“Linnet, welcome. Please come in.”
I did. Several of the Álfar men stepped aside. I looked up at them. “Am I that formidable? Or are you afraid John will stay?” They didn’t answer, and I finally saw John. He was elaborately attired in tight pants, high boots, and a high-collared jacket like a Hussar’s uniform or an extra in The Student Prince. Since he favored khaki slacks or blue jeans, polo shirts, sport coats, and tennis shoes when he had worked for IMG, this look was jarring. He stood at a window gazing down on the gardens and pool.
“John.”
He turned when I spoke his name, and I fell back a step. His left eye was cloudy, an expanse of milk white, and the way he cocked his head told me that when his mother had driven what had looked to be a sliver of ice into his eye it had blinded him. I choked briefly on a sob.
“I got your flowers,” I said softly, after I cleared the obstruction in my throat.
His good eye raked me, and the expression was so cold, so filled with ennui, that it was as if acid followed his gaze, etching my skin. I shivered, suddenly uncertain.
“I have no idea what she is talking about. Why, exactly, is she here?” The timbre of the voice was John, but it didn’t sound like John. The question was addressed to one of the men standing next to him.
Uncertainty gave way to anger. I jumped in before the factotum could answer. “Why don’t you ask me directly? I’m standing right here.”
“She’s rude,” John remarked again to the man.
“What can you expect?” said the first man.
Another of his—guards? entourage?—joined in the pile-on. “She’s a human,” and he gave a shrug as if that said everything necessary.
John took a step toward me. The tap of his boot heels was loud on the parquet floor at the edge of the carpet. “You wanted to see me. Why?”
“To make sure you were all right.” He stared at me as if I’d suddenly burst out speaking in Swahili. “You were forced to stay behind by your mother.” Nothing. “Mommy Dearest said if you didn’t stay behind she was going to force Charity and Destiny and me to stay. You sacrificed yourself for us.” Silence. “This ringing any bells?” My tone was becoming increasingly belligerent.
“Yes. I remember that, but I disagree with your characterization. It was a chance to find my way home. I hadn’t realized how superior life among my own kind was to life with you monkeys.”
I stiffened at the slur. Just as it wasn’t polite to call members of the Powers spooks it wasn’t cool to call humans monkeys. “I’m sure your father, your human father, the one who raised you, Big Red, would just love to hear you talk like that.” There was an instant when I thought that had gotten a reaction. Something flickered deep in his one good eye, but it was too fleeting for me to be sure, and then the ice mask was back in place.
“Ah, the large, sweating, red-faced man,” one guard said.
“Perhaps that is how he got the nickname,” another of the supercilious guards suggested. Laughter, like the whisper of water in a fountain, rippled around the room.
A pounding settled behind my eyes and the room felt hot. “John, this is your father. He loves you. And your mother, she’s grieving for you. Missing you. Don’t let them talk like that about them.”
Given the hateful crap I was hearing in this room I was even more glad I hadn’t called Big Red and Meg. John’s voice pulled me from my reverie.
“We returned their human child. They have no cause to complain,” John said.
“What?” This was news to me. I tried to imagine Big Red coping with an unknown man now in his midforties who had spent his entire life in Fey. It must be a nightmare for both of them. “Your mother threw out Parlan?”
“Why wouldn’t she? She has me now.”
“Yeah, and that’s so great,” I said. I wondered if this new pod person, John, would recognize sarcasm. It seemed he did.
“You are once again becoming rude.”
“You don’t even sound like yourself. Who are you? What’s happened to you, John? Where is the man who was my friend and…” I choked a bit, and didn’t say the word that hovered on my lips. Lover. I couldn’t be that vulnerable to this arrogant stranger. “Protector?” I finished lamely.
John didn’t answer. He looked over at Qwendar. “How long is this going to go on? I agreed to this meeting because of the position you hold, but this is tiresome in the extreme.”
Qwendar looked over at me. I read pity in his eyes. “Well, Linnet? Are you satisfied? Have you ascertained what you wished?”
“No.” The word was so explosive that one of the guards actually jumped a bit. “This isn’t John. Putting aside whatever might have been between us, John would never talk about his father that way.”
“Perhaps he has remembered who and what he is,” Qwendar said.
John stepped closer to me. He was wearing a scent that was like sandalwood and honey, but beneath it I caught the tang of sweat, acrid and musky. “You may talk about the human that raised me, but this is really about you. Because I bedded you once, you imagine that I care for you.”
Sometimes agony can emerge as laughter. I choked on a bitter chuckle. “Bedded? Really? What are we, in a Victorian romance novel? My John, and Big Red’s son, would have said ‘fucked.’”
“If you choose to be denigrated in that way—”
“Oh, you’re doing a fine job of that all on your own.”
“Look, I used you because you were there. Nothing more. So stop thinking there was ever anything between us, or that there will ever be. You are part of a life that no longer exists for me. Your presence in my life now bothers me. So. Go. Away.”
He spun, balanced like a dancer on the heel of one boot, and walked toward the window. I thought he might return to his contemplation of the gardens, but instead there was the wavering of his outline and he and his entourage vanished into Fey. My rage faded, leaving me cold. I stood bereft and shivering. If a boot had been planted on my chest it wouldn’t have hurt this much.
“I wish he’d just refused to see me.” My voice sounded hollow and very far away. “He could have done that. He didn’t have to be cruel. This can’t be happening.” I ran my fingers through my hair, clutched at it so hard it pulled and hurt.
“What will you do?” Qwendar asked.
“I don’t know, but it can’t end like this. It just can’t!”
“Perhaps things are different with humans, but that seemed like a pretty solid rejection.”
I shook my head. “He came to see me. He brought me the flowers. Something to tell me he still cared. He’s being controlled. Maybe that thing she put in his eye. Maybe it can be removed.” I broke off abruptly, arrested by a sudden thought. I turned and started for the door.
“What? What is it? I could see you thought of something.”
“What’s been done can be undone, and now I’ve got a source who grew up with the Álfar and may have some advice.”
“The human exchanged for John.”
I made a gun with my finger, pointed it at him. “You got it on one.”
18
David came into the broom closet the next morning just as I was getting ready to dial the O’Shea household. He was carrying a copy of Daily Variety. I opened my mouth to tease him about going all Hollywood since he was now reading Variety instead of his beloved Chicago Sun-Times, but I never got the words out because he was peering at me so oddly. I put down the phone that I’d just picked up. “What?” I asked. “Why are you looking at me like that?”