“Magicians?” Jade offers.
“Case in point.” But Doug smiles, and Jade brightens at this softening.
“It doesn’t matter,” I say. “Artemis will be wherever Leo is, so the goal doesn’t change. And Rhys is right. Whatever they want him for, we have to stop. Our only hope is that Cillian’s mom can give us a lead to track down Artemis and the zealots.”
“Because someone let the zealots steal our book that could have shed light on the problem.” Rhys’s jaw twitches. Normally, Cillian would reach over to soothe him, but Cillian has his arms folded tight, his face unreadable. I don’t know who in the car he’s most angry at. If it’s me, he’s not alone. I’m most angry at me too.
Cillian pulls out the necklace we took from the cloakers and holds it in his palm. I know how much it’s going to cost him to face whatever we’re going to find out. It means letting go of his memories of his father, potentially replacing them with bad things. His mother asked me to keep him away from it all, but thanks to my choices, that’s not an option anymore.
“Cillian.” Rhys lifts a hand toward him. Rhys is pale, and his hand shakes slightly, but he seems okay in spite of having donated so much blood. Cillian takes Rhys’s hand and squeezes it.
“Let’s do this.” We follow Cillian inside. The Littles must have been bundled into Cillian’s room with Jessi, and this early it’s still quiet. But the light in the kitchen is a warm island in the chilly ocean of the dawn. Cillian’s mother dances around the kitchen humming as she prepares food. We shuffle in. The space isn’t large enough for all of us, so Doug and Jade sit at the table for three, while Rhys, Cillian, and I block the entrance and exit to the kitchen. I don’t know if we stage it this way on purpose, but she can’t get out without going through us.
Jessi appears on the stairs and glares at us all. “Be quiet,” she hisses, before disappearing back upstairs.
“Oh, hello!” Esther beams and her eyes sweep over us. They pause on Doug, but only long enough to register mild surprise and then move on. She does know about demons, after all. She continues bustling about, pulling things from cupboards and the fridge. “I wasn’t sure what the little ones would like, so I’m making a bit of everything. I thought today we’d take a picnic to the beach. It will be cold, but I’ll bundle them up. Then we can stop by the shop for a treat if Jessi says it’s okay. She’s quite intense, isn’t she? But I love the shop. It’s so well done, Cillian. You really changed that space for the better.” She seems genuinely happy to have the Littles here, excited at the prospect of taking them for a fun outing. Gods, don’t let her be secretly evil. Please let this mom be a good one.
Cillian leans against the counter and folds his arms. “That’s great, Mum. Do let us know if you decide to run away to Tibet or Madagascar or Shangri-la as a change of plans, though. We’ll need at least five minutes’ notice.”
Her reflexive smile is tight and defensive. “Give me a moment and I can make you all eggs. You still like them sunny-side up, right?”
Cillian doesn’t answer. He pulls out the necklace instead. She flinches as it winks in the light. “What is this?”
“Toast?” Her glance at me is accusatory. I wasn’t supposed to bring Cillian into it.
“It’s too late,” I say. “I’m sorry. We have nowhere else to turn.”
Cillian moves to block her path to the toaster oven. “This is our only lead. You owe me this. If we don’t find these people, our friend will die.”
His mom’s hands tremble as she reaches up and smooths the wrap around her braids. “What—what can this have to do with your friend?”
“The people wearing this symbol took him. And it can’t be a coincidence that Da’s puzzle is the same pattern. Was he involved with this before he died? Were you? Are you? Because they’re all zealots, and you’ve spent a lot of time trying to find God or religion or whatever.”
The kettle whistles, and Cillian’s mom shuffles around him to pull it off the heat. She pours five cups of tea and pauses on the sixth, raising an eyebrow at Doug. He shakes his head, and she sets the kettle back on the stove. We each get a mismatched mug. I take Jade hers, not wanting to let Cillian’s mom away from where we have her cornered. Jade’s face is bruised, her lip swollen, and I catch Doug staring at the damage with an unreadable expression.
