Glen eased Ashleigh back down onto the couch and shot a look at me. “It’s his job, and mine when I take over for him, to keep people from crossing through the Veil when they shouldn’t. To keep people safe, on both sides. And sometimes that means keeping people from finding out how the gates work.” His tone was harsh, a huge change from his usual chivalrous manner.
And that tone struck a nerve in me. My eyes narrowed, returning his challenging look. “Like the guardian dragon that you didn’t warn me about?”
Ashleigh sighed. “Most people never even see Kaorinix, Rosa.”
Her protector nodded, his eyes still locked on me. “You never would have seen her if you didn’t try to go through the Veil at the wrong time. She was only there to warn you.”
Suddenly, I was tired of arguing about it all. Faeries always had to overcomplicate things with their etiquette rules and their laws about magic. I pulled away from Kai’s arms and stood up.
“I think we’ve had enough discussion for one day,” I said, looking around at my friends. “I’m tired. Let’s talk about this another time.”
Glen stood up and offered his hand to Ashleigh. “I think that’s for the best.” He looked over at Heather. “Can I give you a ride home?”
Heather looked between Glen and me, but I didn’t have a car to drive her home, and I didn’t feel up to giving her a ride on my broom in the cold. She ducked her head and nodded. “Sure. Thanks.”
Before she left, Heather grabbed me in a quick hug and whispered in my ear, “I’m sorry. I was just trying to help.”
I squeezed her back. “I know, it’s okay. It’s not your fault.”
I hugged Ashleigh, too, and gave Kai a kiss, but ignored Glen. He walked out without a word.
I turned away and mumbled goodbye as they left.
5
Host Family
Rosmerta
I paid cash for a motel room under a fake name for Akasha and I to stay the night after we left Black Forrest Dreams. There just hadn’t been time for us to find another place to hide. But on Friday morning, Angelica gave me a call on my burner cell phone.
“My sister Esther’s son goes to school with the Burbages’ daughter, and she caught the mom during the morning drop-off,” she told me.
I ran down the list of names in my head. Angelica’s nephew was Marzell, the only dwarf in Rosa’s class at Crowther. The pookha girl must be Elizabeth. I struggled to remember her mother’s name but came up blank. “Mrs. Burbage?” I said weakly.
“Yeah, Mary.” I could hear Angelica chuckling to herself on the other end of the line. “Anyway, she said you should come by her house this afternoon to talk about staying at her place. She wants to work the details out ahead of time.”
I thanked Angelica for relaying the meeting and turned to Akasha. “Pack up your stuff and put it back in the car. We’re going to meet a family about a house for us to stay at.”
Akasha held her math book up pointedly. “It’s still school hours. I’m trying to do my independent study.”
“You can finish that later if we have a place to settle in.” I checked the clock next to the bed. “Check-out’s at eleven. Let’s get out before then so I won’t have to pay for another night.”
She started packing up her things, but she grumbled about it the whole time. “I should be in a real school right now. I had a perfect attendance record until this mess happened.”
I sighed. We’d had this argument for two months running now, and never got anywhere. Akasha hadn’t liked her middle school, but she hated that her grades were suffering, and unlike most twelve-year-old girls, she actually had the discipline to keep up with her studies even though I told her she was allowed to take some time off. I’d already promised her that when things calmed down, I would find her a new school and make sure that her independent study work counted so she wouldn’t have to repeat the seventh grade.
“If you get ready quickly and if we get into a new house with more space, then I’ll ask someone to go pick up your books,” I promised.
She perked up again. “Really?”
“Really.”
I managed to get our things packed up and Akasha out the door, then checked out of the motel before the deadline.
The Burbages’ house was a historic landmark and quite large. Built in the late 1850s, it had two tall stories and a very symmetrical look: matching bay windows on either side of the front door, arched windows above them, and a brick chimney on each side of the house. The paneled front door was framed with a portico and flanked by two square columns. The house was set back from the main road and surrounded by a well-groomed garden that made me miss my home.
