by Maria Lima
“Did you check her phone’s history?” I asked. “Calls made, etcetera?”
“We did. Nothing stood out. A call from you yesterday, a few calls out to family in the past few days. One to Gideon, also yesterday.”
“Dad! That call to Gideon didn’t stand out?” I practically screamed at my father.
“Calm down, honey. It didn’t stand out because I knew that she’d called him. She told me.”
“Why?”
“Because she wanted to tell me? I don’t know.” Dad’s voice got huffy. “I’m doing the best I can, Keira.”
Argh. He’d misunderstood me. “No, Dad, sorry for yelling,” I said in a much calmer tone. “I meant do you know why she called Gideon?”
“I expect to ream the boy out,” he said. “She was quite unhappy with him.”
“Huw, did she tell Gideon she was disinheriting him?” Adam asked.
Dad frowned. “She what? Disinherited him? When?”
“She told us she’d begun preparations to remove him from any succession,” Adam said. “Keira is to be sole heir now.”
Dad’s face grew grim. “That’s news to me. I don’t like this at all. She told me what happened down there. What Gideon did. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that she decided to cut him loose. Though…” His brow furrowed, he moved away from the phone’s camera lens.
“Dad? Though what?”
“Keira, I need to call you back,” he said as his face once more came into view. “Can you see if you can find Gideon? He’s there, isn’t he?”
“Here? Not with us,” I said. “We’ve had to move off the Wild Moon. We’re staying in an old place in San Antonio.”
“Why?”
“Didn’t Gigi tell you the details?” Did my family not bloody talk to each other? He’d just said she’d told him what happened.
“Look, honey, you know how closemouthed my great-grandmother can be,” he said. “She gave me the SparkNotes version. That Gideon showed up at your Reception and claimed Challenge. Then she gave the scholars the parchment, but that was the gist of it. Nothing about you removing yourselves from the ranch. I sort of figured you’d had to put Gideon up on the property, that’s how usually these things work.”
“Have you had a chance to help them out yet?” I asked. “The scholars, I mean.”
“A little. My experience with Faery Challenges is admittedly rather limited.”
“You know of Challenges?” Adam interrupted.
“I do. I am rather old, you know.” This last was said with a bit of humor. “I know our dear leader got some notion in her head to help you but she has no experience. I don’t know what she was thinking.”
“But you do? How? You’re at least three centuries younger than she is,” Tucker remarked. “Even Adam couldn’t decipher all the information.”
My father raised a brow. “Minerva may be older than I am, but I was her emissary to the Sidhe royals for centuries,” he said. “I lived Below for a long time, wooing Branwen. While there, I made acquaintance with many much older than I.”
“You did? How come you never told me?” I asked.
“It’s never been that important. How did you think I knew where to find you when I came to get you?”
“I never thought about it,” I said.
“Sweetheart, let me go back to work with the scholars, see what I can do. While I’m doing that, you might call—do you have Gideon’s number?”
I had his number all right, but it had nothing to do with a phone. “No, Dad, I don’t.” Hadn’t had it for years. When I’d left him, I made sure to delete all his contact information from the phone I’d had then.
“I’ll send it to you,” he said. “I think you should at least call him. See what he knows. I’ll work here and see what more we can tell you about this Challenge of yours.”
“Papa,” Tucker began, his voice worried. “Do you think she’s okay?”
“Minerva? She has to be.” With that, he disconnected.
I walked over to one of the couches and sank onto the seat, letting every muscle I had relax as much as I could. “He didn’t say he was sure,” I said. “What if she’s not? What if…” I took a deep breath, willing myself to calm down.
“If she’s not, we will deal with it.” Adam joined me on the couch and took my hands in his. “We will deal.”
“I think we should fly to Vancouver,” I said. “Look for her. I can go to the hotel room and see what I can find out.”