Cillian’s mom wraps her hands around her mug and turns to face us, leaning against the counter with the same physical posture I’ve seen Cillian do a hundred times. “Your father isn’t dead.”
Cillian chokes on his tea. “What?”
“In my defense, I never said he was dead.”
He sets his tea down on the tile counter. We’re all frozen, unsure where this is going. “Yes,” Cillian says, “you did.”
“No. I try not to lie to you. If you remember, all I ever said—all I have ever said—is that we lost your father. I meant that literally. We lost him.”
“I think we should sit down.” Rhys takes Cillian’s elbow and leads him to the worn pink sofa. I can’t tell whether Cillian looks like he’s more likely to pass out or murder someone. I sit on his other side, both to support him and to keep him in place in case he does decide to strangle his mother.
Esther sits on a chair across from us, balancing her mug on her knee and staring down into it as though the tea leaves might reveal an easier way to tell this story.
“I was a student of fairy tales. Grad school. I wanted to teach. I’ve always been interested in oral traditions, the stories we pass down generation to generation. Why we tell the stories we do. I traveled the Irish countryside, asking for regional variations of the tales of fair folk. I found the same general information in every single one, but some of the towns and villages had details—very specific details. A hill you should never visit at night. A path that should never be walked alone. A house that was abandoned two hundred years ago and still stands unclaimed to this day. I could sense the power behind their fear. It wasn’t terror—it was self-preservation. It had all the same rules and practical steps as my spells. And that got me interested. I went to one of the abandoned houses at night, made a protective circle, and I waited. At midnight, a portal opened.” She pauses, then looks up at Doug. “I’m sure none of you will be surprised to learn that our world contains—contained—gateways and portals to other worlds. These weren’t fairy paths and fairy doors. They were openings to other dimensions. Hell dimensions. All the stories about keeping your loved ones safe from ageless, unknowable beings who would take them and never return them, or return them so altered you wouldn’t recognize them, were true. They were just about demons, not fairies. Same concept, different name.”
“I like ‘fair folk’ better than ‘demon.’ ” Doug shrugs. “Has a nicer ring to it.”
“It does, doesn’t it? But most of the folk were far from fair. I was lucky that first night. Nothing came out, and I ran as fast as I could. Then I picked my next move very carefully. I wanted to prove my theory was correct. That we were telling ourselves stories about demons, that the Irish had always known about these connections to other worlds and had been protecting themselves for generations. So I found a village with stories about one specific fairy. The Sleeping One, they called him, because he had no name. Once a year, every year, every single person in the village left. They abandoned their homes, their businesses, their lives. When I asked why, they couldn’t tell me, other than that it wasn’t safe. And sure enough, a cursory search of newspaper archives from that annual date showed missing persons going back decades. So that year, when they all fled, I set a trap.”
She sips her tea, frowning. “It was arrogant. But I was young and ambitious, and I wanted a demon. It turned out I was even more ambitious than I meant to be, though, because I didn’t catch a demon that day.” She sighs, looking out the window at a place and a day far from our own. “I caught a god.”
It’s Rhys’s turn to choke on his tea. “You caught a god?”
“A minor one. But yes.”
�
�Wait,” Cillian says. “There are gods—plural?”
“Yeah.” I shrug. “It depends on your definition of a god, but there are countless hellgods, some midlevel benevolent ones. Powers-that-be that sometimes fiddle with our own earth. We’re not sure whether they still have access now that magic is dead.”
Cillian leans back into the couch, rubbing his forehead. “So all this time, when you said ‘oh my gods,’ you weren’t being cute. You were being accurate.”
“I like to cover my bases.” I gesture toward Esther. “But when you say you caught a god, what do you mean by that?”
