Page 78 of Night and Silence

My heart was beating too fast again, and I felt faintly sick to my stomach. If Simon had done this after all—if this was my fault for waking him up—I was going to crawl into my bed and never come out. “What did he look like?”

“Cute,” she repeated. “Um. Tall, skinny, sort of a hipster vibe, like he did all his shopping at vintage stores for ‘the aesthetic,’ but didn’t really know how things went together. He pulled it off, it just didn’t look right, you know?”

“I do.” It was a complaint I had made myself, more than once, when talking about purebloods who didn’t have much contact with the human world. Fashions changed too quickly for them to keep up. Some, like the Torquills, settled on an era and stayed there, dressing well but noticeably dated. Others tried to keep up, with mixed results. “Was there anything else about him that caught your attention? His hair, maybe?”

“Oh, yeah, his hair!”

My heart sank.

“It was this amazing shade of emerald green. I really wish I’d been able to get the number of his stylist. My hair’s so dark that I can’t ever seem to find anyone who can get it to take color.” Gillian hesitated before plucking at a strand of her hair, relaxing a little when she saw that it was still black.

She’d be unhappy when the gray started to appear. But that was a problem for later. “The man you saw with Jocelyn was tall and pretty and had green hair. Are you sure?”

“I notice a good dye job.”

“Okay.” I took a step back. “I need to go. I’ll ask the Luidaeg to let Miranda come up here and talk to you. Please don’t try to take the sealskin off. I’m not sure you could, yet, but if you did, I think you’d probably die. Please promise me you won’t.”

Gillian blinked slowly. Then she nodded. “I won’t.”

“Good.” I turned to go.

“Mom?”

I froze.

“I . . . I’m really angry with you. For leaving, and for being something you never told us about. It impacted my life and I never knew why, and that’s not fair. I don’t know if I’m ever going to stop being angry with you. But thank you. For coming to save me when I needed you. I don’t know what I am now, and I don’t know if I’m going to like being it, but I know I didn’t want to be dead. So thank you.”

I looked over my shoulder, managing the sliver of a smile. “You’re welcome.”

Then I looked away from her and walked, as quickly as I could, to the chamber door. When I let myself out, the Luidaeg was there, waiting for me on the stairs. Her eyes were still sea-glass green, and she was making no effort to conceal her concern. She was just looking at me. Silent, patient as the tide, and equally as eternal.

I burst into tears and threw myself at her, trusting, just this once, that she would catch me. She was my friend and my family, and she would catch me.

And she did. She wrapped her arms around me, murmuring a language I didn’t understand against the curve of my ear, surrounding me in the smell of the sea. I cried into her shoulder until I felt like all the tears had been wrung out of me, leaving me dry as a bone. Only then did I pull away, to find her still looking at me gravely.

“Better?” she asked.

“Yes.” I wiped my cheeks with the back of my hand. “Tybalt?”

“Here. Waiting for you. He’s anxious, but he never tried to go up the stairs. He knew you needed time.” A smile ghosted across her lips. “You should keep this one. He has a good sense of boundaries.”

“I’m planning to,” I said. “Gillian needs her mother. She needs Janet.”

If my statement surprised the Luidaeg, she didn’t show it. She merely nodded and said, “I’ll fetch her. They can stay here a little longer, while you finish doing what needs to be done, and then I’ll take them to see Liz, so she can start explaining what it is to be a Selkie in this world. I’d do it, but I don’t understand them the way I do the Roane, and the bargain has yet to be brought due.”

“It’s been more than a year.”

“I know.” She looked at me coolly, a thread of black wiggling across her right iris like a worm working its way deeper into the flesh of an apple. “You’re almost ready, and by giving them a year, I forced them to start putting their house in order. They should be prepared to pay by now. They should be grateful I gave them as long as I did. Now. Your cat is waiting for you, and I suppose I should go rouse the traitor, shouldn’t I?”

“Yeah,” I said. Impulsively, I grabbed her hands and squeezed them hard before starting down the stairs, leaving her on the landing, leaving my daughter in the tower room. The world had changed. The world wasn’t changing back.

What remained now was trying, in whatever way we could, to set things right.

TWENTY-ONE

I STEPPED INTO THE LIVING ROOM to find Tybalt perched on the absolute edge of the couch. He knew most of the filth was illusionary, but that didn’t stop him from being disgusted by it. The carpet squelched under my feet. He turned toward the sound, relief washing over his face as he stood in a single, fluid motion and began walking toward me.

He waited to speak until there was barely a foot between us. “Your daughter . . . ? I know she lives, but at what consequence?”