Well, that was a start. And the simple fact that we were all here, now, told me Aggie trusted this woman. That was enough to make me hear her out. “The Seelie,” I began with a frown, hesitating over the word. But Millicent nodded at me, so I apparently had it right. “The Seelie talked about Wards. They didn’t want the one who’d laid them to find out what they were doing.”
That provoked a vindictive snigger out of Millie, and as she poured herself another helping of brandy, she replied, “No, I don’t imagine they did. I might be getting old and the city’s Wards full of holes, but Butch and me, we can still plug any Sidhe up to no goddamned good full of enough cold iron to make ’em clank when they walk.”
Jude started to laugh in the middle of a swallow of cocoa, and had to cough to clear her throat; I reached over to thump her between the shoulders, while a reluctant grin pulled at my mouth at the thought of a shotgun named ‘Butch’. It set me a little more at ease. And that, perhaps, was what Millicent intended. Amusement flickered across her face as she watched me.
“So you set Wards on the city,” I said. “And this means what? Magic?” It sounded stupid, said out loud, and I rubbed the back of my hand across my eyes. They still prickled, though not so vehemently now. “Which, given everything else that’s been going on, I presume is real?”
Beaming, Millicent nodded firmly. “Yeah. Magic. You can think of Wards like magical roadblocks. Put one up, make it strong enough, you can keep out practically anything supernatural.”
“Sort of a magical security system,” Jude said. It wasn’t a question, and that surprised me. When I blinked at her, she went on with a grin, “Hey, I’m pagan. I get the idea of magically protecting a space.” Then her grin went a little lopsided, as she sheepishly appended, “Though last I checked, I wasn’t doing it with actual, um, magic.”
“You’d be surprised, girlie.” The old woman shifted position on the papasan, broadening her attention to include Jude as well as me; Aunt Aggie and Christopher, I supposed, were way ahead of us on this particular topic. “Burning a candle or incense, prayer, invocation… it’s not that far off from what us Warders do. We just do it with a little more zing.”
I pondered this, studying Millie and peeking sidelong at Christopher every so often as I did. The Sidhe had called her a Warder—but they’d called Christopher a Warder-blood. “But you’re human.”
“Human as they come, girlie.”
“But with magic.”
“But,” the old Warder drawled, a mischievous grin flaring across her face, “with magic. Boy howdy, the Sidhe don’t like that.”
“And you’re Seattle’s Warder.” Jude, following my lead, worked her way through the concept to make sure she had it down. “How’s that work? What do you Ward against—the Sidhe?”
Millicent inclined her head at my friend, a gesture that seemed incongruously dainty when taken with her cackle and the fedora on her head, but which went bizarrely well with the way she sipped her brandy. “Sidhe, trolls, or anything else wants to make a supernatural nuisance of itself,” she said. “I keep ’em out of Seattle. Now mind you, not all the fey folks and critters are a hassle. Some of ’em’ll just want to live and let live, same as you and me. And even most of the Sidhe, they can cross the Wards on a city and be welcome. Warders got a Pact with ’em, actually. We promise to let ’em into a Warded city, they promise to behave themselves.” Her grin vanished, though, and her expression went darker. “What happened back there at the bar ain’t covered by the Pact.”
A chill crept along my skin, prickling or no prickling, at the thought of this added layer of magical politics; I was having enough of a problem buying that magic existed in the first place, without extra complications on top of it. “But you were outside the bar when Jude and our teammates and I got there. You weren’t following me, were you?” I asked, a little more challenge in my voice now.
“Nope,” Millicent replied, not batting an eye. She gestured at Christopher with the brandy bottle. “I was following him.”
Christopher let out a throaty groan, tilting his head back over the top of the couch and spreading his fingers across his face. “The grass,” he rasped behind his hand. “My blood on the grass.”
“Felt it soon as it happened, son. Got a bead on you from a mile away.”
My head swiveled back and forth between the old woman and the young man. Comprehension dawned—at least in regards to Christopher. “That’s why you wanted so badly to leave, isn’t it?” I asked him. He didn’t utter a word, but the expression that stole across his features was all the answer I needed.