“I’d be the first to agree,” Tucker said, “except for one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“If we leave here, willingly, after Truce was declared and after we’ve established our temporary location, it’s tantamount to abandonment. By terms of Truce, we’ll have to let our claim go and Gideon wins.”
“How long have you known this?” I accused. “Seriously, Tucker, I thought you’d told me everything. Did you know this?” I addressed both Adam and Niko.
Niko only shook his head.
“It’s standard Truce—” Adam began.
“Standard Truce protocols, what ever,” I said, my voice heated. “You guys have got to be completely in full-on disclosure mode from now on. Pretend I’m totally stupid and give it to me in simple words. I don’t know Truces. I don’t know Challenges. I obviously don’t know what questions to ask, and now my bloody matriarch is missing somewhere and our seers can’t even locate her. If she’s… if she’s dead…” I closed my eyes against that thought. Anger, yes, I could do anger, thought it was mostly frustration. I knew Tucker hadn’t kept information from me deliberately, nor had Adam. It was simply one of those situations where they didn’t know what I didn’t know, and I didn’t realize that I’d been missing data. Despair, however, that was an emotion I couldn’t handle so well. If Gigi was truly gone, dead, passed over, that meant I was the new ruler. I couldn’t be, not yet. I wasn’t anywhere near ready.
Sure, I could pretend. I’d been okay with doing the ruling thing over Texas and the Southwest. That was cake. I would ease my way in with Adam’s help and we’d enjoy the next several decades just learning each other, learning how to be rulers. He’d ruled a vampire tribe, but nothing of this magnitude. Gigi had promised to be there for us, to help us learn. She told me she was going to be around for a long time to come. Damn it. I wasn’t ready. She had to be all right.
I voiced my concern out loud. “What if she’s dead?”
“She’s not dead,” Tucker said, with a certainty I couldn’t argue with. “You’d know it.”
“I’d know?”
“You’re the heir, Keira. If Gigi died, whether by choice or not, you’d feel it.”
I had to take his word for it. “Okay then, I’ll accept that.”
“What now?” Niko asked. “If we can’t go to Canada to search for her, what do we do?”
“We wait some more,” Adam said. “Here, you and Tucker sit and I think the four of us need some information sharing. Tucker, I’ll explain the terms of Truce if you can share what you know of the various runespells on the parchment.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“The important thing is this: To be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become.”
—Charles du Bos
A headache beat its pounding rhythm against my brain. My eyes watered with the strain of looking at tiny imperfections in the parchment skin, at minuscule curlicues of ink. Two hours after Dad’s phone call and the four of us were no better off. Sure, I understood Truce now—basically, we were stuck here for the duration. So much for my brilliant idea of moving to a hotel. We couldn’t leave here (other than forays to town for supplies, but two of us must always remain on property); we couldn’t go back to the ranch.
Dad had texted me, asking me to wait for his call a little later on. He thought he’d found something regarding Gigi and had some information regarding the Challenge, but he needed to consult with one more person before he got back to us.
I didn
’t wait well. I’d buried myself in reviewing the parchment, touching it, stroking the letters, muttering various revealing spells. Nothing. I’d balked at calling Gideon and made the others swear to let me call him, but later. Yeah, I knew it was stupid, but talking to him right away would have been more stupid. In the mood I was in, I’d just yell. If I could calm myself, get a grip on my emotions, I could approach the call rationally. Talk to him as one person to another, keep my cool. I was going to need time to regroup, to get myself in the right frame of mind.
“Keira.” Adam spoke to me with a gentleness I’d not heard from him for a while. “Come away from there, you are in pain. I can feel your headache.” His cool hands rubbed my temples. “Come over to the couch and lie down for a bit, love. This isn’t helping you.”
I let him lead me. He sat and I lay down, my head on his lap. He stroked my forehead. I closed my eyes and concentrated on the soothing touch. My headache began to fade. I slowly let myself fade with it, dropping into sleep.
I woke, swearing, as my phone rang in my ear.