Mary Burbage, a middle-aged woman with the distinctive pointed ears and black fur of a pookha, met us at the front door with a smile. “Come in from the cold, dears. Would you like some hot coffee or tea?”
“Herbal tea for me if you have it, thank you,” I said.
“Hot chocolate, please,” Akasha mumbled to the floor.
The front entryway was just as intimidating as the outside, with a carved wooden staircase in the middle hallway and mirrored parlors on either side. But somewhere in the air was the tantalizing smell of spices, meat, and fresh sourdough.
Mary took our coats. I wiped my feet carefully on the rubber mats, not wanting to mark up the hardwood floor, and watched Akasha to make sure that she did the same.
Mary led us to a kitchen at the back of the house, and here I saw the intrusion of modern comforts and clutter: school schedules posted on the fridge, a tangle of cell phone chargers on a side table, a laptop sitting open on the kitchen table in the middle of the room. Mary shut the laptop and shoved it over to one side. “Sorry, I had some things to finish up. I work from home, designing websites for online classes.”
Akasha’s eyes widened. “You can teach people on the computer?”
The pookha’s ears twitched with interest, and she smiled. “Yes, it’s starting to catch on. Right now it’s mostly colleges offering online classes, but I think in the future we’ll all be able to start going to school online. Wouldn’t that be fun? You could learn from the best teachers no matter where you are in the world, downloading video lectures with the click of a button!” Her ears flattened. “At least, that’s the idea. I’m afraid downloads are very slow on the average dial-up connection, and we’re still trying to find ways to optimize all of the files that the teachers want to include.”
The technical jargon went right over my head. My husband, Samuel, was the one who had set up the family computer. I hadn’t even looked to see if he’d taken it with him when he left.
“Oh, I’m sorry to keep you standing around like this!” Mary gestured to the table. “Please, sit down. I’ll get your drinks. My daughter Elizabeth will be joining us soon.”
I smiled and pulled out a chair. “What smells so good?”
“I put some chili to simmer in the slow cooker for dinner.” Mary poured hot water from a kettle into two mugs, then added a packet of powdered hot chocolate mix to one and a tea bag to the other. She brought both over to the table with spoons for us to stir. “I usually just throw something in to cook while I do my work. Now, do you want sugar for your tea, or marshmallows for the hot chocolate?”
Akasha shook her head. “No, this is fine.”
“I’ll take honey, please.” When Mary handed me the plastic bear-shaped bottle, I stirred some into the steaming mug, then let it sit—it would be too hot for several minutes yet. “It’s amazing that you manage to cook dinner for your whole family. Don’t you have three kids?”
Mary beamed with pride. “Yes, although Richard and Donny are both away at college right now. I think it’s important to have the whole family together for at least one meal if we can manage it.”
The back door slammed in the hallway and a teenage girl came in, still wearing a jacket and muddy shoes. “Mom, when’s dinner ready?” she said, dropping a heavy backpack on the floor.
Mary frowned. “Go
take off your wet things and put that away. We have company.”
Elizabeth glanced at us and gave a half-hearted wave. “Hey.” She went back out into the hallway, but she called, “I’m hungry!”
“You may get yourself a small snack.” Mary flashed me an apologetic smile. “You know what teenagers are like.”
Her daughter came back in and grabbed string cheese from the fridge, then slumped into another chair at the table. “What’s all this about?”
Mary’s face turned serious. “Angelica said they need a place to stay for a while.”
I glanced down and saw her bushy tail twitch nervously under the table. If she was too scared to do this, I needed to know now. “You understand that I am a wanted criminal, and helping me goes against the laws of the Seelie Court. You could endanger your own family.”
The pookha quivered, but she nodded firmly. “I know the consequences. My husband and I talked it over.” She took a deep breath and looked at Akasha. “I just don’t think it’s fair the way they’re hunting you and your little girl down. We’ve got to look out for each other.”