And as I watched him, Millicent spoke again. Her voice had gone soft, but not gentle; she lifted her chin and pinioned Christopher with her stare, challenge of her own ringing beneath every word. “Earth, air, and water… the doings of the people… they all go into a city’s living energy. All it takes is a taste of Warder blood on the land—and that energy rises up for its Warder. Who damned well better be prepared to take up his side of the bond before he spills his blood on a city’s earth!”
“I already told you, old woman, I don’t want…” Christopher wobbled even as he surged forward where he sat on the couch, angry words wavering into silence almost as soon as they erupted out of him. He looked sick. He looked stricken. And I couldn’t tell whether it was because being a Warder was the last thing he wanted on his resume, because he was about to heave, or both.
“And I already told you, son,” the old Warder woman began, glowering, but I leaped to my feet and glared at her to cut her off.
“Whatever you two need to work out, do it later. Please,” I told them both, working to keep a civil tone because Aunt Aggie was in the room. To Christopher, I added uncomfortably, “Take it easy, okay?” I reached for his shoulder, but stopped short of actually touching him as the thought that he’d shed blood on Seattle earth because he’d gotten hurt defending me crashed over me. Guilt was shaping up to be the theme of the night.
Aunt Aggie had no such problems. “Millicent, I think it’s time we changed the subject and left the boy alone for a while,” she said as she rose to fetch the brandy bottle.
“Humph,” grumbled Millicent.
Christopher rested his head on his hands, gingerly, as though he feared it might fall off his neck at any moment. But as he grew aware of my presence beside him he lifted a tense, pained gaze to me—and then to my aunt, as she poured him a sparing shot of the brandy into his cup.
“I probably shouldn’t have any more o’ that,” he muttered.
“It’s not for your head, son,” Aggie patiently replied. She held out his cup until he took it, and watched him until he sheepishly dropped his gaze and began to drink down the brandy and remaining cocoa in one deep gulp. Satisfied, she turned round to me and added, “And I don’t think we’re done answering Kendis’ questions, anyway.”
I swallowed hard, but didn’t look away from the woman who’d raised me. “Not yet, no,” I acknowledged. My voice came out almost as rough as Christopher’s. “I’m getting clear on Millicent’s part in all of this, but I’m still hazy on mine. What’s happened to my eyes, why the Sidhe at the bar were so dead set on getting their hands on me, and why that redheaded one was asking me about Dad and—”
Something else struck me then. Hard. I froze, and then stared round-eyed at Aggie. “—Mom,” I finished. “You never told me about…”
In all the time I’d spent under her roof, I couldn’t remember her mentioning my mother. Not once. Ever.
Dad, yes.
Mom, no.
Why hadn’t Aunt Aggie ever talked about my mother?
Why hadn’t I asked? God, why the hell hadn’t it even occurred to me to wonder?
I couldn’t get that last crucial word out. But Aggie didn’t seem to need to hear me say it. She took my arm and sat me back down on the couch next to Jude, took a seat on my other side, and put an arm around my shoulders. Her eyes, liquid and grave, never left mine.
“Kendis,” she mu
rmured, “I ain’t fey. I can’t pretend to know what’s going through their heads if they’re looking for you. And I don’t know for sure why your eyes have changed. But if I had to put a guess on it, I’d say it all has to do with your mama.”
“Oh God,” Jude blurted. She’d gone quiet as Millicent and Christopher had snapped at each other, doing her best to look unobtrusive, but now she almost squeaked at Aggie’s words. “I can see where this is going.”
So could I, and a lump swelled up in my throat, big enough that I probably couldn’t have spoken through it even if I’d wanted to. But I knew what I was about to hear, and it took everything I had just to brace myself for the words.
Aggie nodded to Jude, sorrowfully, and lifted up a dark hand to smooth my hair back from my face. “Your daddy was the easy part,” she said to me. “Every word I’ve told you about him is true. He was my brother, my little baby brother Will, and before you start worrying on any ideas to the contrary, he was as human and mortal as we come. Your mama though, she was one of them, those Seelie Court folks. Kendie baby… you’re half Sidhe.”
