CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

I was just about to start making a proper breakfast when the doorbell rang. Veronica stood on the porch, holding a paper bag from the diner.

“Perfect timing,” I said.

She brought the bag into the kitchen. When I hovered, she said, “Sit. I might be a terrible cook, but I’m perfectly capable of serving food from boxes.” She glanced around. “I saw Ricky’s motorcycle. Are the boys around?”

“Ricky’s upstairs talking to his dad. Gabriel is taking a shower and…”

Footfalls sounded on the steps.

“And he’s done.” I leaned out of the kitchen. “Can you call Ricky down? Veronica’s here with breakfast.”

Gabriel’s steps reversed.

“I hate secrets,” Veronica said, still emptying the bag. “Odd for fae, but my kind simply don’t see the point of them.”

“Your kind being coblynau.”

She smiled. “Nice try, but that’s one secret I’m forbidden to share.”

“I think you kind of did.”

“Did I mention I’m terrible at secrets?” She took plates from the cupboard. “Other fae find them delightful. To me, they’re just tedious. Dangerous, too. You get knotted up in lies and misdirection until you can’t find your way out. That’s what’s happening here. The elders spent the night in a meeting. Well, all except Patrick, who wasn’t in on the original secret, and when he finds out, he’ll be rightfully furious, mostly with me, as the one elder he can count on to keep him informed.”

She set out a plate stacked with flapjacks. “Disagreeing with secrets in principle does not mean one is exempt from keeping them…or from suffering the consequences.”

“And this secret concerns the sluagh,” Gabriel said as he walked in.

She smiled at him. “Yes, Gabriel, I’ll get to the point. I was waiting because it concerns you. Patrick as well, and I considered having him here, but I suspect that’s a conversation best had in private, where he can properly tell me what he thinks of me for keeping it from him.”

She tried for a wry smile, but the sadness behind it made me curse Ida all the more. Veronica was right. Nothing good comes of secrets. People get hurt, often those who least deserve it.

“And Ricky,” she said as he walked in. “Good to see you.” There was no sarcasm in her voice—unlike some elders, she treated Ricky like an actual person. “Sit. Eat. You may have little stomach for it by the time I’m through.”

“That sounds ominous,” I murmured.

“Anything concerning the sluagh is ominous,” she said as she pulled out a chair.

“Before you begin,” Gabriel said. “As much as I want the truth, I need to ask how much trouble it will cause you to tell us. If you’ll suffer for it, I’d rather confront Ida. I do have leverage. I’m quite prepared to use it.”

She smiled. “They know I’m here and what I’m doing. I may have lost my temper at about four a.m. Blame a low tolerance for endless meetings and endless bickering. I informed them that I was telling you the truth, and if they had an issue with that, they could banish me.” Her smile grew, her sunken eyes twinkling, and I caught a hint of a much younger fae behind them. “Let’s just say that’s not an option.”

“Ida didn’t insist on coming along?” I said.

That glint in her eyes sharpened. “She insisted. I told her I’d lock her in the closet and bind her there if she kept insisting. She knows better than to test me. So it’s just me, which means we’ll get through this much faster.” She looked at Gabriel. “Once I actually start saying something useful, right?”

“I believe I was the one who stopped you.”

“Which is never wise. Derail a fae in conversation and you’ll spend an hour herding her back on track. So, in the interest of staying on track, I’ll get straight to the point. Thirty-five years ago, we made a bargain with the sluagh. We…” Her voice quivered, and her glamour wavered. She took a moment to pull it back. “This is difficult for me. I’m shaken by what happened yesterday morning, and angry at the role we played in it. At our lack of foresight. This will be easier if I don’t need to maintain my glamour. I realize that may be disconcerting for you…”

“Whatever makes you comfortable,” I said.

“Thank you.”

Her body shimmered. A pop of light, like a low-voltage flashbulb. Not enough to make me blink but just to lose visual focus for a split second, and when my sight cleared, she sat in her true form.

Veronica looked about Gabriel’s age, with curling black hair, tan skin, and green eyes, brighter than usual. She bore little resemblance to the coblynau statue in my garden—a squat, ugly gnome. Yet I could see where the caricature might have come from. As in her human form, she was small, particularly for a fae, maybe barely topping five feet. Sturdier than others I’d seen, with a fifties pinup-model figure. Beautiful for a human, perhaps not by fae standards.

