Page 37 of Be the Serpent

“I think Jessica did, yeah,” I said. “I didn’t stay to talk to the night-haunts. Maybe I should have. Maybe I should call them back and see what they can tell me. Her memories must have had time to settle within the flock by now.”

“You promised to stop doing that,” said Quentin. “They’re not a toy. If you keep messing with them, they’re going to eat you.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe I deserve to be eaten, if I can’t tell Stacy what happened to her little girl.”

“Maybe you do,” agreed Walther roughly. “That doesn’t mean it would help. You’ll have to find another way.”

“There was another issue,” said Simon. Walther and I both turned to look at him. “A complicated and currently unfashionable illusion called a Llangefni screen was thrown over October when she went looking for Stacy, and transferred from her to several others, myself included. Infectious illusions are . . . They’re not outside the realm of the possible, but they’re difficult in ways I can’t easily articulate. I’m not the most powerful illusionist in Faerie, but I served under a woman who very well may have been, and she taught me many things that can take advantage of the level of power I do possess. I couldn’t spin that illusion. I doubt my old mistress could have done it easily, if she could have done it at all.”

“Which means there’s absolutely no chance Stacy did it, and we need to assume it was somehow tied to the compulsion spell she was under,” I said.

The door opened again, and we all looked around to see who was coming to join us. The Luidaeg stared back before she sauntered fully inside and toward the throne, Oberon—as he so often was—following in her wake.

We held our tongues until she reached us, when Arden set her laptop fully aside, rose, and bowed. “Luidaeg,” she said.

Like most of the Firstborn, the Luidaeg technically has no title. She pre-dates the feudal system we mimicked from the humans, and never saw the point in chasing crowns. So for her, the title she had been given by Faerie itself when she stopped using her given name with most people was the polite form of address. Everything else was just frills.

Arden didn’t acknowledge Oberon at all, and from the way he relaxed, I suspected that was what he’d been hoping for.

And in that instant, like a balloon being pricked with a pin, my patience for whatever game it was he’d been playing burst and drained away, and I stalked toward him, shoulders tight, eyes narrowed. The Luidaeg turned to watch me go, lips slightly pursed, like she was reserving judgment on my actions until she knew exactly what they were.

Every step made me angrier, until I was standing right in front of the tall, unassuming man with the antlers on his brow, the man who was the father of us all, both symbolically and—in some cases—literally. I tilted my chin up so I could meet his eyes.

“You,” I said.

“Me,” he agreed. Arden jumped, looking at him for the first time since he’d entered the room. She hadn’t been ignoring him before, I realized; she hadn’t been able to see him until he’d decided to allow her to.

“You need to cut this shit out,” I said, voice hard and louder than I had intended.

He blinked. “I’m sorry?”

“You need to stop,” I said. “You fucked it all up. You get that, right? We were fine. Faerie was flawed but it was fine, and then you left, and we all started eating each other alive. Your kids are killing each other. Somebody hurt a little girl I considered part of my family, and I don’t know what I’m going to do about it—I just know that nothing I do is going to make it right, because there is no making this right. She’s dead, and she’s gone, and the only people who might be able to help me are the night-haunts, and they asked me to stop summoning them all the damn time. So congrats, asshole. You fucked it all up by leaving, and then you came back and you didn’t do anything to fix it. You need to stop. You need to start helping us.”

He blinked again, more slowly this time, and his eyes seemed to truly focus on me for the first time. There was a distant, primal menace in his expression, something older than I was by such a vast degree that the part of my mind responsible for registering fear and transmitting it to the rest of the committee barely even recognized it as a threat. That was nice. Normally, I’m way too foundationally aware when I’m daring something bigger than me to knock me down a peg. This time, I knew it, sure, but I didn’t know it. The gulf between us was too enormous.

No one else was saying a word, not even the Luidaeg. They were all just watching as I tried to pick a fight with Oberon, the man whose power was as great compared to that of the Firstborn as theirs was to my own.

Sometimes I’m a damn genius.

“What did you just say to me, daughter of my daughter?” he asked, voice a low, warning rumble.

“I said, you fucked up royally when you walked away from the people who needed you, whatever reason you may have had at the time, however good of an idea it may have seemed, and I said you’re still fucking up right now, today, by coming back and not stepping up to do your damn job,” I snapped. “You’re Oberon. You’re the King of All Faerie, not just some puny Kingdom here or demesne there. You could stop this. But you don’t. You walked away from your kids when they still needed you, you left us all trapped here on Earth for reasons literally no one has ever been able to explain or figure out, and now that you’re back, you just want to, what? Watch television with Poppy and eat all the Luidaeg’s ice cream? You have a job to do. You need to start doing it.”

He inhaled slowly, looking at me the whole time, and the part of me that had been steadfastly refusing to see how dangerous he genuinely was suddenly seemed to realize what I’d been doing for the last five minutes and panicked in the back of my mind, quietly, so as not to set off the rest of my limbic system. Big help, there, brain. Couldn’t have reached that conclusion, oh, before I started mouthing off to the man who created us all?

Finally, in a low tone, he said, “You are so much like your grandmother sometimes. I forget how quickly things change in your mortal world. I thought you would remember why I left the way I did. I thought you were being polite out of consideration for what I’d been through, what I’d lost.” He looked to the Luidaeg. “Annie, is she telling the truth? Do you truly not understand why I locked the doors?”

She shrugged. “I’ve been trying to tell you, Dad. You just didn’t want to listen.”

“I see.” He looked back to me. “As to why I don’t simply solve your problems for you, if you had a tank of very small creatures, mice or fish or fleas, and they had a problem, and they somehow managed to express that problem to you, would that mean you could magically fix it? Every time? Oh, if the problem was large enough for you to see, if there was a cat among the mice or a hunting snake among the fish, you might be able to intercede, but if the problem was more to a scale with them, who were so much smaller than yourself, you might well be left standing helplessly by, however much you wanted them to be safe and cared for. I can grant the large strokes of what will aid you, but the fine details are too far beneath me for my aid to help them.”

“Don’t start a campfire with a nuke, got it,” I said.

“But as to why I locked the doors . . . the Summerlands grow from fae presence. They are a skerry created by the sheer weight of our descendants gathered together, like a film of sweat left by a hundred soldiers running in the summer sun. They are a natural phenomenon, and they will always expand to contain you all. The deeper realms, the ones farther from this world and its physical laws, they formed from myself and my wives, or from our direct descendants, and without us to keep them safely tamed, they could easily turn feral and consume anyone too weak to take them back in hand. I locked those doors because without us, you would never have survived. You would have been destroyed.”

I stared at him. So did everyone else in the room. In that moment, you could have heard a pin drop—or the whisper-soft sound of a Cait Sidhe stepping out of the Shadow Roads. I turned. Tybalt was standing near the edge of the shadows behind the throne, one hand on Julie’s shoulder, the tiger-striped changeling looking far more winded than her adoptive uncle, who traveled through the shadows almost as easily as he breathed. Julie was Cait Sidhe, which meant the shadows liked her a lot more than they did me, but she was also human, and they would always push against that part of her.

“Toby!” she exclaimed, seeing me looking in her direction. She stepped out from under Tybalt’s hand, rushing across the floor to my side, not sparing a second glance for Oberon. So he’d lifted the illusion of not mattering for those of us who were already in the room, and not for everyone? It was probably petty of me to be annoyed by that. We’d never get anything done if someone was stopping to go “Holy crap, that’s Oberon” every five seconds. But it was still time, and past time, for him to be telling the rest of the family that he was back.