One Salt Sea

fae.”

“What, you mean, like an elf? Like from the movies with the Hobbits and everything?”

“Not quite, but . . . yes, like an elf.” I hesitated before adding, “You are, too.”

Gillian stared at me for a moment, brown eyes wide. Then she started to laugh. “Oh, right. Like I could be some kind of magical whatever.”

“You’re my daughter. You can be whatever you want to be.”

Bit by bit, her laughter stopped. The meadow behind her was getting misty, losing definition. I knew from my own Choice—the second one, the one Amandine led me through—that time here ran differently than it did in the real world; this was like a dream, and it could condense a great deal into a few seconds. We still didn’t have forever.

“You’re serious,” she said.

“Yeah, honey. I am.” I closed the rest of the distance between us, offering her my hands. “You’ve been hurt, but it’s going to be okay. I just need you to make a decision now, and then everything can be all right again.”

“What?” Gillian looked at me nervously. Her own hands stayed by her sides. The smell of primroses was strong this close to her, all but rolling off her skin.

“Your father’s human. I’m not. Right now, you’re somewhere in the middle, and that makes you vulnerable. The thing that hurt you, it’s going to hurt you worse if you stay where you are. So I need you to decide. You can be fae, or you can be human, but you can’t be both.”

Her eyes widened. “What? I can’t . . . you can’t mean that I . . .” She stopped in the middle of her sentence, suddenly focusing on a point just past my left shoulder. I knew what I would see if I turned around. I turned around anyway.

Another Gillian was standing behind me. This one’s sundress was red, still patterned with pink primroses. Her ears were sharply pointed, and her eyes were the no-color gray of mist rolling in off the water. There were streaks of gold in her dark brown hair. There was nothing human about her, and she was beautiful.

Next to her stood a third version of my daughter, this one wearing a white sundress. She was almost identical to the girl in front of me. There was a faint, nearly indefinable difference in the shape of her face and the way she held herself, but she was close to Gillian as she’d always known herself, and she was beautiful, too.

I tore my eyes away from these possible futures, turning my attention back to my daughter as she existed in the here and now. “Gillian.” She was still staring past my shoulder, awe and horror mixing in her expression. “Gillian. You need to choose. Either of them can be you, but, honey, we don’t have time to stand here arguing about which one it’s going to be.”

“What if I get it wrong?” Gillian met my eyes, fear finally washing away her awe. “What if I want to change my mind?”

“You can’t. This is a choice you only get to make once. You’re either fae, like me, or you’re human, like your father. Please.”

She hesitated again before asking, very softly, “Which one lets me go home?”

Her words stabbed me like knives. I forced my voice to stay level as I replied, “Human. You have to be human if you want to go home. If you choose fae . . . I’m sorry, honey, but if you choose fae, you have to stay with me.”

“Forever?” she whispered.

I couldn’t bring myself to answer that. I swallowed hard, and nodded.

“I . . . I want . . .” She stopped for a long moment before saying, rapid-fire, “I want you to take it all back. I want you to have never left us. You’re magic, right? Like a Fairy Godmother? Can you do that? Can you make it so you never went away?” Even her tears smelled like primroses.

“Nobody has that much magic, baby. I’m sorry. I love you, and I’m sorry.”

“I am, too.” She kept crying as she slid her hands into mine. “I love you, Mom. I wish you’d never gone away. I want to go home now. Please let me go home now.”

“You have to say the words, Gillian. You have to tell me what you want.”

She sighed. “I want to be human. I just want to go home.”

“All right, honey. If that’s what you want, you can go home.” I let go of her hands, gathering her into a hug. It felt good, and right, and like it was everything I’d been missing since I came back from the pond. “This is going to hurt, okay? But it has to hurt if you want to go back to your dad.”

“Okay,” she said, sniffling, and buried her face against my shoulder.

I closed my eyes, the smell of grass getting stronger, the smell of copper overwhelming the primroses. Even with my eyes closed, I could see everything she was, every trace of her heritage. And I reached out, still holding her close to me, and grabbed hold of everything that wasn’t human—including the poison that was struggling to kill her. Wipe away one, wipe away the other.

Set her free.

Her screaming was the worst thing I’d ever heard—but if I stopped, she’d die, so I kept going, changing and twisting and wiping away, until the screaming stopped, giving way to silence. And I opened my eyes.

THIRTY-TWO

GILLIAN WAS STILL UNCONSCIOUS on the floor, but the wound in her shoulder had closed. That seemed to be the only immediate change. Her fae blood was thin enough that removing it hadn’t visibly altered the shape of her face; she still looked like my little girl. And she still wasn’t breathing.

“Move,” said the Luidaeg, pushing me roughly to the side as she moved to put her hands on my daughter’s chest. She looked up, pupils expanding until her eyes were consumed by blackness. “Go to your Selkie,” she said. “You don’t need to watch this.”

I nodded numbly, climbing to my feet. I swayed there for a moment, and then I turned and ran to Connor.

He was lying where he’d fallen, motionless, save for the shallow, strained rise and fall of his chest. The arrow was still in place, sticking out of his body like an accusation. See? it seemed to say; see what happened because you let him love you?

“Oh, Connor.” I knelt, letting my fingers brush against his cheek. “You idiot. You wonderful, stupid, beautiful idiot.”

Gillian whimpered. I didn’t let myself turn around.

“I love you,” I whispered, and leaned down to kiss Connor’s cheek. My lips left a bloody print behind. “Sleep well.”

Something was wrong. The blood in the room was trying to tell me what it was, but I was tired, and everything was so jumbled that I couldn’t tell what was happening anymore. I stood, wiping the tears from my eyes and the blood off my lips and chin. “Come on,” I said, to no one and to everyone who was listening. “Let’s go bring those damn kids home.”

The room only had two doors. We entered through the first, and so I walked toward the second, not looking to see who followed me. I was exhausted. My head ached from the strain of what I’d just done to my little girl—a thing I would have said was impossible a year ago. “Impossible” no longer seemed to have much place in my life. Connor was . . . Connor was asleep. I refused to admit to anything more than that. As for me, I was somewhere past “done” and accelerating toward “completely finished.”

“Toby?” asked Quentin. He ducked ahead of me as I opened the door into the next section of the shallowing, revealing a long, dark hallway. The pixies flew ahead of us, lighting it. “Are you okay?”

“No,” I said, stepping past him. A blue-winged pixie landed on my shoulder, providing a dim but steady local light. “We’re looking for two teenage boys. They’re probably scared, so try not to startle them.”

“Are we quite sure Rayseline had no other little helpers?” asked Tybalt. I glanced back to see him making his way through the doorway.

“No,” I said. “But if she did, they were probably more hired thugs, and they’ll run when they realize they’re not going to get paid. There’s no way she paid them enough to stay—Dugan could never have stolen that much from the Queen’s coffers without getting caught, and Raysel didn’t exactly have resources of her own.”