Page 35

Cate

I wasn’t certain which one of us was more on edge. It was a bad sign that my first attempt at wedding dress shopping was set to end in day drinking. I didn’t bother trying to talk. I barely even noticed Ciara’s terrifying driving. I was too lost in my own head, but there was no way to sort through it.

None of it made sense.

“Where are we?” I asked, peering out the Porsche’s window as we pulled up to an empty spot on the street.

“Best Doberge cake in town,” she promised as she escorted me inside, lowering her voice to add, “and the owner is a vampire so we can talk freely.”

I doubted her on both counts.

But The Fontaine was empty. The hostess’s head was bent to a black ledger, poring over the evening’s reservations. “We’re closed. Dinner service doesn’t start for an hour.”

Relief flooded through me. I wanted to go home and crawl into bed and hope I woke up to discover this was all a dream. I nudged Ciara, my eyes already straying toward the door.

“What about the bar?” Ciara asked her. “My money is good, I swear.”

The woman startled, slamming the book shut. She dashed from behind the stand and threw her arms around my friend. “The bar is always open to you.”

“Even these days?” Ciara drew back, giving me a better glimpse of the woman. “Listen, I’m sorry about étienne.”

I blinked, realizing I’d met her before. Not some hostess. The owner . Baptiste. The vampire who owned La Porte.

Lach’s ex-girlfriend.

Because today couldn’t get any weirder.

“It’s still surreal.” Baptiste forced a smile, noticing me for the first time. “We’ve met before, haven’t we?”

“Cate,” I reminded her.

Ciara bumped a hip against mine. “Lach’s fiancée.” She grabbed my hand and held out my engagement ring for the vampire’s inspection.

And today could get weirder.

But Baptiste let out a sharp whistle. “Someone finally landed the whale. I never thought I would see the day when that man settled down.” She grabbed a few menus and nodded toward the dining room. “We can open early for friends.”

“That’s not necessary,” I started.

But she shook her head. “You deserve a drink if you’re going to marry him.” She winked at me. “We used to date, you know?”

“She knows,” Ciara teased. Her eyes rounded, and she grabbed my shoulder. “Oh gods, I should have taken you somewhere else.”

“Why?” Baptiste asked as she led us to a booth tucked into the corner. “Because of Lachlan and me? We were old news eons ago.” Her eyes went distant like she was searching through all those decades of memories. “I think I was over him before we broke up. Honestly, I don’t even remember.”

“Hush!” Ciara smacked her shoulder playfully as we slid into the seats. “Don’t scare her away.”

A feline smile slid onto her lips. “I would never.” She passed each of us a menu in turn. “Since we’re celebrating, I’ll open the kitchen early, too.”

“You don’t have to do that,” I said quickly.

“Nonsense. It’s all on the house today.” Baptiste waved our attention toward the menu before disappearing into the back.

I hadn’t gotten a chance to talk to her much on Halloween, when she had been busy playing hostess. It was good to see she wasn’t holding a grudge, especially with so much drama between the covens.

“She’s…nice.” I breathed a sigh of relief as we settled into the booth, its high-backed velvet seating providing a discreet place for us to talk.

“Oh, she hates you,” Ciara said casually. She opened her menu but didn’t look at it. She just kept staring at me as though she could see past the glamour on me that she had put back in place in Blanche’s restroom.

“Hates?” I choked out. She had acted perfectly pleasant. “So, she isn’t over him?”

Ciara snorted. “No, that much is true. It’s just a vibe I get. Vampires tend to look at humans as snacks. I mean, not that you’re a… But with the glamour…” Her cheeks reddened as she reached for the wine list. “White or red?”

I shook my head. On the ride over, I’d decided I wanted to keep my head clear. I needed to process what had happened.

She gave up and dropped both menus on the table. “How long have you known?”

“Known?” I blinked. “About twenty minutes.”

She frowned. “You’re telling me that you didn’t know you were a fae until I unwrapped that thing?”

“No.” I swallowed, suddenly questioning if wine might be a good idea. “But Lach…”

“Lach what?” She planted her hands on the linen tablecloth, leaning forward. “You can tell me anything.”