Chapter Nine
My mother’s name, Aggie told me, was Elanna.
“I remember to this day what she looked like,” she said, hugging me lightly to her side. Grown woman though I was, I sorely needed that comfort. I leaned against her, closed my eyes, and let her voice wash over me. It made me feel like a child again, but I didn’t exactly mind.
“Beautiful didn’t begin to describe her, even before I could see her real appearance. She had hair like living copper, like a brand new penny tossed into the sun. And her eyes… they were everything yellow in the world. Fire. Buttercups. Aspen leaves in the fall.” A sad little chuckle undercut my aunt’s words. “Your daddy used to say she had eyes the color of lemon soda. Not the most poetic boy in the world, your daddy.” Aggie blew out a soft sigh, then looked at Jude and gestured to the dining room table. “Honey, there’s a photo album over there, where I put Millicent’s things down. Bring it over here, would you please?”
Jude obliged. I’d never seen that album before. Its aging dark blue cloth cover was frayed at the corners and showed the layers of thin cardboard beneath; its pages sported lines of sticky glue and plastic cover sheets to hold the pictures in place, pre-dating the fancy notion of acid-free paper for the preservation of photographs. Before she handed it over, though, she paused and looked uncertainly at my aunt and me.
“Um, are you sure you don’t want to talk about this between yourselves? Personal family stuff and all…”
“It’s okay, Jude, really,” I said. Some of her tension was clearly in reaction to Millicent and Christopher—but she was still having a hard time looking at me for more than two consecutive seconds, and that worried me. So I sat up and held up a hand to my friend as I did every time we told each other about finding new bugs in our team’s products. After a moment, Jude grinned and gave me the high-five I wanted. “I want you to know,” I told her earnestly, which turned the grin into a genuine smile. “All of it.”
Then I glanced at Christopher. He slouched on his end of the couch, his face wearier now, his gaze a little blurry; either his headache or the brandy was getting to him, or else the spat with Millicent had drained what was left of his strength. But I still felt his presence on the edge of my senses—and it apparently went both ways. His gaze met mine, dark and unreadable, as I added, “Besides, it’d be kind of silly to tell you all to get the hell out now.”
Still radiating displeasure, Millicent let out an audible snort. “Not to mention,” the old woman said, “that we’re safer in this house than outside of it. I’ve Warded it every time I’ve come by for the last twenty-seven years.” Waving a socked foot imperiously at Aggie, she bid her, “Keep going. You’re just getting to the good part.”
Aggie smiled faintly and opened the photo album. The first few pages bore black and white pictures of random sizes, including some of my grandparents in their younger days, back in the 1940’s. Others were school pictures of both my aunt and my father, who grew older as the pages progressed from black and white to color. At last, at the end of the album, she paused on a picture that stood alone on an otherwise blank pair of pages.
In that lone photo Dad grinned out at the camera, his close-cropped hair and broad, chiseled features a stunning contrast to the woman he cradled tenderly against his chest. Her hair indeed seemed burnished, liquid copper, pulled back from her face in a thick, curling ponytail that spilled down around her neck and gleamed against the darkness of my father’s arms. Her skin was pale, and her eyes were an otherworldly yellow, the same eyes I’d last seen staring at me from the bathroom mirror at work.
I drank in the face of my mother in small, discrete chunks, as though the photo had to upload itself to my brain and I wouldn’t be able to understand it fully until it finished. Fragile, delicate cheekbones. The angle of her head revealing one ear whose finely sculpted point peeked up through a few loose tendrils of copper escaping the ponytail. And, several seconds after I registered their color, the size and uncanny luminosity of her eyes.
