The Changeling (28 page)

“Smart ass?” I finished his sentence, laughing.

He chuckled. “Yes. I knew at that very moment I was in love with you. I’ve never met anyone like you. You’re cocky, you’re strong, you’re smart…and you’re absolutely beautiful. I still feel…well, that’s not true. I don’t really know what I feel right now, but that doesn’t matter.”

“What are you saying?”

“You’re in love with Gavin, aren’t you?”

He stared at me, fixed on my face.

“The road!” I pointed at a curve coming up.

He slammed on the brakes and pulled onto the shoulder. “No more excuses. Tell me.”

“I am.”

A slow exhale left his chest, and he crossed his wrists over the steering wheel. He put his head between his elbows. “I’d hoped that was all part of the mind games.”

“I’m sorry, Doug…I mean…I can’t believe I’m still apologizing. Crap.”

He shook his head without looking up. “He’s one of them, isn’t he?”

I didn’t know what to say. Even Candace hadn’t directly asked whether I was in love with a Fae. I’d never admitted it aloud. Even Billy and Sara hadn’t made me do that. Doug raised his head. He wasn’t going to move the Jeep until I told him.

“Yes. He’s Fae.”

He put his head back on his elbows. “I can’t compete with that. But I can’t figure out why I should have to. He’s not human, Maggie. How old is he?”

“He’s really young for a Fae.”

“What does that mean?”

“Compared to some, he’s practically a teenager,” I said.

“Not an answer. As my dad would say, you’re just rationalizing. What? Is he like a hundred or something?”

Suddenly I felt guilty and weird. Our age difference didn’t seem like a big deal when I said it to myself, but right now, the gap of hundreds of
millennia
… “He’s quite a bit older than that…”

He sat up and put his head against the headrest. “That’s kinda gross. Have you…”

“No, we have not,” I said, cutting him off.

He smiled for a moment and then went white. “Oh god, how old is Cassandra?”

“You don’t want to know.”

He closed his eyes, rolled down his window, and shook his head like he was trying to spit something nasty out of his mouth. “So, what do you…know?”

I couldn’t tell him that I knew, that I witnessed some of it. “Do I know what?”

“Nothing,” he said.

“Doug, all that aside, where does this leave us?”

He put the Jeep in gear and pulled back on the highway. “I need time to figure that out. For right now, though, I think you’re right.”

“Right about what?”

“We need some time apart…at least until I can figure this out. No whining this time. You owe me.”

“I do.”

“Maybe it’s all for the best,” he whispered to himself.

“Doug, what’s for the best? Use your words.”

He laughed, and then let out a long exhale. “I’ve signed a letter of intent to play football for the Razorbacks.”

“Oh, my gosh, that’s great!”

“Yeah, it’s always been my dream. My parents are ecstatic.”

“Mine, too. I’m going to sign with Arkansas, too.”

He smiled. “My parents are so ecstatic they’re buying a house in Fayetteville. We’re moving there. They want me closer to school, closer to training. I won’t be swimming anymore.”

It was crystal clear to me that he was saying everything except goodbye. “Are you happy about the move?”

“More now than before. I think it’s best to put some distance between me and Eureka.”

I exhaled quietly and stared out the passenger side window. “Distance is probably a good thing. Especially now. Do you think we can still be friends?”

“I hope so,” he said, “but for right now, I think…well, you know. I hate to break our date for the prom, but…”

“No, I totally agree,” I said. My inner voice went on the attack.
Maggie, you’re such a coward!

We drove back to my car in silence. When I agreed to tell him, I’d hoped we could be friends—that I had somehow found a way to be honest with him, protect him, and have our lives go back to the way they were. Pipe dreams. He felt betrayed and he resented me. Each time he glanced at me, I could see it in his eyes. My emotions ran high, but I managed to bottle them up and keep a pleasant veneer. When he dropped me off, he nodded, smiled and simply said, “Take care. Good luck with Mitch.” Then he was gone.

Billy appeared next to me in the Thunderbird after Doug drove off.

“Can you erase his memories of, well, the intimate stuff with Cassandra?” I asked, my voice quivering.

“I can, and I will. But why don’t you let me drive you home first?”

“I’ll be fine,” I said, forcing a smile and wiping a tear with a shaky hand at the same time.

Billy shook his head and walked around to the driver’s side. “I know exactly how you are. You can hide your emotions, most of the time, but this is not one of them. Go on, move over.”

I slid over, feigned being annoyed, and then lost it.

NINETEEN

AETHER

We spent my seventeenth birthday at the hospital. It was a far cry from the party I had a year ago—no dance floor or DJ, no scheming to get Gavin alone, and I couldn’t just look across the yard to find Aunt May grinning at me with her crooked smile. Candace, Rachel, Ronnie and my grandparents joined my parents and me, and did their best to act like nothing was wrong. Spending it at the hospital was my suggestion, and in hindsight, it was a terrible idea. The sound of Drevek’s respirator airing up his lungs every few seconds was barely audible, but everyone listened to it, nonetheless.

Candace held Drevek’s tiny hand and talked to him as though he was wide awake and grinning at her. It was quite an acting job, I thought, since she knew he wasn’t Mitch. Learning about her brush with death last year, and the truth behind it, did nothing to tarnish her personality like I was afraid it might. Instead, Candace emerged stronger and more confident than ever, and that made me love her even more.

Rachel was the big surprise. So much inner strength, so much caring, and it all came from her enormous heart. She tried to focus on everyone else in the room, but I caught her sad eyes fall on the facsimile of my brother’s form every few seconds. She held it together, and even managed to trade barbs with Ronnie, but it was apparent that being in the room with a changeling bothered her. She’d do anything for me. They all would. They each did everything they could to make me feel better in the depressing little room. Ronnie worked overtime, even getting Mom, Dad and my grandparents to laugh. I owed my friends big.

