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“Oars. We don’t need them. I learned to steer with magic a long time ago.” He drops a hand over the side and, sure enough, the boat slips away from the dock and out into the lake.
There’s a three-quarter moon out tonight, shedding its silver light over the calm water. Darwin steers the boat out to a small island and circles it, pointing out the dark, low humps of birds bobbing in the water near the shore. One of them lifts its head and that eerie wail echoes over the water.
I tip my head back onto Darwin’s shoulder. “Are you aware of what will happen if the doors from the mortal world to the fae courts close?”
“Yes. I mean, I know it’s bad.”
“Do you understand how bad? Do you know that a fae court cut off from the mortal world will die out in two generations?”
“I—” Darwin’s silent for a long moment, while another, chittering call ripples over the lake. “I guess I hadn’t thought it through.”
“Your father calls it the pure-blood curse. Is it widely known?”
“No one talks about it. But everyone knows why so many high fae take mortal lovers.”
Doesn’t explain why Darwin’s father thought it would be a good idea to take a Black Empyrean as a lover, but that’s a question for another time.
“What about the wild fae? Can they reproduce without mortal blood?”
“Yes.”
OMG, fucking fae. Everything I told him and Callan still couldn’t give me the whole truth.
“Yeah, your father was still playing the angles. He told me a fae court cut off from the mortal world would die in two generations, but that’s not the complete truth. The high fae of a court cut off from the mortal world would die in two generations, but long before that, they’d be overrun by the wild fae.”
Darwin shudders. “You don’t appreciate how bad that would be, Teddy.”
“You’re right, I don’t. But your father does.”
“I—” He swallows loudly. “I don’t understand. He knows this already.”
“He does. What he doesn’t know is that the doors to the fae courts will close in twenty years if we don’t fix what goes wrong in this timeline. It’s what future-Teddy was working to prevent. But she didn’t. She left me a note about it. I showed it to your father when I was stuck in the future. He said if the sióg dorcha found out there was no future for the courts, they’d rain terror on the mortal world. A new Dark Ages, he called it. But that wasn’t the whole truth, was it? They’d rain terror on the high fae first.”
“Yes,” Darwin says, his voice almost as plaintive as the loon’s.
“There’s your leverage.”
We drift in silence for a long time. The loons’ calls echo around us. Water laps gently against the sides of the boat. But we don’t speak. I let Darwin think.
“Why would future-Teddy leave you a note?” he asks finally.
“Insurance. She’d been studying Time for a decade. She said she’d Time-Walked into the future and there was a short space she could go into, then no further. So either another version of herself was filling her place, or the timeline had collapsed. Either way, she knew she was doomed.”
“Did she say how the doors to the fae courts would close?”
“Not specifically, but I’m assuming it’s the Vitrim.”
“Is that what—is that how she died?”
“Uh-huh. They cut her unborn baby out of her and sacrificed it to something. Klotho, or something worse.”
Darwin wraps both arms around me and holds me tightly.
“Mate, I have no intention of going out that way.”
“No, I know, she’s not you, or you’re not her, but—”
“Time-travel makes everything twisty. Yeah. Understand why I’m so committed to fixing the timeline now? It’s not about Jade. I’m sorry for her. I want justice for her and her baby, but it’s not about her anymore. It’s very fucking personal.”