“Damn it.” I grabbed for it, narrowing its location down to Adam’s pants pocket.
“Sorry, love,” he said. “I should’ve moved the phone.”
I shot him a glare as I mumbled into the phone. “Dad? You find something?”
“Enough.”
I sat up at the tone of his voice. I’d rarely heard my father sound so tired.
“Did you call Gideon?”
I fumbled, nearly dropping the phone. “Sorry, Dad, I didn’t.”
“Keira, why ever not? Damn it, girl, we’re not playing games here.”
I cringed, feeling about ten years old, caught doing something stupid. “I know, I’m sorry. I promise I’ll call when we’re done.”
Dad sighed. I left the call on just audio, not really wanting to see his disappointed expression. “It’s not good, hon. I had a tough time with the wording, but from what I can decipher, this is an old-style sacrificial Challenge.”
“What?” Sacrificial? Adam’s voice spoke over mine. “No, not good at all, Huw.”
I put the phone on speaker and set it down onto the table. Tucker and Niko came down the stairs, each carrying a tray of food. I motioned them over.
“Huw, what’s the bottom line?” Adam dropped into full business mode.
The other two set down the food trays, pulled around the armchairs, and sat, listening.
“There’s a lot of history of such,” Dad said. “Long established tradition for these kinds of Challenges. Your cousin means to oust you entirely, Keira. To rule in your stead, to bind all the land to him.”
“All of it?” I still felt a little fuzzy from my nap. “The ranch?”
“No, I mean everything under your rule.”
“How can he do that?” Adam asked. “Minerva said the Truce involved just the Wild Moon property.”
“And so it does. Buried in the writing is the fact that the property at the Wild Moon stands as center, it represents all your holdings. If you can bind this land to you, then your rule is safe.”
“Then how do we do this? What kind of sacrifice?”
A rustle of paper, then my dad began to quote. “Willing and unwilling meet and marry. Blood of the willing. Heart of the unwilling. Replenish and fulfill. Rhoi a gadael yn byw. Mêr esgyrn. Gwaed ac esgyrn.”
“Give and let live. Blood, marrow, and bone.” I automatically translated the Welsh, though Adam and Tucker wouldn’t need me to.
“It’s very traditional,” Dad said. “Shared blood given freely reawakens the land, calls the rains. You said the land was dry, barren, a drought and heat wave?”
“Yes,” Adam answered. “I thought it was due to our natures, our infertility.”
“Could be. Could just be a curse.”
“A curse?” I asked. “But who? Adam bought the ranch slightly more than two years ago. Been living on it for nearly a year. The drought only just started a few months ago.”
“It started shortly after your Change,” Dad said. “When you became heir.”
“And that means what exactly?”
“When you Changed, part of the magicks included tying the land to you,” Dad explained. “When you pledged yourself to Adam, the magicks felt the death.”
“So Gideon somehow cursed it?”
“I doubt he would have been able to do so directly,” Adam said. “But Huw, if you’re right, Gideon is just exploiting this fact. By claiming Challenge and tying the magicks to this, he’s basically caused something similar to a curse, correct?”
“Yes, exactly. In order to break it, you must tie the land back to you by blood and bone.”
Adam stood abruptly, crossing to the other side of the room. “That is an ancient curse, Huw, far more ancient than I. It’s not just symbolic.”
“No, I’m afraid not.”
“So by sacrifice you mean, to the death?” I asked. Dad was confirming everything I’d suspected in the beginning. Death for life. Damn that black-souled bastard Gideon to eternal torment.
Three nods agreed with my assessment. Dad was silent on his end.
“This is like some sort of twisted religion. What do you want from me, Gideon?” I said to the air as I flew off the couch and began pacing. “To have me sacrifice myself like some latter-day Jesus Christ, washing away sins?” I caught the view of the former chapel’s altar out of the corner of my eye. “Much good it did him in the end. He still died horribly.”