There was unmistakable pain in her eyes, but she didn’t allow it into her voice. Didn’t allow it to become accusation or recrimination. Ciara might be upset that I’d hid some things from her, but she would listen with an open mind. She would listen like a friend and respect that I’d kept a secret.

And so the whole story spilled out of me, pausing only when we accepted bottles of white and red from a waiter who’d had the unfortunate luck to turn up to the restaurant early. Ciara poured while I shared, gulping down three glasses before I’d started my first. I needed to get it all out of me. I needed to tell her everything, if only to make sense of it myself before I faced Lach. How my bargain with her brother had hinged on the ring. How Oberon had wanted it for himself and revealed its origin. Her face remained impassive even as I told her about his plans to resurrect the Terra Court, but she poured another glass, finishing off the bottle.

I braced myself as I continued on to what I’d learned since I returned to New Orleans—about her mother and father and the secret they had kept from everyone, the secret Lach had known for decades and never shared with her.

Ciara stared at me when I finished, the empty wineglass clutched in her hands. “You’re telling me that my brother thinks you’re Stacia’s daughter? Or Calista’s, I mean? Gods, this is confusing. Can we just call her Stacia? That’s how I knew her.”

I nodded, taking a long sip from my glass. “I’ve been trying to prove him wrong ever since he told me.”

“I can’t believe he didn’t tell me.” Her hand closed around the butter knife laid before her, and she squeezed it so tightly that her knuckles turned white. I might have to take it away from her. Before I could intervene, she dropped it back on the table. “Why didn’t he tell me?”

I didn’t buy Lach’s claims that we needed to withhold this from Ciara because she couldn’t keep a secret. “I think he didn’t want to cause you pain.”

“Pain?” Her eyebrow arched. “Why would this cause me pain?”

“Because your parents lied to you,” I said slowly. Was this a trick question?

“Of course they lied to me. I was a brat back then,” she admitted, reaching to open the bottle of white. “But knowing the truth doesn’t change anything. Well, not for me.”

It changed a lot for me. I was fae, and I didn’t know how to feel about that.

“You look like you’re about to throw up.” She abandoned the bottle and picked up the drinks menu, flipping it over. “Maybe we need something harder than chardonnay.”

“All my life, I wanted to know who my parents were.” My voice was quiet. “I wanted to believe that there was a reason I lost them. That someday it would all make sense. But…”

“We all want that.” She reached over and squeezed my hand.

But there was something that even now made no sense.

“Why couldn’t you tell I was under a glamour?” I asked her. “How could you have glamoured me all those times and not have realized?”

She shook her head, studying my face again. “I don’t think the effigy was a simple glamour. Most of us can see through a glamour if we really look, especially if we want to see past it. I should have been able to see through it.” Just like she could see past the human glamours the others wore on the streets of New Orleans. Just like I had seen past the glamours in the Garden District on Halloween. “I still don’t understand why it just fell apart when I unbound the threads.”

Neither did I. “Lach assumed that there was a glamour tied to my ring.” I told her about the day we met and how I’d started to remove it in his office. “But when it finally came off the other night, nothing.”

“Unless someone rebound the threads of the spell and tied it to that thing.” She shivered. “You have no idea where it came from?”

I bit my lower lip, unsure how to answer, but the hesitation was enough. “I saw them in a shop in the Quartier Enchanté. The witch who runs it, Willow, called them effigies. She said people would use them to cast protection spells on loved ones or curses on their enemies.”

Ciara’s eyebrows jumped a full inch, her forehead wrinkling. “Do you think she’s the one who made it?”

“Maybe. But she was trying to help me understand where the ring came from. We did a séance on Samhain. I…” Trusted her. At least, I had. Now, I wasn’t sure.

“Why would she want the spell to stick if she was trying to help you take off the ring?” Ciara asked, voicing one of the questions bouncing around in my own head.

I forced myself to say it. “Maybe she isn’t my friend.”

Ciara shot me a sympathetic smile. I could guess from the kind sadness written on her face that that’s what she suspected. “This is a lot to digest. You don’t have to know how you feel about this right now. Or tomorrow. Or even next year.”

And I was a fae, which meant I had time to figure things out. Somehow, the prospect of a very long life wasn’t a comfort. What if I never worked through this? What if I lived for hundreds of years and all I had at the end of them were more questions? What if I didn’t want to be immortal?

