Kiyo shook his head. “No. She’ll come after both of you. You shouldn’t have done it.”
After what felt like an eternity, my voice had finally come back to me. I wet my lips, trying to speak. “Maybe,” I whispered. “Maybe he should have…”
Silence fell over us all, thick and heavy. Kiyo gave me a look…I couldn’t fully interpret it. “You’re in shock. You don’t what you’re saying. We’ll get you and the girls back to the Otherworld. Art’s records might show us how to track the others.”
I looked back and forth between his and Dorian’s faces. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I hated all men, exactly, but suddenly, I just couldn’t be with either of them, even though I loved them both. Plus, at the moment, I didn’t want anything to do with the Otherworld. I shook my head.
“No. Take the girls…I’m not going.”
Dorian arched an eyebrow. “What will you do?”
I turned toward Roland for the first time in a while. He still had his gun, but it was lowered now. He’d been ready to attack the whole time but had been content to let the other two men take the lead in this. Later, I would have to find out how this motley crew had banded together. Right now…right now I was more concerned with the look on Roland’s face. He was regarding me like he didn’t know me. I felt a piece of my heart break.
“I want…” And to my shame, I felt tears burn in my eyes, which was just stupid. Throughout this entire week, I’d never cried. I’d taken it all straight-faced. I’d fought and killed today without remorse. Now…now it was like a lifetime of sorrow was coming out of me. “I want to go home,” I said. The tears escaped, running down my cheeks. “I want to see my mom.”
For a second, I thought Roland was going to turn away, condemn me as the half-gentry he’d always feared I would turn into, the one who’d lied to him about her involvement in the Otherworld. I think if he had turned away, I would have died then and there. Instead, he held out his hand. I couldn’t actually bring myself to take it. I didn’t think I could let anyone touch me right now. I loved all the men here, but right now, I was inexplicably afraid of them.
Still, I felt safe leaving with Roland. Roland was my father. Understanding my feelings, he lowered his hand and simply beckoned. I approached him, stepping over the bodies in the kitchen.
“Okay,” Roland said softly, his own eyes shining with tears. “Let’s go home.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
It was no secret: my mother hated Otherworldly things. Her feelings weren’t that hard to understand, considering that she’d been a prisoner there, serving as Storm King’s forced mistress-not unlike my own experiences now. Just as she tried to ignore what Roland and I did for a living, she also tried to ignore the gentry blood in me, treating me as though I were fully human and often refusing to hear otherwise.
Therefore, I was a bit surprised that she took everything better than Roland did when we got back to Tucson. I knew they had discussions when I wasn’t around. He filled her in on what had happened in Yellow River, how I’d been practicing magic on the sly, and how I was now the reigning monarch of a fairy kingdom. He told her about Leith too. If she was shocked by any of it, if she was repulsed by it and hated me for what I’d become…well, she never let on. She was just…well, my mother.
She set me up in my old bedroom. It hadn’t changed much over the years and even still had the same glow-in-the-dark stars I’d stuck to the ceiling. When I’d put them there in my youth, she had fretted that they’d never come off without ripping out part of the paint. So, I guess she’d never bothered in all these years.
Roland knew someone who knew someone who came and did a field surgery on my shoulder, removing the bullet and leaving me with pain meds and antibiotics. That was about all I saw of Roland in those initial days of recovery. It was my mom who stayed with me the most, talking about anything that wasn’t Otherworldly and making sure I had entertainment in the form of books and TV. I could pay little attention to those diversions, though, not when my mind was on so many other things. I would turn the events of the previous weeks over and over in my head until I grew too weary to string any coherent thoughts together. When I reached that exhausted point, I would usually just let my mind go blank for a while. It was oddly soothing, particularly since I so often woke up from nightmares about Leith. An empty mind was sometimes welcome.
And it was my mother I went to when my period came. She’d already bought a pregnancy test too, just for peace of mind. When it came out negative, I stared sobbing. My mom held me in bed and rocked me the whole time, saying, “I know, baby, I know.” It was odd because I didn’t even know why I was crying. The negative test was a good thing, and I was glad there were no loose ends with Leith. As she held me-the first time I’d really let anyone touch me since Art’s house-I suddenly wondered how she had felt when she was pregnant with me. Had she been repulsed by the thought of the half-gentry child forced on her? Had she wanted to get rid of me but been unable to in the Otherworld? I shuddered, not wanting to ponder that too much. Thinking I was cold, she went and got me a sweater.
It was a few days later that Roland and I finally talked. I was more mobile then and had come downstairs to make a bowl of cereal in the kitchen. He strolled in and joined me, sitting at the table with his coffee. His face seemed to have more lines than the last time I’d seen him. My fault, no doubt.
“I’m sorry,” I said when the silence grew too hard to bear. “I…I should have told you.”
He looked up from his cup. “Which part exactly?”
“All of it. Everything. I…” I sighed. “You were always so mad that I was spending time in the Otherworld at all. I thought you’d be upset if you knew the rest.”
“Oh, believe me, I’m much more upset to hear it now than I would have been then.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again, not knowing what else to say. “It all just happened so fast. There was that fight with Aeson-”
“I know, I know. Kiyo gave me the details of that, though he too was a bit surprised to find out you can conjure up hurricanes worthy of Storm King now.”
I shook my head. “I’m a long way from that. And once I started learning the magic…I just can’t stop.”
Now Roland sighed. “He’s been by a couple of times.”
It took me a moment to realize he meant Kiyo, not Storm King. “I’m not ready to see him.”
“I know.” There was a pause, and I think it took a lot for Roland to say his next words. “He’s not so bad. Relatively speaking.”
I gave him a sad half-smile. “Yeah, he’s great.” And I meant it…but something was bothering me about Kiyo, something that kept nudging me in the back of my head. I continued to ignore it.
“So what happens now?” Roland asked. “What are you going to do?”
I stared in surprise. “Well…what else would I do? The same thing I’ve been doing.”
“What, running back and forth between the worlds, trying to act like you have some semblance of a normal life?”
The tone of his voice hurt me. “What do you expect me to do? And it’s not like our lives have ever been normal.”
He shook his head. “This is different. You can’t do this. You can’t literally live in two worlds.”
I munched on my cereal for a moment to give me a chance to think. “I don’t really see that I have a choice. That land is bound to me. If I neglect it, it dies.”
Roland said nothing.
“Oh, come on! You think I should do that? Abandon it and let all those people suffer? You’re as bad as Art.” The mystery of what had happened to Art’s body and to Abigail was…well, a mystery. No one had told me exactly, save that it had “been taken care of.”
Roland’s eyes flashed with anger. “No, I’m nothing like him. Don’t ever make that mistake. But the gentry aren’t our people. They aren’t your people.”