“Boys?” Tinker asked.
Esme and Lain exchanged looks.
“You really told her zilch about the family?” Esme said.
Lain shook her head. “I was afraid that if anything happened to me, she would feel the need to share the news with the boys. They would have wondered why I kept a child close to me, and the ball would start rolling.”
Esme sighed. “Our father — as you might know — was Neil Shanske. He was an astronaut. Our mother is Anna; she was from a family of well-to-do bankers. When I was six, our mother met an evil snake of a man called Edmund Desmarais. Within a few weeks, our father was dead. Desmarais had him killed.”
“There’s no proof of that,” Lain said quietly.
“Our stepfather is evil.” Esme glared at Lain defiantly. “He killed our father.”
Lain scoffed. “Your daughter has made me completely impervious to that look. I won’t argue that he’s evil, but we’ve never been able to prove he was behind the shooting.”
“The man is a billionaire,” Esme said. “He had enough money to make all proof disappear.”
Lain didn’t argue the point. Instead she turned to Tinker and asked, “Do you know how our father died?”
“He was killed in a random shooting.” Tinker knew that small part of Lain’s family history. Their family history. “He was doing a charity appearance in a bad neighborhood — in California? Someone opened fire on the crowd.”
“Esme was six and I was twelve,” Lain said. “Our father was training at the Marshall Space Flight Center, which is in Huntsville, Alabama. Our mother was an investment banker; she had relocated to Huntsville so we could be together as a family. That’s how she met Desmarais. He had an isolated estate outside of Huntsville — a huge plantation house that had been in his family for generations. Our father was on a business trip to the Jet Propulsion Lab when he was killed.”
“On Earth.” Esme stood up to pace the kitchen. “Without magic, you never get that gut punch of ‘this will be bad’ and your dreams seem like they’re just nightmares. But I know what I know: Edmund Desmarais killed our father.”
“And I’ve always believed you,” Lain said. “But to everyone else, you were just a child having nightmares after her father was murdered.”
“Desmarais turned our life into hell to make our mother marry him. Oh, we could never prove it,” Esme said as Lain lifted her hand to protest. “But we knew. He had our mother mugged. The robbers took her wallet, emptied her bank account, and maxed out her credit cards. Our house was burned down. Our car was stolen. It just went on and on. Anyone that she might have turned to was lured away with a job offer on the other side of the country, or had some crisis of their own spring up, or was simply killed.”
“He loved her that bad?” Tinker wondered if it could even be called “love” if it moved a man to be so cruel.
Lain and Esme exchanged looks and shook their heads.
“We don’t know why he wanted to marry her,” Lain said. “We never did, but it wasn’t because he loved her. It couldn’t have been for her banking savvy; he could have had that without marrying her. She was already handling his money.”
“It was his money, not hers,” Stormsong said. “Nuenae extends from yourself. You must always be at the center. It does not include the wealth of other people. If you try to focus on others that way, it becomes like trying to walk two paths at once. Only the most powerful intanyai seyosa can keep track of multiple goals. My mother is part of the queen’s personal household merely so their nuenae would align.”
Lain shook her head. “He couldn’t have known that. They’re both humans living on Earth without magic. This was long before Pittsburgh traveled to Elfhome — at least, in human terms. I was twelve when they married; I was in my thirties when I came to Elfhome that first Startup.” She frowned slightly. “But — you know — Yves was there that first day. He didn’t seem as puzzled as everyone else by the ironwood forest.”
“Yves never looked a day older the entire time we knew him,” Esme whispered.
“Desmarais never seemed to age…” Lain paused. “Oh, God, it makes sense now. Desmarais is an elf trapped on Earth, just like the Dufaes. How did I not see that?”
“An elf would have recognized an intanyai seyosa,” Stormsong said. “They would have known that they had to tie the oracle to them for their abilities to work.”
Tinker gaze fell on the necklace. “But where does Chloe fit into this?”
“I have a theory,” Lain said slowly, gaze distant as if she looked at far-off objects. “Desmarais tried to win our affection.”
Esme made a rude noise. “Buy us off. I wasn’t having it. I knew what he did.”
Lain motioned to Esme not to derail the subject. “If he is an elf, then he’s been on Earth for centuries. He married mother to bind her to his nuenae but that was a short-term fix for him. If he wanted her abilities over the centuries, then he would need to control her bloodline.”
“Operation: Baby Machine,” Esme snarled.
“What?” Tinker said.
“Desmarais talked our mother into quitting her job to devote herself to having children,” Lain said.
“Mother loves babies,” Esme said. “It wasn’t that hard to do.”
“Yes, there is that,” Lain said. “The problem was that she was forty when they married and he had a really low sperm count, so they had to go through in vitro fertilization. It was such a big production that they couldn’t keep it from us. We knew everything. How many times it failed. How many times she miscarried. It took them two years for Lucien and she spent all nine months in bed. But Desmarais wanted more — she wanted more — so the medical circus continued. If a doctor said it was too risky, they would find another doctor. It always made me wonder: If she was the golden goose, why was he risking her? If he was an elf, though, he knew that she would die long before he did.”
“She almost died giving birth to Tristan,” Esme said. “She was forty-six. Some women are grandmothers at forty-six.”
Tinker struggled to control the hurt welling up. “You have two younger half brothers that you never told me about? Lucien and Tristan?”
Lain sighed. “Yes, ladybug, Lucien and Tristan are our younger half brothers. Desmarais had a son by his first wife. Yves was ten years older than — well — if Desmarais was an elf there’s no telling how old Yves is. Oh! Oh! If Desmarais was an elf, it means Lucien and Tristan are half elves.”
“Oh crap!” Esme said. “That bastard! Autosomal dominant genetic disorder, my ass!”
“What?” Tinker said.
“Oh, I feel so stupid!” Lain was shaking her head. “Desmarais made out that the boys had some odd disease that made them look like children even when they were full grown. How could I not see that they were half-elf?”
Esme reached out to cover Lain’s hand. “All that happened before the first Startup; we didn’t know anything about elves and their immortality!”
Lain waved away the excuse. “Even afterward, I never questioned it. It’s so obvious now; the boys were like Blue Sky. When they were eighteen, they only looked like they were six or seven. They were still babies, but Desmarais treated them like they were grown men. He sent them away so they wouldn’t distract Mother from her work.”
“I never laid eyes on them again,” Esme murmured. “Have you?”
Lain shook her head.
Oilcan’s kids ranged from seventy to ninety years old but were still obviously “children.” Even Windwolf was considered a “teenager” at 214. The Desmarais boys would be in their forties, which meant they were closer to tweens in age than teenagers.
Tinker had been thirteen when her grandfather died. She couldn’t imagine being cut off from everyone she loved after losing him. “Did you abandon them because of me?”