“I used to attend the Royal Institution’s Friday Evening Discourses when I could—and of course the Christmas Lectures. Faraday spoke on its possibilities on multiple occasions.” Her mouth twitched in a sad, nostalgic sort of smile. “His 1837 lecture was particularly moving…”
“Get in.”
Avery hesitated out of habit.
Gideon sighed deeply. “Please?”
It might have been the unusual presence of the word “please” that coaxed her into sliding into the seat, though she did so while deliberately smearing rainwater over the soft black leather.
Gideon followed after, sitting in the seat across from her, and the driver closed the door behind them. “You’ll want this.” He meaningfully took hold of the seat belt and made a small show of how to pull it across the body and secure it.
Avery’s brow raised and she searched for a similar contraption on her side before mimicking the process. She shifted uncomfortably beneath it, but she said nothing. Then the car started and her attention drew raptly to movement outside the window. He watched her lips part ever so slightly. Awestruck.
It was certainly far smoother than any carriage ride she would have ever had—by comparison, the passage of the road beneath them was imperceptible.
She turned around in her seat to stare out the back window, just barely catching sight of the building before they turned onto the road. Like most of their buildings, it was glamoured to appear as something else to conceal it from mortal eyes; to Gideon, who had seen the city rise to what it was, it was a rather modern office building, but to Avery it must have been strange. She faced forward once more, her form slumping as the weight of lost time began to sink in. “Two hundred years.”
“Very nearly.”
Avery inhaled slowly as she processed this. “Two hundred years,” she repeated. Something dawned on her, a flicker of worry that cleared from her face almost the instant it marred it. “How isFather?”
“Still dead.”
Avery’s eyebrows raised. Truth be told, she was not alone in her surprise, but Gideon Blackthorn would be the last to admit to anyone that something had surprised him.
“Good.” She spat the word. Her eyes cut to him. “And you?”
“Still alive,” Gideon answered wryly.
Avery pursed her lips. “You have done well for yourself in his absence.”
Gideon said nothing. She was baiting him.
“Would you say you are the Winter Council’s chief lapdog now, or dothey not play favorites?”
“I am on the council now,” Gideon said quietly.
“You were not crowned in his place?”
It was an insult, not a question, but Gideon chose to answer it anyway. “I believed a more democratic approach would be better for everyone. Though I do take his place as Winter’s voice should the five courts meet in this realm.”
Avery’s curled her upper lip, fighting the urge to say something. What came out, however, was an angry taunt: “Does it bother you how much you look like him?”
He met her eyes. In so many ways, he could still see the child too terrified to so much as breathe out of turn. Every muscle was tense and poised to react, and while she appeared to be locked on him, he could tell by the minute movement of her iris she was trying to keep an eye on everything in her immediate sphere. The majority of the world secretly breathed a sigh of relief the day the Erlking perished, but two hundred years later, Avery was still looking over her shoulder. “Not as much as it bothers you.”
Avery huffed and stared out the window again. Her expression softened slowly as awe overtook her anger once more.
There were more trees in London than she would have remembered, more gardens, both in parks and crafted into the architecture itself. Climbing vines and spilling over balconies, the endless green that had been carefully cultivated into the city was reminiscent of the great city of Tír na nÓg.
Her next question was genuine, and spoken with the kind of threadbare hope you don’t dare let anyone witness for fear they could shred it with a simple word. “Are…are weoutnow?”
Gideon knew if he wasn’t careful, he would be the one to shred that hope. “For all intents and purposes, we are still blissfully separated from the mortals, but there have been…complications.”
The anger bubbled up again—it was her comfort and old friend in unfamiliar situations. “Too many trying to reach across the divide? Hard to pay off the dead, I suppose.”
Gideon clicked his tongue in annoyance. What humans now called “the spiritualism movement” had been one of the largest cover-ups the Winter Court had ever had to manage. It had taken years of planning and subterfuge to throw off mortal suspicion, and yet even now remnants of it stubbornly lingered. “That persevered longer than we’d have liked but was easily discredited in the end,” Gideon lied. “A few of our own masquerading as charlatans, or discrediting those displaying their true gifts and attempting to out us, as you would say… Eventually belief and suspicions died among the Mundane.” The cold arrogance she’d so often accused him of finally reared its head. “It’s a shame you missed it. We enlisted a marvelously clever warlock. He accrued quite a bit of infamy among the mortals as a great debunker of so-called magic among the humans.” He could hear it himself now and cleared his throat to try to level out his pride. “History remembers it now as little more than a bizarre phenomenon.”
“Huzzah the empire,” Avery muttered.
