He nodded. “This is about your contract with the Fae. Same stuff all over again.”
“It is.”
“I haven’t asked you about that since we split up,” he said. “But I’m going to have to ask you about it again. No direct questions.”
She could handle that.
“I know the terms of your contract even if I don’t know everything else. You’ve kept the terms never to tell a soul, no one else can know?”
“Yes. To the letter.”
“Is the thing you saw in the mirror the Fae being you made the bargain with?” he asked.
“No.”
He frowned. “Then the agreement’s broken. Someone else knows.”
Who? The poppet?
That changeling still ought to be indistinguishable from a human being in the human world, all grown up by now. Maybe married, popped out a baby or two of its own, along came the grandkids. As she understood it, the changeling would never discover it wasn’t human. Never leave the human realm.
What had happened to change all that?
“You can tell me now,” Mike said. “Tell me everything. It won’t matter to the Fae if you do.”
It mattered to her. “It’s bad.”
“For me to get you out of this, I need to know, Addie.”
But there was no way out. Fae contracts had no loopholes. You couldn’t run or hide from them. You couldn’t outsmart them. This time she’d spent in Mike’s office-every minute from here on out-would be the only time they had left together.
How could she tell him? She never wanted to see his expression broken and wary, for him to look at her as though he couldn’t decide if she was a monster. Or a stranger. She’d have no right to expect anything different.
More than that, though, she wasn’t the same person who’d done that terrible thing to save herself. Time and experience had worked their own magic on her. She’d changed.
“I’m sorry, Mike,” she said. And she meant it.
He twined his fingers with hers. Squeezed her hand. “I figured you’d say that.”
She closed her eyes so she wouldn’t have to look at the love in his. His determination filled every molecule of air in the room. She could all but hear the wheels turn in his mind.
“If we can find Jennifer, we can get to the bottom of this. I won’t let you go without a fight,” he said, his voice full of fierce and stupid hope. “We’ve gotta go now, and fast. Stay ahead of the Fae until we can get a bead on things. If we can’t run from this problem, then we run at it.”
He shoved her coat into her arms. Pulled her out of the office and down the hall.
Whatever he wanted, she’d try to do it. She tried to hope, too. No matter how alien it felt.
Or that it lasted all of ten seconds.
Ingram met them at the second floor landing. “Trouble,” he said.
Red eyes. Black wings, difficult to camouflage under human clothes. At the bottom of the stairs.
She kissed Mike’s cheek.
“Don’t go,” he said.
But of course she had to. She let go of his hand and walked down to meet the Fae with her head held high. She hadn’t cringed since the last time Fred had struck her-all those fifty years ago-and she didn’t intend to start again now.
She glanced back only once, to reassure Mike. But he’d vanished.
“The letter of the agreement has been broken,” the Fae said, in a voice so deep it rattled her bones. “The changeling has discovered what it is, abandoned its human life and its family. It came back to us.”
“How?”
“Politics,” the Fae said. “It was the work of an enemy, exposing this secret. One of my enemies.”
Addie closed her eyes. It was so unfair. This whole mess-the changeling had done nothing to cause it. And it wasn’t Addie’s or Jennifer’s or even this Fae’s fault.
She could rail against the unfairness of it, but she’d known the rules when she agreed to them all those years ago. The terms that bound all of them. “So what’s my fate worse than death?”
“You’ll come with me,” the Fae said. That was all. That was enough.
She’d never see Mike again. Never go home again, never see all the treasures on their shelves in her sun-dappled kitchen. There’d be no more unwitting pawn customers to bake cookies for.
The life she’d built on the backs of that little girl she’d switched and her parents would be gone. It was the only life she had.
Well, at least she’d had one. Not everyone did.
The Fae led her out into an afternoon laced with evening. The new sickle moon hung low on the horizon, the sky streaked with orange and pink. The wind tore at her. She shrugged her coat on and pulled it tight across her chest, breathing car exhaust and the salt scent of her own tears.
She saw Mike at the corner of the building. That alien hope flared in her again… and sputtered.
She memorized every angle of him, the rhythm of his gait as he strode over and spoke to the Fae.
“I won’t try to stop you taking her. I came to ask you something.” He didn’t wait for the Fae to respond. “I wanted to know who broke the contract between you and Addie, since she sure as hell didn’t. I’d have searched regardless, after you’d taken Addie away. And I’d have started with a young lady named Jennifer, who brought Addie a looking glass today.”
The Fae looked pointedly at the mirror handle sticking up from Mike’s back pocket.
“You know, I thought it’d take me hours,” Mike said. “It’s a big city. She could’ve been anywhere. But do you know where I found her? She was right here the whole time. Outside, out of view, sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk. She’s still over there, matter of fact. Why is that?”
“Jennifer followed Addie,” the Fae said. He turned to her. “You’re the last human being she saw before she came to live with us. You’re the reason her whole life changed.”
Jennifer, the human child she’d stolen? She was so young-but, then, time moved much more slowly in the Fae realm.
Mike held Addie’s gaze. “I want to know what happened, Addie. And I want to know why.”
“No.” She’d made up her mind about that upstairs, and it’d stay that way. She understood, too, that there was someone else she would have to tell. Someone else to whom she owed that story first.
They left Mike standing there on the walk, staring after them.
Jennifer joined them half way down the block, keeping a fair distance as they walked into the sunset. She seemed to be gathering the nerve to say something.
Addie braced herself for a tirade. For rage. For grief. But the girl didn’t show her any of those.
“Did you know my mother?” she asked.
And, somehow, that was worse.
Addie hated Faery. Everywhere green and in bloom, in colors so bright they hurt her eyes and sounds so sharp they hurt her ears. They gave her a room of her own, and she supposed she should be grateful.
They gave her new terms. Do what they told her. Obey the letter of their laws. And there were so many laws to learn. It took up all her time. She had no treasures-other than her own company.
Until the day Jennifer knocked on her door, carrying a brown paper-wrapped package, and asked what had happened and why.
Addie started slowly, with Hot Corner Fred. Not that she expected Jennifer to understand or to forgive her, but because it felt important to say she hadn’t done it for kicks. Or for any more power than power over her own life.
She told Jennifer about the smell of fresh paint in the living room of the dark, still house. Parents asleep in their bedroom with the door cracked wide enough to hear a crying child. The infant with the strawberry blonde curls and pink-flowered pajama set, asleep in her crib.
The rhythm of the child’s breath held her in thrall for what seemed like forever but couldn’t have been more than a minute or two-until the little one scrunched up her face and waved her arms.
She had to move then.
Five long minutes to recite the spell she’d been given to hush the baby and the space around her so she wouldn’t wake. To wrap her in a blanket and replace her with a homemade doll made of scraps and sticks. To do as she’d been ordered: keep from bolting long enough to witness the poppet come to life. She watched the doll assume the glamor the Fae had charmed into it. Take on every detailed characteristic of the baby who belonged in that crib.