Cillian’s mother has refocused on us. She’s watching Cillian with careful concern. “I was quite good at magic. I drew from a variety of sources. Irish, English, Nigerian. The traditions melded in surprising ways, and I drew a lot more power than I would have had I specialized in only one like my college coven wanted me to. There’s a lot to be said for knowing your heritage. When the god stepped into the village to look for a sacrifice, he stepped into my trap. My nets fell on him, binding him to this world and to me. But once he was there and I had him, I didn’t know what to do with him. I panicked.” She swirls her remaining tea around in her mug. “I defaulted to my British training, and I invited him to sit down for tea with me. We talked. He had been visiting earth for countless generations, siphoning power. Like we were an outlet and he was recharging himself. It takes a lot of energy to sustain godhood.”
“Naturally,” Jade mutters. “Can’t be all-powerful without a lot of power.”
“So you had a bound hellgod and you were drinking tea. Then what?” Cillian isn’t looking at her, or any of us. His eyes are fixed on the floor, and his hand is gripping the necklace so tightly it must be cutting into his palm.
“Well, we … we hit it off. He was really interesting, and quite charming and handsome.”
“Mum.” Cillian’s hand twitches. “You are not telling me my father is a hellgod.”
“A minor one. But yes. Technically. Though he resented it when I referred to his home dimension as ‘hell.’ He felt it was reductive.” She takes a prim sip. “He did quite like being called a god, though.”
Rhys lets out a long, controlled breath. “Then you brought him back here and played house with him.”
She shrugs. “I couldn’t let him go, knowing what he was. Eventually his power would drain. If he spent long enough here without sacrifices, he would become human. I debated the morality of it, of course. Of deciding this ageless creature should no longer be able to do what he was designed to do. But that had to be weighed against the countless generations of people who had been sacrificed to him. And, well, I liked him. It was lonely, being the only witch in Shancoom. Honestly, he was happy. He had been doing the same things for so long they had ceased to have meaning. Watching him discover the world, feel things as a human, was really wonderful. He never tried to break the binding, never asked to be free. I loved him, and I really do think he loved me, too. When I fell pregnant, he—well, when I say he glowed with happiness, I mean it literally. He was thrilled. He had been alone for so long too. We had that in common. And we both wanted you, Cillian.”
Cillian is silent. I can’t imagine what must be going through his head. Aside from the decidedly complicated question of whether a hellgod bound by magic can give consent, the sheer fact that his parentage is half not of this world would be enough to set anyone over the edge. I reach out and take his hand in mine, squeezing.
“So what went wrong?” Jade asks.
“Everything was normal. Happy. I had the magic shop. He volunteered with the local police force, helped out in the shop, took over the bulk of the parenting and housekeeping. But then a few years ago, I came home early with a headache and caught him in the shed with Cillian. They had that triangle receptacle. I didn’t know where he got it, or how, but I recognized the symbol from the town where he’d crossed over. A circular courtyard in the center where he’d appeared had an old stone pillar with the symbol carved on it. I had thought it was a Celtic relic, but it wasn’t. It was him. His symbol. He was teaching Cillian how to manipulate it, and then—then it started glowing. It terrified me.”
“Why?” Cillian asks. “You knew what he was.”
“I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t know if he was using it to siphon energy from you like one of his sacrifices. Or if … or if he was trying to make you into whatever he had been.” She grips her mug, her posture rigid. “Either option scared me more than I’d known was possible. I had gotten complacent, so used to him and in love with our life together that I let myself forget who and what he was. And for the first time I wondered if maybe he had let me bind him. Maybe I had been the one without power all along. I was so distracted, that night I forgot to redo the binding.” She shakes her head. “I don’t know. Maybe I forgot on purpose. I was in over my head, and I was scared for my child. On that very first day with him, over tea, he told me he’d kill me when he got free. He said it with a smile, casual and cheerful.” She shivers. “But when I woke up in the morning, he was gone. He just left. I think—I really do think he loved us. In his own way.”
“Why did you lie to me?” Cillian’s voice breaks. “Why did you let me think he was dead?”
“He’s not the same as us. He’s an ancient creature, infinite. And when he was no longer tied to us, he had no choice. He had to go back to what he was. But he loved us. We’re still here. If he didn’t love us, if his time with us hadn’t changed him, he would have killed me. So I let you think he was dead. It felt kinder than knowing he couldn’t stay. That he went back to his own dimension.”