Elizabeth grumbled, “We’re more at risk if we don’t help. Who would the Seelie come after next?”
I nodded. “I promise you that I’ll do everything I can to make sure that I don’t get you into trouble. I told Angelica when I went to stay with her that if it came down to it, I would turn myself in before I took her down with me, and I’ll say the same to you.” I closed my right eye and pointed to my left eye in a secret signal of the underground Unseelie society. “I know there are bigger things than just my own personal safety.”
Mary had never made a public commitment to our cause before, but she returned the signal. “I trust you.” She tilted her head to one side. “There’s just one thing that I need before I agree to let you stay here.”
I tensed up, afraid of what she might ask for. Money? A spell? “What is it?”
She folded her hands on the table in front of her. “I need to hear your side of the story. I know what the Count says you did, but I don’t trust him. What kind of spell did you really use, and why did you do it?”
“Is that all?” I said with a nervous laugh, because an explanation was actually a lot to ask for. I’d never told anyone the truth about what I’d done.
Akasha leaned forward, also interested. I knew she’d heard things from her sister, no doubt grossly exaggerated—Rosa had a flair for the dramatic, and she couldn’t understand my real motivation. Perhaps I owed my younger daughter an explanation of why her life was turned upside-down, too.
I took a deep breath. “This could take a while.”
I curled my hands around a fresh mug of hot tea and tilted my face down so the steam drifted up to warm me. “I didn’t mean for things to go this far. All that I wanted was the same as any mother: to see my family safe and well.
“My own family didn’t approve of magic.” The words seemed to come out of me from far away as I spoke of another place and time, the sting of the old rejection long forgotten. “They were conservative, religious. I wanted a change. Against their wishes, I applied to colleges in California, and got in to Santa Cruz. There I met faeries for the first time”
I smiled, remembering those early days. “Magic was way more interesting than college, and I dropped out of school.” I glanced over at Akasha and saw her frown in disapproval, but I shrugged. “My parents had cut me off, but I didn’t care. I crossed the Veil every time I could get someone to guide me, and crashed on friends’ couches in between. Eventually I earned their trust enough to pass the witch test and gained powers of my own. I trained with anyone who would teach me. I learned that selling spells could make a living, so I did that for a few years, doing magic for money and drifting through the different Courts of magikin to see what each one was like.”
Mary nodded without showing any real reaction to my story. “And that’s how you ended up here?”
“The town drew me here because there were so many people of magic,” I admitted. Madrone was unusual as a small town with a diverse magikin population. In other places, magikin lived segregated from humans, like in the dwarf community of Cave City. “But it was my house that made me want to stay. I put down roots, in more ways than one.” I laughed at my own joke.
“I bought the house here and settled down, but I didn’t have everything I wanted.” I didn’t want to admit how desperately lonely I’d been before I met Samuel. Faeriekin made excellent lovers, but they weren’t known for their commitment to their partners, and I’d been growing tired of being discarded once they lost interest in me. “Then I met Samuel at a music festival and found what I was missing.”
Akasha rolled her eyes. “You can skip the mushy stuff.”
I went on closer to the point. “We both wanted a family, and I already owned a house. I persuaded Samuel to move here, get a job at the county hospital, and I would work from home with a little mail-order spell business and raise the children. When Rosamunde was born, I thought nothing in the world could make me happier.”
Mary smiled then, nodding with the understanding of a fellow mother. “But with motherhood comes worries.”
“Yes.” I looked down again. “I thought I knew so much back then, but I didn’t know anything about being a parent. I knew witchcraft, so I used spells to help me. They were just little things at first. I worried the old house we lived in wasn’t safe, so I boosted the baby-proofing with magic.” My mouth twisted into a smirk at one particular memory. “Then I realized that the herbs I used could be dangerous if little Rosie ate them, so I had to find creative hiding places for my charms.”
