Page 57 of Be the Serpent

I looked back to Stacy. She was watching me, equal parts weary and wary, like she was waiting for the other shoe to drop. How much did she know of what was happening to her? How much was she allowed to know? Titania had clearly carried her back to the house when her second attack had failed, and had cleaned up the evidence of her assault on Jessica before allowing Stacy to have her own body back. Stacy was a hostage in this situation, and there was no way out for her.

It hurt to even think about. Drawing it out wasn’t going to make it any better. I took a deep breath, the taste of roses cloying on my tongue and overwhelming the scent of breakfast foods, and said, “Stacy, we’re here because we need to talk to you.”

She blinked, all guilelessness and innocence, and tilted her head very slightly to the side. “What about?”

In for a penny, in for a pounding. “Jessica.”

She stiffened, very slightly, her expression going cold around the edges. Cold and somehow brittle, like the wrong word could shatter her. “What about her? Has she been getting on the internet again? I didn’t want it in this house, but after Chelsea convinced Duke Torquill to allow it at Shadowed Hills, I lost most of my argument against it. I hate to say anything that sounds like I’m judging someone else’s parenting choices, but Etienne is far too lenient with that girl. Although I suppose it’s easy to be lenient when you get to sweep in after someone else has done all the hard work and declare yourself as the hero of the hour for teaching the daughter you abandoned how to use her magic.”

Now it was my turn to blink. Titania might be poisoning Stacy from the inside out, but everything she knew—everything she had to work with—came from the time they’d spent together.

And at this point, I had to admit that we were right. Stacy and Titania were absolutely one and the same. Stacy could never have cleaned up the evidence of Jessica’s death on her own, and more, she wouldn’t have wanted to. Denial, I could believe. Absolute negation of her daughter’s horrific loss . . . no. It didn’t make any sense for the woman I thought I knew, and that meant it wasn’t something she could have done on her own.

“I’m sorry, what?” asked Tybalt.

Stacy shrugged. “Etienne knew he’d been intimate with Professor Ames. He knew there was a chance of pregnancy with a mortal woman. But he never checked in on her? He never asked her why she cut him off the way she did? He had a responsibility and he walked away from it, and now that he feels like he’s getting a second chance that he doesn’t deserve, he’s overcompensating.”

“You could say the same thing about me and Quentin,” I said. “He has the internet. All the kids who hang out at my place do. That includes Karen, you know. She comes over about once a week, and she’s got a smart phone.”

“The sea witch insisted,” said Stacy uncomfortably. “I tried to ban them from this house, and between Karen and Chelsea, it’s become impossible. Jessica just had to have the social medias and the whole of human knowledge at her fingertips. Were we that stubborn when we were her age?”

“We were worse,” I said. “But no, Jessica hasn’t been getting on the internet, at least not while she was with me. I don’t see her as much as I do Karen and Cass, remember?”

Jessica had been working hard to recover from her experience in Blind Michael’s lands—therapy and nightlights had gone a long way toward helping her with that—but she had never been completely comfortable with me after I brought her home. I was too close to the monster who had shattered her childhood sense of safety and security. It didn’t matter that I was also the one who’d killed him, the hero who’d been willing to risk myself to get her back. Children are allowed to need time to heal their wounds, and sometimes those wounds leave scars more terrible than the eye can possibly see.

At least in the last few years, she’d stopped crying every time she saw me. That had been more disturbing than I’d ever wanted to admit, and had made me reluctant to keep trying to reach her. There’s being a supportive adult, and then there’s being so associated with a source of trauma that every time you come into a room, you retraumatize the kid. It wasn’t Jessica’s fault. It wasn’t mine, either. Blind Michael was dead, and even knowing that hadn’t done anything to make it better.

Stacy scowled. “Blind Michael,” she spat. “That . . . that beast.”

Tybalt’s hand tightened again, this time harder, less reassurance, more alarm. It would have made sense for her to call Blind Michael a monster, or a bastard, or any number of nasty things. “Beast,” though . . . that had connotations in our world. That had a meaning beyond the simple insult it could have been intended as. Even if Stacy had been inclined to think that way after a childhood spent with Julie, she should never have been willing to say it with him in the room.

Titania was the one who first started the idea of cleansing the “bestial” aspects from Faerie. Hearing that word in that tone made it a little easier to think of Stacy as fading away, being overwhelmed by something bigger and crueler than she was.

“Yes,” I said, soothingly. “Blind Michael hurt her, and she associated me with that hurt, and so she never came over the way her sister did, not even once she was old enough to take BART into the city by herself.”

Stacy kept scowling. “He should never have been allowed to prey on children the way that he did,” she said. “Not for so many years. He should have been stopped a long time ago. The children of Maeve, they think they can do whatever they want just because they’re Firstborn, but they destroy what they touch.”

“The Luidaeg hasn’t destroyed Karen,” I said, forcing my tone to stay mild. “If anything, she’s kept her safe. Too many people know she’s an oneiromancer. She would have been claimed by a royal Court by now, whether she wanted to be or not, if not for the sea witch standing in the way.”

“And whose fault is that?” asked Stacy hotly. Her irises looked like they were starting to crystallize around the edges, throwing back the light in flecks of pink and white and red, like nothing an eye should be capable of doing. “If Antigone hadn’t insisted on dragging my daughter to that ridiculous convocation, then no one would ever have known there was anything strange about her. She could have lived her life in safe obscurity, and she would never have needed to have that woman anywhere near her.”

“Can you hear yourself right now?” I asked. “Do you understand what you’re saying to me? Is there enough of you left for that?”

She blinked, hard. When she opened her eyes again, the prismatic flecks were gone, replaced by her normal, neutral blue. “Of course. I’m sorry, Tobes, what were you saying?”

“That we need to talk about Jessica.”

“Oh, she’s a very good girl, her little delusions about being an oracle like her sisters aside. As long as it’s just poetry, well, there are worse hobbies she could have. She could be interested in taxidermy, or trying to tell the future by splashing paint on my walls or . . . or all sorts of awful things.” She looked at the door into the living room and frowned. “Where is that girl? I made her favorite. She should be coming to dinner any time now . . .”

“Stacy!” I said, more sharply than I meant to. She swung back around to face me, and I put my hands flat on the table, finally taking them away from my knives. “Jessica isn’t here.”

“Is she with her father?” The question was asked with such sincere confusion that it hurt to hear it.

I took a deep breath, trying to compose myself. I’d come here to finish a fight, not to start a new one. “No, she’s not with her father,” I said. “She’s with . . . someone else.”

“Who else?”

“Jessica Brown is with the night-haunts,” I said, and forced myself to keep looking at Stacy, even as the confusion bloomed on her face like a terrible flower, washing everything else aside. “I’m so sorry, Stacy, but Jessica has stopped her dancing, and I’m pretty sure you have too.”