Rhys frowns. “He went back? Just like that?”
“I never saw him again. I don’t know what else he would have done. He hated how noisy it was here. Going by his old calendar, he was due to return this spring equinox, but he can’t, obviously.”
Cillian stands, pacing. “This is so messed up. This is all so messed up. I—I don’t have time for this. We don’t have time. What’s the triangle thing?” He shakes the necklace, our only link to Leo’s captors. “Why do they have it on necklaces?”
“If I had to guess, I’d say they worship him.” She makes a distasteful expression, as though something is sour or rotten. “It’s tacky, really. Maybe they’re trying to reach him.”
“Like Eve,” I say, “trying to make a new hellmouth.”
Jade leans back in her chair, her expression thoughtful. “Could be what they need Leo for.”
Rhys nods, his expression intent as he ponders these new developments. “They heard what Leo’s mum did and want him to do the same thing.”
“Would that be so bad?” I’m genuinely curious. “I mean, he’s Cillian’s dad.”
Cillian shakes his head. “Any god who runs an operation that uses other living creatures for parts isn’t a benevolent god. Plus, he’s missed every single birthday and Christmas even though he knew exactly where I was and could have come back to earth any time before magic died. Even if it was just for a day. He might be a god, but he’s still a deadbeat dad.”
Cillian’s mom looks sad. Then she shakes her head, her expression resettling into firm disapproval. “Cillian’s right. It wouldn’t be good if he came back. Especially now that there’s no competition. He used to talk about how he didn’t stay because he could only stand to be here for a day at a time with all the other powers and demons competing. They all sort of held one another at bay. If a god—any god—could get a foothold here now, they’d have no rival. It would be bad.” She gestures to the necklace dangling from Cillian’s hand. “I don’t know that it’s much to go on. The triangle is his name. It’s a symbol, or a receptacle. I’m not sure. He would never talk to me about it. All this time I’ve been studying, trying to learn more about various gods, about their power.”
“Why, though?” Cillian stops his pacing. “You want another boyfriend?”
She recoils as though he struck her. “I did it for you. Because I worry. About the parts of y
ou that are him. He can’t be here for you, so I wanted to learn as much as I could. That way, if you are like him, if you do … change, then I can be here to help you navigate whatever comes up.”
“But that’s just it, Mum. You haven’t been here. I’ve been alone. I don’t care about the parts of me that are him. I care about the parts of me that have been so scared and so alone.” He doesn’t turn away when Rhys stands and takes his hand. He shifts so their shoulders touch.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispers, tears brimming in her eyes. “I wanted to take care of you. But I made the wrong choices. I’m so glad—I’m so glad you’ve had a family here, while I was gone. And I’ll try my best to make it up to you.”
Cillian clears his throat, trying not to cry. “I don’t care if my father was some big bad bloke from another dimension. I take after you, anyway.”
She laughs, then stands and wraps Cillian and Rhys up in a hug. “At least you have better taste in men than I do.”
I don’t want to be the reason this family reunion is disrupted, but Leo can’t have much time. And I have to find Artemis. I have to stop her. “How do we find them, though?”
Cillian’s mother releases him, straightening and pulling reading glasses from around her neck. She puts them emphatically into place. “Oh, I’ve done the research.”
Rhys’s face is nearly beatific as he looks at her. “Can I see it?”
“Next time, dear.” She pats his shoulder. “I have so much to show you. But for now …” She reaches into a cupboard and pulls out a recipe book. When she opens it, it’s revealed to contain hundreds of pages of notes in a cramped but efficient hand. “If they’re trying to reach him, they’ll go to his traditional seat of power, of course. It’s a little village about two hours from here. We can start searching there.”
“It’s more than we had before.” Rhys sounds excited.
I wish I could be excited too. But part of me hopes we don’t find them. That we never find them. Because if we never find them, I never have to face Artemis. But if we never find them, Leo will die.
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