“He rose again.” Niko’s voice, soft but strong, came from behind me. “Keira, I understand that my religious beliefs are not yours,” he said. “And I know that the history of a demigod sacrificing himself for his people isn’t unique to Catholicism, or even to any of the Christian sects. Tucker’s taught me about Baldur’s sacrifice, about the Fisher King and the other legends and myths. They had to come from somewhere.”
“What’s your point, Niko?” I asked, my rant deflated.
“Myth or not, parts of them are true, it seems.” Niko put an arm around me and led me back to sit down. “Call him. Call Gideon. We should have done a long time ago. We should have humbled ourselves and asked him to give us the translation, to work with him to see if he could accept some sort of compromise.”
“He wouldn’t have done it—he won’t do it,” I protested. “I know him. He’s getting a hard-on knowing that we couldn’t easily read this. I’ve absolutely no doubt that this was part of his plan—to frustrate me, all of us.”
“Or he wished you to call him and ask him,” Adam said. “I do not know him as well as you do, but I can see that being a motive.”
“As do I, Keira,” Dad agreed. “I’m sorry I don’t have better news, but Adam’s right. Call Gideon, play nice and perhaps this can be settled without bloodshed.” Without another word, he closed the connection.
“And Gigi?” I turned to Adam, searching his face.
“He may not have anything to do with her disappearance. Like us, he, too, is bound by terms of Truce. I do not know where they settled, but he and his people must be somewhere close by.” Adam seemed certain.
“How come?”
“He’s managed to hire someone, or convince someone to desecrate the cemetery,” Adam said. “He could not have returned to Faery through that particular door, not once he agreed to Truce. So he’s bound to be somewhere near, as we are.”
Cemetery. I’d almost forgotten. “Not to change the subject or anything, but did you know there is a priest here?” I asked him. “I ran into him outside. He looked like the gardener at first.”
“A priest?” Adam looked around the chapel room. “I’m not understanding.”
I quickly ran through my odd encounter with Antonio de Olivares.
In a blur, Adam crossed the room and grabbed my arm. “That was his name? Are you sure? Describe him.”
I pulled away, rubbing my arm. “Adam, what the—?”
Adam’s eyes focused on me. “Apologies. Please. Describe him.”
“Short, p
robably around five four at the most. Old. Weathered skin. Worn clothing. A straw hat. A tonsure, which I thought was weird, because isn’t that for monks?”
Adam turned from me and stared up the stairs. “He was outside?”
“In the cemetery. Adam, what the hell?”
He turned back to me, his brows lowered. “It can’t be,” he said. “No. It’s been…” He took my arm again. “Come, we are going outside. Niko, Tucker, remain here, please.”
Tucker put down his book, and before Adam could say another word, my brother was in front of us, arms crossed. “No bloody way,” he said. “I am not letting you two go gallivanting around out there without backup.” He looked to Niko. “Are we?”
“No, we are not.” Niko carefully placed the laptop he’d been using back on the table and joined Tucker. “Your clan chief is missing. You are the sole remaining Kelly heir. Adam is the sole heir to the Unseelie Court. If you think Tucker and I, who are your blood-bonded Protectors, are going to let you out of our sight right now…”
Adam gave a curt nod. “Very well. Come along.”
With that, he pushed aside the four pews and bounded up the stairs. I shrugged and followed.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
—Albert Einstein
Outside, the night remained still. The earlier darkness I’d felt was gone, replaced by the clear moonlight. No more clouds obscured its face. The cemetery stones all shone, as if newly scrubbed.
“Interesting,” Adam said as he examined the historical marker. He stood and wiped his hands on his slacks. “I don’t recall…” With Niko practically plastered to his side, he wandered away from the marker, toward the far end of the cemetery. “He said his church was beyond that ridge?”
“Yes,” I said. “A building he’s using as a chapel, in any case. Adam, what the hell are we doing up here, anyway? Do you know this priest?”