The room was silent as everyone stared at me, still stunned.
“Good. War Council dismissed.” I stood up and looked around once more before stomping down the steps and leaving. Let the rest of them figure out how they were going to deal with the stars and Fate and all the stupid superstitions that kept getting my people into these predicaments.
I hurried across the hall and into the library, closing the door behind me and locking it before I sank down in one of the comfy wingback chairs near the fireplace, my head in my hands.
Chapter Eight
“Would you like to talk about it?”
I looked up to find John had appeared next to one of the bookcases, and I grimaced. “How did you get in here? The door is locked.”
“There’s a hidden door in the back corridor—the painting of the man in the blue armor who’s riding the gold dragon. It comes out here.”
“Great.” I waved my hand at him and sighed before turning back to the empty fireplace. “Make sure you lock it behind you when you go.”
“Allie.”
“John.” I rolled my eyes at him. How could he not be getting that I really didn’t want to talk right then?
“You could try calling me Dad,” he said.
I looked up at him, glaring. He had not actually just suggested that, had he? The guy had been part of my life less than three months, and suddenly he wanted to be “Dad” like nothing had ever happened? He wanted me to call him Dad after I’d been dumped in foster care for years? I mean, sure, I’d gotten lucky with Gran Mosely, but that didn’t change the fact I’d been alone, with a mother in a coma, while he was off running around the woods like an overgrown leprechaun. What sort of mushrooms had he been eating?
“Or not.” He held his hands up as he moved to sit in the chair across from mine. “But I’d really like to talk to you about what happened tonight.”
“What about it?”
“You can’t discount the Pleiades. The people here believe—”
“You’re telling me that the people here believe that it’s the design of some invisible goddess for us to get the crap kicked out of us by everyone we meet? They believe that people are dead because Fate decided she was having a bad day?”
“Allie—”
“No, John. You know what? This idea of Fate as a goddess? It sucks.”
“People here believe she’s real. You may not believe it but they—”
“Well, if they’re right and I’m wrong, then Fate sucks and I’m sick of dealing with her brand of crazy, and you should be, too. From now on, Nerissette decides its own future.”
He tried to take my hand in his.
“No.” I pulled back from him. “You don’t get to do that. That’s not something you have earned the right to do. For all you talk about us being family and being worried about me like you were today, you don’t get to do that. You don’t get to sit here and pretend you care.”
“I know that things between us are strained right now, Alicia, but I am your father.”
“No, you’re not.” I stood up and stormed over to the other side of the library, grabbing books off the shelves and tossing them on one of the tables. “You lost that right a long time ago, and any chance you had of getting that relationship back ended when you took off on me for almost a year.”
“I know you’re upset with me, but I did what I had to do. Besides Allie, I loved—”
“No!” I grabbed a heavy green book and turned on my heel, flinging it at him like a baseball. “I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to hear about how you loved Mom! You left us there—alone.”
“Alicia, I never meant—”
“My name is Allie! Not Alicia. No one calls me Alicia. No one ever has and don’t tell me what you meant to do. What you meant doesn’t matter. We were trapped there, and then I lost Mom, and we were alone. You left us there alone. You abandoned us. You abandoned me.”
“I would have come for you and your mother if—”
“If what?” I threw my hands up. “If you weren’t too busy getting bullied by the Fate Maker?”
“One of these days, I would have—”
“Would have what? Left the woods and found a way to save us? That’s great. Really. But the thing is, you left us alone, and when the Fate Maker tried to murder Mom, she was alone. All alone.”
“Sweetheart,” John started.
“No. She was alone. I wasn’t even there with her—I was at swim practice, and right now she’s still alone. If we die—if I die—then she’ll be trapped in that hospital, in a coma, all alone. No one will be there to take care of her.”
“You’re not going to die. I won’t allow it.”
“Why should I believe you? You left me alone. All on my own, Dad.” I spat the last word out hatefully. “Do you get that? I had no one but some stranger who agreed to take me in off the street. Where were you then? Where were you when I had nowhere else to go?”
“I thought your mother had left to protect you. To keep you safe. I didn’t know she’d been forced through the Mirror of Nerissette.” His shoulders slumped.
“Then you should have fought to make this world safe so that she could come back. So that I could come back instead of being trapped in the World That Is.”
“I never thought you would lose her over there, that you would end up alone. I never wanted to let you go, but I wanted you to be safe more. I know that I’ll never make up for all those years I missed but—”
“Don’t. Don’t tell me you want to make this right. If you wanted to make it right, you wouldn’t have taken off on me for the past ten months. You’d have been here, trying to be my dad instead of hiding in the Borderlands.”
“Allie—”
“You couldn’t leave the sieges and the peace negotiations to someone else?” I asked. “You didn’t think that I would need you? That I would need my father while I was trapped in the middle of a war in a world that isn’t even supposed to exist?”
“I was trying to secure you a kingdom,” he protested.
“Yeah? Well, great job with that. Turns out you suck just as much at negotiating a peace treaty as you do with getting to know your only daughter.”
I saw the latch on the painting he’d been talking about before and pressed it, watching as it swung open. Instead of waiting for him to say anything else, I slipped out of the library and closed the hidden door behind me.
I spotted the rune carved into the brick at the end of the hall and stomped toward it, my shoulders tense. All I wanted to do was use it to transport back to my room, so I could sleep and try to forget about the fact that this wasn’t a really bad dream.
I knelt down and brushed my finger over the portal key. “All I want is my bed,” I said. A curl of smoke enveloped me, and I felt myself being taken apart.
The world reassembled itself just outside my only half-finished tower, and I took a deep breath in, trying to shake off the sloshiness that came from being ripped apart at a cellular level and then being put back together somewhere else a split second later. Right. Time to find my pallet and try to pretend that this day hadn’t happened.
I made my way into the bedroom and wound through the various clusters of stuff that had been stored there during the renovations as I made my way to the small area in the back that we’d sectioned off. I needed some privacy while the goblins were still rebuilding the rest of the tower. I pushed the curtain back and stepped into the tiny cubby, my eyes focusing on the low fire in the fireplace and my two best girlfriends curled up in front of it, Kitsuna’s arms wrapped around Mercedes’s shoulders.