CHAPTER NINE
Robin~
“The Council is going to squawk,” Gordon Sullivan warned.
In deference to Robin’s sensibilities, her widowed brother-in-law had taken off the smelly oilskins he wore to run his sightseeing cruises and trimmed his beard to a respectable sleekness. His blue blazer and gray pants made him look jaunty. But nothing could make this burly weather worker appear tame.
Robin Fairchild met Sully’s blue eyes calmly. She gave his opinion careful consideration before she commented. “Probably,” she said after a pause in which she thought about the members of the Mystic Bay Town Council. “But we have to bring West Haven into the twenty-first century. Those hidebound traditionalists on the Council are going to keep us Fae so pure we go extinct.”
Sully nodded. He too was on the Mystic Bay Town Council which ran not just the town, but the entire island. They made the rules and enforced them. Both the written and unwritten laws.
He stopped pacing Robin’s sitting room and sat down in the armchair she had created just for him. The pretty, brocade-covered piece was intended to support his muscular frame in comfort. She had done a good job. It did not even creak as he placed his square frame in it and leaned back against its blue and cream cushions.
“You could have started with something other than a hunter-fairy match,” he said heavily.
Robin only smiled.
Sully placed hands like hams on his knees and waited.
She didn’t have to justify herself. When auras resonated and complemented one another, there was nothing more to be said. She hadn’t created a match between their niece and that dragon. It just was. But under Sully’s bright blue gaze, Robin’s placid certainty wavered.
“They are going to have beautiful babies,” she offered. “When was the last time a fairy had a child on West Haven?” Moira was the first and last fairy born in more than sixty years. Sully and Nightingale had never had one. She herself was childless and unmated. The Fairchilds might live a long time, but they were dying out.
“Huh. Didn’t look into the future myself. Babies, eh?” Sully’s big broad face split with an attractive grin. She could tell he was envisioning himself with a great-niece or nephew on his knee.
“Yes,” she said quietly. “Without Quinn, Moira will probably never have any. She’ll remain a spinster. Like me. Without Moira, Quinn will marry a Muggle who is not a virgin, and enjoy a sterile union. Together they will have several children.”
“Powerful children,” Sully interjected the warning. “Which is precisely what the Council is afraid of.”
Impatience ruffled her calm for an instant. But she caught herself, and let serenity settle around her like a cloak. “It’s been nearly 200 years since the Haverstock Era. In all that time we’ve never had another psychopathic family on West Haven. Never had a single rogue hunter. We have no reason whatsoever to think that interbreeding with hunters causes criminal behavior.”
“Hybrid vigor,” Sully dropped those two damning words into her elegant parlor like the bombs they were.
She had known this was coming. She sat up straighter in her own dainty chair. “If only we sensitives had chosen a euphemism that sounded less scientific,” she said. “Hybrid vigor actually refers to the fact that outcrosses produce offspring that are bigger and stronger than their parents – or not. Just subtly different enough to be better adapted to their environments. There is nothing necessarily evil about hybrids.”
“The Haverstock brood were worse than evil,” Sully reminded her.
“Olivia Fairchild was a wicked fairy long before Owen Haverstock abducted her. She spent centuries turning her neighbors into frogs. And worse.” Mostly worse.
“I know. But it’s the children she and Owen had that folks remember. As evil as their parents, but much stronger.”
“Murderous, thieving cannibals would frighten anyone. But just because Owen was a hunter doesn’t mean all hunters are murderers or thieves. Let alone cannibals. It’s absurd. Two hundred years ago, the sensitives of West Haven hired hunters to get rid of the Haverstock gang. When they had performed that task, we encouraged them to hang around. Isn’t it about time we integrated them fully?”
“Integrated,” Sully rolled the syllables around on his tongue. His tone was ironic. “In-te-gra-ted.” He laughed humorlessly.
Robin’s eyes rested fondly on him. It had been almost twenty years since her sister Nightingale had sailed west, but he had remained family. Lately she and Sully had engaged in a new dance – one that felt entirely foreign to her spirit, but which was also peculiarly satisfying.
“Integrated,” she said firmly. She knew that the non-shifter residents of West Haven thought of themselves as the real residents of the island, and shifters as visitors. Unwelcome visitors. But that had to change if West Haven was not going to die.
“People are afraid of hunters,” Sully said. “Keeping them in their place makes the Council feel safer.”
Robin sighed. “Hunters pay the lion’s share of taxes on West Haven in general, and in Mystic Bay in particular. Donations from the big clans enable us to have our library and community center and a dozen other amenities. Yet not one hunter has ever sat on the Council. Taxation without representation. How fair is that?”
“You’re preaching to the choir, Robin. But the Council always argues that the hunters knew the rules when they bought their land,” responded Sully. “Jumped at the opportunity to buy tracts of land where they could shift and let their beasts run free.”
“That’s true. But how fair is it that not one hunter clan owns their property free and clear? Every single one holds their land – and we’re now three and four generations on – at the discretion of the Town Council.”
“Which has never expropriated a single acre,” Sully pointed out.
“But we could. And we keep them off the Council. We take their money and fret when they marry out of their order. It’s foolish. Who’s a better citizen, or has done more for West Haven, than Lloyd Furlong? Yet he’s never been offered a seat on the Council.”
Sully laughed. His big, booming laugh comforted her. “Lloyd is a good man, for all he’s a dragon. No one I’d rather have to watch my back in a brawl. But he’d rather die than accept the responsibility. Besides, Martha has been on the Council several times.”
“She has. But do you think she would have been allowed on, if she and Lloyd had had any children?”
“Probably not,” Sully admitted.
“Even though they would have made excellent parents. And had lovely children.”
“Lloyd wasn’t the only Vietnam vet to have a vasectomy,” Sully pointed out. “Martha knew that going in.”
“I don’t blame Lloyd, Agent Orange causes woeful birth defects.” Robin waved a hand. “We’re straying from the point, Sully, which is Moira and Quinn. How do you think the Council will react to a marriage between a hunter and a fairy?”
“Badly. But our laws do not forbid marriage. Just interbreeding without it. I wonder how the Drakes will take to being kicked off the island for breaking the rules?”
“We have to make sure that doesn’t happen,” Robin conceded.
“Besides, I heard he drinks just as much as Bramwell,” Sully said. “I wouldn’t like to think of our niece tied to a drunk.”
Robin chuckled. “Quinn is in disguise. He doesn’t want anyone to associate him with the Drakes of Shoreside. He’s no alcoholic.”
“Just a hunter who paints. Downright peculiar occupation for a dragon. For any hunter.”
“Oliver Bramwell is a grizzly,” Robin pointed out tartly.
“And look what happened to him. Turned to drink and started painting nightmares. I was damned glad when he took the ferry back to the mainland.”
“I’ll admit that I didn’t see that coming,” Robin said. “I should never have rented him Willow Cottage. The Old Ones did not like him.”
“Know what I think?” Sully folded his arms across his chest.
“What?”
“I think he went hunting in the Old Forest.”
The shock went right through Robin. “There’s no hunting on West Haven.”