Page 77 of Night and Silence

“I . . .” Gillian stopped, staring at me with sudden understanding. “I was in a meadow, and you were there too, only you didn’t look the way you looked in pictures. You looked like you were something else. Like you were my fairy godmother.”

Not exactly the description I would have used for myself, but I nodded anyway. “Yes. Exactly. What happened in the meadow?”

“There were two more versions of me. One of them who looked like you, and one who looked like Daddy.” She hesitated, her face screwing into a look of deep concentration. “You told me I had to choose, because you could only save me if I chose. You looked so sad, and I wanted to be the kind of person who could choose to stay with you, but I couldn’t do it. All I wanted was to go home. I wanted my dad and Miranda. I wanted my room and my things, and I guess that’s why I’m being punished now, isn’t it? Because I chose wrong.”

“Oh, baby, no. No, you’re not being punished. You’re not . . . you did nothing wrong. The choice was yours to make, and you asked for what you needed. No one should ever be angry with you for that. I’m not. I never was.” I’d cried myself to sleep because she hadn’t wanted to be with me, but I had never been angry with her. “That meadow, though, that choice . . . I was there with you. It wasn’t a dream. It was the magic letting you see what you needed to see in order to understand what I was asking. You had been shot with a sort of poison that only kills mortals, whether human or changeling—um, fae who have some human blood in them—and in order to take it out of you, I needed to be able to change your blood. When you asked me to make you human, I did.”

She looked at me with wide, bruise-colored eyes. “That’s why my skin stopped breaking out when I helped Dad work on the car, and why I stopped being so tired in the mornings. Because you took the alien out of me.”

“Not alien: fae,” I said. “And yes. My kind of fae is . . . we’re a little odd. We work with blood. We can make it do what we want. But we can only work with what’s there. When I took the fae blood out of you, I couldn’t ever put it back again.”

“And you took it out of me to save my life. Because I asked you to.”

“Yes.”

Gillian lifted one hand, fingers spread to show the soft new webbing between them. It would thicken and get tougher as it spread, until it connected her fingers all the way to the first knuckle. If the other Selkies I’d known were anything to go by, her manual dexterity wouldn’t be that affected, but all those other Selkies had been raised knowing that one day, if they were lucky, they might go to the sea. They might earn a skin. Gillian . . .

Hadn’t.

“So what the fuck is this?” she asked, voice small and wounded. “Why does everything feel wrong? Why is there fur tied around my shoulders, and why can’t I take it off? What did your weird monster friends do to me?”

I took a sharp breath, forcing my tone to gentle before I said, “The woman whose face you can’t remember stabbed you with the same stuff you’d been shot with before. The stuff that kills humans. It’s called elf-shot. It was tearing you apart, because that’s what it does. You were dying, Gillian. So my friend Tybalt brought you here, at my request, to find out whether there was anything that could be done to save you. I was hoping . . . I don’t know what I was hoping for. I was hoping for a miracle. What I got was a loophole. That skin you’re wearing, it belonged to the youngest daughter of my aunt, the Luidaeg. The woman with the green eyes. When her children . . . died, she put powerful magic into their skins. Anyone who bonds with one of them becomes what’s called a Selkie. A kind of fae. Not the kind you were before you asked me to change you, but still fae, and if you’re fae, the elf-shot can’t kill you.”

She stared at me. “You’re lying.”

“I’m not.”

“You—you orchestrated this whole thing! You wanted this to happen! You wanted me to have to come and live with you!”

“That’s not going to happen.” She was my daughter, I loved her, and I would have been lying if I’d said I had never dreamt about it, never closed my eyes and seen her sitting across the table from Quentin, the two of them close as siblings, arguing over who had stolen whose toast and who had to go make more. But dreams were exactly that: dreams. “You may need to take a little time off from school to adjust to the change, and I apologize for that. It’s still better than dying. And you’re not coming to live with me. You won’t even have to see me if you don’t want to. Your . . . ”

My voice caught in my throat, lodging there like a stone. I couldn’t speak. Gillian narrowed her eyes, looking at me warily.

“What?” she asked.

I swallowed the stone. It settled heavy in my stomach, and I said, “Your mother is here. J—Miranda. She knows about Faerie. She’s always known. She’ll take you home and tell you how to hide yourself from your father until someone can teach you how to spin illusions, and she can take you wherever you need to go.” Probably to Half Moon Bay, to the rambling house occupied by Elizabeth Ryan and her small clan of Selkies. She’d be able to help Gillian adjust to her new reality, and I’d be able to stay far away, missing yet another milestone in my child’s life.

But my child was going to have a life. Maybe not a human life, and maybe not the life she’d been expecting, but a life all the same. That was so much more than I’d expected. I wasn’t going to complain about it.

Gillian sat up a little straighter, some of the worry going out of her face. “Miranda is here? In this weird place?” She paused. Her eyes widened. “Miranda knows about fairies?”

She wasn’t pronouncing the word quite right yet—there was a subtle wrongness to it that told me she was still thinking more Tinkerbell than Blind Michael. She’d have time to learn the difference. I nodded.

“She is,” I said. “When the bad woman took you, she tried to make us think Miranda had done it, that she was the one who’d hurt you. I think she wanted us to fight, to give her more time to get you into hiding.” But that didn’t make sense, did it? The false Queen hadn’t made any effort whatsoever to hide Gillian: if anything, she’d been disappointed that it had taken me so long to follow Jocelyn’s note.

Dugan was playing his own game. Every piece we found made me more certain of that. I just didn’t know what that game was quite yet, and until I found out, none of us were safe.

“Gillian,” I said carefully, “I’ll get Miranda for you, and I won’t come around unless you ask me to. You have my word on that. But I need you to think very hard. Apart from the woman you can’t remember clearly, was there anyone strange around the residence hall in the last few weeks? Anyone at all who didn’t feel like they should be there?” If she’d seen him . . .

Gillian began to shake her head. Then she stopped, and asked, very carefully, “Did I really see Jocelyn in that place with all the fog?”

“I’m sorry, honey, but yes, you did.”

“That bitch.” Her expression hardened. “She was always trying to suck up to me, you know? Always asking questions about you, like you were some kind of hero, and not a deadbeat who ran out on her family when things got hard.”

I didn’t say anything. Gillian was part of Faerie now. She would learn the truth soon enough, and this wasn’t the time to try arguing the case for my redemption. “She said something similar when I came looking for you,” I said. “Why do you ask?”

“Because she had a new boyfriend hanging around this past week. I mostly noticed because he was really cute, and I thought he might make a good model for our life drawing class.”