She settled in and said, “Back to my story…You were not a surprise to us, Olivia, as you may have realized. We knew a Matilda was coming. The signs were there long before you were born. There would be a Matilda for Cainsville. The question that concerned us most was…” She looked at Gabriel. “Would there be a Gwynn? While we could still win over a Matilda without one, it introduces an obstacle. Particularly if there is an Arawn for the Cŵn Annwn.”

“It would slant the odds.”

“Yes. So we called in favors. We made bargains. We gave up some of our already dwindling power to get an answer from those who could give it. Would there be a Gwynn? Would there be an Arawn? The response was exactly what we most dreaded hearing.”

“An Arawn but no Gwynn.”

She nodded.

“That was the deal you made with the sluagh,” I said. “Somehow they were able to guarantee Cainsville a Gwynn.”

“They have powers beyond our own. Dark magics. They heard of our dilemma and offered us a deal. They could promise us a Gwynn. In return for a favor.”

“That you give them Olivia,” Gabriel said, barely able to force the words out. “She is marked for the sluagh.”

Veronica’s green eyes rounded. “Absolutely not. We promised them no one. Nor any power over either of you. That would be unthinkable.”

“So what did you give them?” Ricky said.

“Access to Grace’s building,” I murmured. “It’s a refuge for fae. You give them asylum there.”

“Yes.”

“And you allowed Olivia to move in?” Gabriel said. “You let her—”

“We granted access to the building for one manifested sluagh who had been injured and could not cross back to its own dimension.”

“Manifested?” I said. “A high-ranking one, then. A powerful sluagh.”

“Yes, but we only granted it five years of access, on the understanding that it would not provide us with a Gwynn until the end of those five years. We didn’t want the sluagh in Cainsville after he was here. Of course, that didn’t work out as we’d hoped, and you did not grow up here, Gabriel, but the sluagh was still gone before you were born.”

“Except it left a door open,” I said. “So it could come back.”

Veronica let out a bitter laugh. “A mere child sees what we did not.” She shook her head. “Sorry. I know you aren’t a child, but compared to us, you are, and the fact you can see what they did is only all the more damning.”

“But I have the hindsight of knowing it came back. I’m just making the logical connection.”

“Still, we should have foreseen the possibility that we’d been tricked. They are sluagh, after all.”

Ricky pushed his plate aside. “So you guys let it board at Grace’s, and it kept the key when it left.”

“You granted access once,” Gabriel said, “which inadvertently granted it permanently.”

“Yes and yes,” Veronica said. “In order to allow a sluagh to stay at Grace’s, I had to undo some of my wards. Of course, I reactivated them afterwards, but it seems that once it had been allowed in, the wards were no longer effective against that particular sluagh. It had the key, so to speak.”

“Like vampire lore,” Gabriel said. “Once they are invited in, you can’t rescind the invitation and your wards are no longer effective.”

“Looks like you finally get vampires,” I said to him. “I know you’ve been waiting.”

He sighed.

I turned to Veronica. “Okay, so you guys made a deal with the sluagh to get Gabriel. That deal granted the sluagh access to Cainsville. I know you’re kicking yourselves for not foreseeing the trickery, but what’s done is done, and neither of us was harmed by the sudden appearance of the scary sluagh, so presuming you can keep them out now, we’re okay, right?”

“Can you keep them out?” Ricky said. “Is Liv safe here?”

“Yes, we need to know that,” Gabriel said. “We also need to know what the sluagh meant when they said Olivia was theirs. The implication is that there is a mark. I looked for it on Olivia and—” He stopped short. “That is to say, I looked as best I could, on her arms and such, and I did not see it.”

“Do you know what it looks like?” Ricky asked Veronica.

“I do.”

“Can you check Liv?”

“Of course.”

“You aren’t marked,” Veronica said as she finished her examination in my bedroom and I began redressing. “If I sound less relieved about that than you’d expect, it’s only because the sluagh wouldn’t dare take a Matilda.”

“So they’re bluffing?”

“No,” Gabriel said from outside the closed door. “They simply don’t mean it in that way.”

“You can stop hovering and come in, Gabriel,” Veronica called. “She’s dressed. Though even if she wasn’t, I don’t think it’s anything you haven’t already seen.”

I looked over at her sharply. She chuckled. “It’s rather hard to miss the signs.”

“Great,” I muttered.

“The other elders aren’t as astute at reading those signs. You can buy yourself some time yet. I won’t spoil it.” She turned to Gabriel as he walked in. “Yes, you’re correct. If they said they have some hold over Liv, it means something other than the obvious.”

“I’d say that’s a relief,” I said. “But I suspect whatever they do mean, I’m not going to like it a whole lot more.”

“We will resolve this,” Veronica said. “We owe you that.”