Alice encouraging me to leave, to grow, to live.
Alice leaving me everything.
Alice saying I would come back someday.
Because Alice knew I had to.
Voss stepped fully in front of me now.“What do you want with her?”
He pointed the gun at Garrat and inched forward.I was too stunned to move.To think.
“What I want,” Garrat said lightly, “is exactly what you’d expect.And now that I know who she is, delivering her becomes much easier.”
“She’s the Guardian,” Voss said flatly.“She’ll close it.”
“Will she?”Garrat’s gaze slid back to me.“Or will she be too distracted trying to figure out who her father is?Who Alice was hiding from?Why she gave away her own child?”
“Stop,” Owen said.Another crack of thunder.
“The truth hurts, doesn’t it?”Garrat stepped backward, into shadow, into bubbling dark.“Until next time, my dear.We have so much more to discuss.”
Then he vanished.
The woods seemed to inhale.
The sludge at the base of the tree surged again, angry and alive, as if whatever doorway Garrat used had made it worse.
My knees gave out.I hit the ground hard, breath shuddering out of me as the world narrowed to sound and heat and disbelief.
“Piper?”Owen dropped beside me.
“Leave me alone.”My voice shook.“I want to be alone.”
“No,” Voss said sharply.“It’s too dangerous here in the woods.The crossing is still open.”
“Then I’ll seal it.”The words came out raw.Furious.
Tani clapped her hands.“We’ll make another potion—”
“I will make another potion.”I didn’t hide the razor’s edge to my voice as I looked at the fairy.“Go back to your realm, fairy queen.I don’t need your help.”
Tani’s face fell.
“Piper—”
“Don’t, Owen,” I said when he opened his mouth.“Are we going to pretend that didn’t happen?That he didn’t tell me my whole life has been a lie?”
No one argued.The only sound in the woods was cicadas, birds chirping overhead, and the wet, sick bubbling at the tree behind us.
“That’s what I thought.”
I got to my feet and ran.
I was going to confront my parents for the truth.
If it were true, it would explain so much.It would explain why my mother seemed to hate me and treated me differently and why I never felt part of the family even after all this time.
If Alice was my mother, then who was my father?
