversation? I don’t like standing around in a torn shirt.” I plucked at the shredded shoulder for emphasis.

Keane took a step closer to me, his jaw set. “Yes, I mind if you take a little extra time to work out the details of whatever lie you’re about to tell me.” There was a hint of a growl in his voice, and I wondered if he was mad enough to hit me in anger. I didn’t think so, despite the clenched fists and the smoke coming out of his ears, but I couldn’t help my primal instinct to take a step back.

Keane blinked, like he was surprised. Then he seemed to realize just how aggressive his body language was, and he visibly relaxed. His fists uncurled, and his shoulders lowered, but I could still see the metaphorical smoke. He wasn’t any less pissed. And he wasn’t going to give me time to think things through before I spoke.

“Start talking!” he commanded.

I wished I could squirm my way out of talking, but I couldn’t, so I tried to keep my explanation as simple as possible. “The Erlking put a spell on me when I was trying to get him to free Ethan.” I left out just how he’d put the spell on me, because there was no way I was telling anyone about the Erkling’s brooch. I’d used it three times to make myself invisible, and the third use had activated the mark. I hadn’t used the brooch since—despite the Erlking’s promise that it contained no other secondary spells—but I didn’t want to risk having it taken away.

I resisted the urge to reach up and touch the mark. It didn’t hurt or anything, but somehow I was always very conscious of it on my skin, knowing exactly where it was even when I couldn’t see it.

“It’s like a tracking device. He claims it’s for my own good,” I said, “because he wants me alive so I can take him into the mortal world.”

I hadn’t thought it was possible for Keane to look any more horrified, but I was wrong. Most of the people around me had accepted that the Erlking, despite being one scary dude, wanted me alive. They didn’t know that he wanted me alive so much he’d saved my life, but it was pretty obvious a dead Faeriewalker wasn’t going to do him much good. From the way Keane was looking at me, I felt sure he wasn’t as convinced as the rest.

“He knows where you are right now?” Keane asked. “He knows the location of your safe house?”

“Yeah, he knows. He’s known for a long time and he hasn’t come down here after me, so you can stop looking like the world just came to an end.”

“You’re unbelievable! You didn’t think it was important to tell anyone this shit?”

“What good would it do? No one can do anything about it.” A geis prevented the Erlking from attacking anyone in Avalon, but the geis was deactivated if someone attacked him. “The bottom line is he can’t attack me, and I don’t want anyone getting all protective about this and maybe giving him an excuse to hurt them.” That was, after all, how Ethan had been captured by the Wild Hunt.

Keane didn’t look convinced.

“You’re not going to tell my dad, are you?” I asked, then chewed my lip when he didn’t answer immediately.

Keane let out a heavy sigh and shook his head. “How many other secrets are you keeping?”

I didn’t want to think about that. The Erlking had once suggested that all my secrets were going to come back and bite me in the butt someday. I had a feeling he was right, but I was determined to put off dealing with it until absolutely necessary.

“Are you going to tell on me or not?” I asked, ignoring Keane’s question.

“I won’t. At least for now. But you really should tell him yourself. Have you ever considered that when you go into Faerie, the geis that keeps the Erlking from hunting anyone in Avalon won’t be in effect anymore? And that you’re not officially a member of the Seelie Court and therefore aren’t protected by the Erlking’s agreement with the Queens?”

I’m sure my face went pale. No, I hadn’t thought of that.

“There will be nothing to prevent him from hunting you, and if you’ve got the equivalent of a radio collar on you, he won’t have to look very hard to find you.”

It was true that the Erlking didn’t want to kill me. However, if he was free to hunt me, then if he captured me, he could force me to join his Wild Hunt. And then the Hunt would have its very own pet Faeriewalker to take