What struck me most of all, though, was her smile. It was as wide as Dad’s, unfettered and joyous, the smile of someone having her picture taken with the man she loves. With her face—a face as inhumanly beautiful as those of the four Sidhe at the bar—even a picture of a smile was devastating. It glowed with the clear, golden light of Seattle’s best spring days, when the sky is a fathomless blue and the air is so clean and translucent that everything seems drenched in sunshine. It brought tears to my eyes and made something chime deep within my chest, something that resonated like my violin when I played it, a painfully sweet chord of connection.
If she turned a smile like that on Dad, I thought, wetness trickling down my cheeks, no wonder I wound up coming along.
“She loved him,” I whispered.
Aggie murmured back, “She did, honey. I didn’t know what she was at first, of course. Rich little white girl, I thought, out to prove she was all that by getting it on with a black boy. In a little bitty town in West Virginia in 1982, you’re going to think that no matter what color you are.” Briefly, again, she gave that sad, small chuckle. “Even told me once what first caught her eye about Willie was his color—’he was the first human I ever saw of that shade,’ she said to me. And she never lied, not once, about being out to charm him. Or that he’d charmed her just as completely. One thing you can say about the Sidhe: they won’t lie. Not if you ask them something point blank.”
“Hah,” grunted Millicent. “The Seelie aren’t half bad about it. But getting a straight answer out of one of the Unseelie is like trying to peel grapes when you’re drunk and sitting on a cactus with cayenne pepper up your nose.”
It wasn’t the most conventional way of restoring a lighter mood to the room. But it worked. Jude let out a surprised yelp of laughter, and as I passed her the album so she could see my mother’s picture, I giggled a little myself.
Even Christopher spoke up, though he pointedly avoided the old Warder woman’s eye. “I didn’t t’ink you could take pictures of the Sidhe,” he said. His accent stood out a little more strongly now, sleepy and ever so slightly uncertain. And not because of the subject at hand, I thought. Just to assure him he had a place in the conversation, I shot him a tentative smile. Jude, backing me up with the impromptu unanimity, held the album around so he could see it without having to move.
“Every Sidhe on the planet would like you to think that,” Millicent said, snickering. The idea seemed to improve her mood immensely, or perhaps it was just the opportunity to impart more clues to the clueless: i.e., me. “Difference between a camera and the eye, though—you can bewitch somebody’s eyes into seeing something else, or nothing at all! Best damn camouflage there is. But you can’t toss a thrall on a camera. So anybody trying to take a picture of the Sidhe tends to get unlucky. Film gets exposed for no apparent reason, or the thing gets knocked out a window and run over by a passing bus. Or a pack o
f fairies makes off with the picture and you never see hide or hair of it again. Aggie here,” she concluded, “has one of the only real photos of a Sidhe in the whole damn country.”
“I can see why you’d keep it under wraps. Or tell everybody she was a Trekkie and liked to wear Vulcan ears.” Jude ventured a small playful smile to the older women as she passed the album back to me, but her eyes were solemn. Aggie smiled tolerantly back; Millicent snickered again, louder.
Now, finally, my friend was starting to sound like the Jude I knew; I shot her an even larger smile than the one I’d given Christopher, grateful beyond words for her presence. But I couldn’t keep the smile from tilting a little sideways as I took back the album and stared once more at my mother’s picture. “So why didn’t you tell me about her before, Aggie?”
“Your mama asked me not to,” she answered gravely. “She said you’d be safer not knowing.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. “But I should have thought—I should have asked…”
Aggie pulled in a slow breath, and for the first time I could remember, her voice actually shook. “She took care of that, baby. The Sidhe are magic. Your mama was, too. She made it so you wouldn’t ask, not until you were old enough to understand, and defend yourself. Because of what happened to your daddy.”
I really didn’t like the sound of that. “You told me Daddy died in a car accident just after I was born.”
“That’s true.” Aggie sighed, and for several seconds the sorrow I’d seen etched in her features before flared up again. She struggled with it, closing her eyes; after a few moments more she opened them again, but they’d taken on a wet sheen of grief. “Mind you, I can’t swear to the truth of it one way or another, but your mama thought her people had something to do with it.”
My head jerked up, uneasiness turning to an outright chill. “They killed him?”
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