Sara was there in human form, talking to my mom and dad in a strong Irish accent, deftly keeping their attention focused on everything but Drevek. Billy hid out of view, occasionally whispering things that only Sara and I could hear. Only Gavin and Doug were missing. I hadn’t seen or heard from Doug in a week, but I felt better that Sara had been protecting him. Tonight, Sherman himself protected Doug. I didn’t ask how Sara arranged it.

During the brief intervals when my friends weren’t talking to me, I scrawled notes in my mind to Sara and Billy, asking them about Cassandra. They tried to assure me that Cassandra and the Unseelie would leave him alone.

I found it difficult to focus on anyone else in the room as Billy told Sara that Cassandra had compelled Doug into having a physical relationship with her. They agreed that Doug was still in danger. Even though it was a rare occurrence, in the past the Unseelie only took human lovers to cause pain, and it rarely ended well for the mortal. I was so relieved that Rachel had stood strong and forced me to deal with everything head on. Without the intervention, Doug would not have survived.

***

My parents retired an hour before I went to my room and lowered the lights. Sara had settled in the library and began reading when she was sure my parents were asleep. Since January, she’d read nearly every book in the room.

Other than Sara, the only Fae in the area were the guards, so I went to the plaster wall and retrieved Pete’s journal. The familiar, musty smell of the journal filled the room when I began reading.

After a few pages I realized Pete was well aware of Ozara’s interest in our family. He had heard her debating the subject of “Áedén’s heir” with the Council on several occasions. All the Fae, it seemed, had noticed Pete’s eyes.

So Billy and Sara were right
.

Pete also confirmed that among the Seelie Council, Ozara alone knew how to create Aether and administer the fifth trial, but as I continued reading, a passage snapped me out of my drowsy state. He thought he’d guessed the secret to the fifth trial while watching her, as he put it, “
conjure the substance in a most unique and uncanny way, in an amount so slight it appeared to assemble in its most basic form
.”

Pete had watched her methodically, and he’d done so for more than seventy years. During that time, he had witnessed her playing with Aether, and in another bombshell passage, he wrote:

Unbeknownst to the otherworldly creature, I secured for myself a vantage from which I beheld her, to my astonishment and marvel, assemble and disassemble the substance again and again from each of the quaternary elements, like a watchmaker plying her trade. A fortnight passed before the veil of ignorance lifted and I began to grapple with the enormity of what I had witnessed. As I pen this entry, I muse at the fact that I scarcely appreciated the spectacle at the time.

Then I came across an odd passage written directly to Lola. Pete said that at her birth the Fae began speculating that she might be Maebown. According to Pete, Ozara recognized an abnormality in her “cognitive function,” an abnormality that appeared in humans who frequently developed a proclivity for sensing and controlling the elements. She warned the Council members to keep that fact to themselves, as both prior Maebown had the abnormality as well. The Council was shaken by the news, Pete said, as each of them began referring to the
Second
. Pete didn’t know what that meant, but I did: the Second Aetherfae. Then something else registered.

Oh my god
, my mind screamed,
Ozara knew from the moment I got to Arkansas that I was different
. There were so many times over the past year when different Fae would stare at me and remark about how special I was. Maybe, like Billy and Sara, they didn’t know why I was different, but each was aware of something from day one.

I read faster, past the observations he’d recorded for Lola until, near the bottom of a page, he began to discuss the implications for learning to control Aether. He followed by describing what he’d seen Ozara do—the combinations she’d used to create Aether.

I read the last line on the page.
The initial combination consists…
Then on the next page I read,
(Summer 1935) curiosity demanded I listen. Nary a condition existed that might explain…

It didn’t make sense at all. It was as if he’d changed topics in the middle of the sentence. I reread it a dozen times. I relaxed and let the journal rest on my lap as I tried to figure out what it meant. After a while, I glanced down at the book as it straddled my thigh, and I noticed the cleanly cut remnants of two pages sticking out of the binding.

What the hell? Really? Oh come on! This only happens in movies
.

I pulled the book closer to my face, and yes, two pages had been removed. The date didn’t make sense either—the passages were written around the time of Lola’s birth, in 1899, three and a half decades earlier than the written date. If I remembered correctly, Pete O’Shea had passed away in 1901 at the ripe old age of 98, and his journal entrees had stopped in April of that year.

I didn’t know what
Summer 1935
meant, but I didn’t need to. Aether was created through a particular combination of the elements. That was valuable information, and it was more information than I had when the day began. I fell asleep wondering what combinations would do the trick.

***

On Monday morning, the first day of spring break, I prepared myself to track Cassandra wherever she went each day at nine. Mom and Dad left for the hospital about the same time they always did, and Billy followed them, generating a sense of calm and hope, I was sure. Sara left at the same time to take Sherman’s place and look after Doug.

At 8:45, I settled onto my bed and began trying to relax. It was a little more difficult to concentrate. My nerves were on edge and my heart was beating faster than normal, so it took several minutes before I felt the floating sensation. Patiently waiting for what seemed like several minutes, I finally sensed my body well below me.

Without wasting a second, I willed myself to the Seoladán. Despite knowing that I had to remain calm or risk being yanked back to my body, I felt nervous about how much time I’d spent trying to relax. I wondered whether Cassandra would be there.

Through the mist I recognized two things. The first was the bureau in the abandoned cottage where I’d found Pete O’Shea’s journal—I was floating in front of it in a thick fog. Cassandra’s presence was the other. Good, I hadn’t missed her. She was still out front near the fountain.

Before I willed myself to her, it occurred to me that the bureau doors were open. I distinctly remembered closing them, so I knew with complete certainty she’d discovered that a book was missing. The dust free spot on the shelf was a dead giveaway.