The pookha laughed. “I wish you’d been in business when my oldest boy was born! Richard got into everything. By the time you started selling your ‘mother’s aids’ in that shop, I was on my third child and I’d already learned to manage on my own.”
I grinned back and reached over to pat Akasha’s hand. “Yes, we make our mistakes on the first child and know better for the ones who come after. By the time this one was born, Rosamunde was four, and I had a better plan.” I winked at my younger daughter. “Not that you gave me so much trouble. You were always so quiet, I would worry that something was wrong, and then I’d find you just sitting and staring at a spot on the wall or playing with your toys, perfectly happy to be alone. Rosa squalled if I was out of the room for half a minute, but you almost never cried. I’m not sure that I can claim credit for you turning out so good!”
Akasha ducked her head in embarrassment. “But Rosa’s your favorite. You spend all your time on her.”
I shook my head. “That’s absolutely not true. Rosamunde is more willing to spend time with me because she wants to learn magic. You avoid magic, and I stopped being able to help you with your homework when you hit sixth grade.” I sighed. “You always were a daddy’s girl. Rosamunde is the trouble maker, the one I worry about—and now I’m losing her to the Seelie Court.”
Akasha took my hand and squeezed it. “I’m here now, Mom. I’m sorry about what I said earlier. I do want to help. I just don’t get this magic stuff.”
I smiled at her. “No, you want logic and reason. You weren’t interested in Fae.” I sighed again. “When Rosamunde grew too curious about faeries, I started teaching her magic of her own, hoping that would keep her from getting lured into their world.” I shook my head. “I held back a lot from her, though, because I was afraid of what she might do with her powers. I should have realized that she must be learning more somewhere else. But I never guessed that she would betray me so deeply.”
I closed my eyes against the painful memory. I’d done everything I could to protect my daughter short of forbidding her to go to the Faerie Court, because I knew placing limits on her would only make her more interested. Yet their influence on her had grown behind my back. No doubt Count Duncan’s heirs, Ashleigh and Glen, had helped her to destroy my beautiful garden, the source of my power. They must have urged her to turn me in to the magical authorities, bec
ause I couldn’t believe Rosa would be so spiteful on her own.
I opened my eyes again and forced myself to tell the rest. “I’ve used witchcraft so much now that I cast a spell to stop her without a second thought. I didn’t know what she was up to, then, just that she was snooping around in my private things. So I bound her powers, thinking that would be the end of it.” I shook my head. “I should have talked to her. I realized that too late, when she broke one of my spells. But by then she’d run away to avoid me, and then she came back and destroyed every single one of my spells when I was out of the house. I wish that I could explain things to her, and apologize for letting it get out of hand, but now I’m afraid that contacting her directly will only bring the Seelie Court down on my head.”
Mary leaned closer, her glowing golden eyes staring deeply into mine. “So you did not intentionally cast an enchantment to control your family’s minds?”
I shook my head. “I wouldn’t even quite call it mind-control. It was more of a suggestion. I wanted harmony in my home. The spell just planted the idea that arguing wasn’t worth the trouble, and reminded us how much we loved each other. None of it was meant to harm anyone, just avoid painful and unnecessary fighting.”
She pursed her lips together in a straight line. “But you must have realized that fell outside the strict rules of the Court’s laws on magic. Anything that could potentially affect the free will of another person is forbidden.”
She had me pinned down there, and Akasha was watching me, too. I nodded slowly, afraid that I would lose her budding trust. “I knew I was venturing into a gray area. But by then I’d seen things that made me doubt the Seelie Courts’ laws. They seemed a little too strict in their judgments of others, and—” I licked my lips nervously. “A little too lenient when it came to judging their own.”
Mary sat back in her chair and nodded. “Yes, there is a double-standard in our community: one for those with Fae blood, and one for everyone else.” She smiled at Akasha and me. “Welcome to our home. You may stay here as long as you need to.”
Fae of Calaveras Trilogy Box Set Page 30