“How does it work?” I asked her, dread forcing the questions from my tongue now. I needed some answers, even if they weren’t the ones I wanted. “We don’t know for sure that Stacia was my mother.” Although it seemed more and more to be the case. “Or whether both my parents were fae. Is there a way to tell?”

“Not really.” She chewed on her lower lip a minute, looking so much like Roark toying with his lip ring that I almost wanted to smile…despite my crippling existential dread. “Obviously, you’re part fae. Anyone with more than half fae blood stops aging in the Otherworld. That’s why we spend most of our time there. Well, usually.”

I blinked. Why was now the first time I was hearing about this? “But what about here?”

She picked up her water goblet and frowned. “I really need to order some wine,” she muttered.

And now she was avoiding my questions, too. “Fae don’t age in the Otherworld,” I repeated. “What happens when you are here?”

“You know those old stories about changelings.” She traced patterns in the water’s condensation, refusing to look up at me.

“Yes.”

“There’s some truth to them. Not much,” she added hurriedly, her eyes flashing to mine. “Our kind doesn’t switch our babies with human ones. But when fae are born, most of us are nursed on Earth because we grow more quickly into adulthood here. It would take much longer for us to reach our prime and settle in our world. Most of us were cared for by fae nursemaids. At least, Lach, Fiona, and I were. Roark, too. Shaw—”

“Went to school,” I remembered. My brain felt like it was full of cobwebs, and I shook my head, trying to clear the thoughts and questions sticking inside it. “But once you reach your prime, once you settle,” I repeated her words, “you stop aging.”

“Not exactly.” She took a drink. “When we’re deemed old enough, we return to living in the Otherworld, and that’s that. As long as we return to the Otherworld every day, we age at fae rates.”

I couldn’t breathe. Not just because of what it meant for Lach but because of our original bargain. “So if you wanted to see if someone was fae, you might make them spend every night there?”

“Cate…” Her mouth remained open as she searched for words of comfort or an excuse or anything…

Lach had suspected what I was from the moment we met. I already knew, but now I finally understood the terms he’d chosen. Mercy for Channing in exchange for half of my life spent in his world. “He really did know,” I said softly. “That’s why he wanted me to stay in the Otherworld.”

“I think he was in love with you from the beginning.”

“He made me stay at the court or in the Avalon because I wouldn’t age and it would prove I was fae. It was another test.” But a twang in my heart reminded me that it could be both. Lach was complicated like that.

But Ciara shook her head. “We still age in the Avalon. The veil between our worlds is thinner there, but it’s not our world. We just like our phones too much to live down there, and like I said, we just have to pop down.”

I squinted at her, my eyes narrowing as my thoughts did. “But Lach can’t return to the Otherworld.”

She bit her lip. Silver lined her lashes, and she blinked away tears. “That’s why the bona fides spell is only a temporary solution.”

Roark had said as much that first day after I’d made it home, and Lach had silenced him.

“Why didn’t he tell me?”

“I don’t know, but I think maybe you do. Maybe it has something to do with all of this. The ring. Your own glamour.”

And he’d tried to convince me to visit the court, tried to talk me into leaving him behind and seeking shelter deep within his world. Not because being with him was dangerous but because staying here kept me from being protected by the Otherworld’s magic.

“He should have told me.” A pit churned in my stomach. “What if I had left him here?”

“My brother has an annoying tendency to make decisions for us, like proclaiming me his successor,” she reminded me. “I think he cares more about making sure we’re all safe than he does about saving himself.”

That was the other truth I didn’t want to face. Lach believed he couldn’t save himself—that absolution from the Wild Hunt was a lost cause. I prayed he wasn’t right about that, either.

But to keep this from me…

“Did you know?” I asked her, uncertain if I wanted an answer. “That Lach hadn’t told me about this?”

Ciara hesitated before bobbing her head. “But only because Roark knows.” She scowled at the signet ring by her plate. She hadn’t put it back on since the bridal shop, and I was grateful. I needed more time to sort through this before Lach found out, to get bearings in this strange new reality before he celebrated his victory. “He asked me not to tell you.”

“Roark or Lach?”

“Roark.” She sighed, scanning the restaurant. “Where the hell is the server? I’m ready to skip food and order a bottle of whiskey.”

“I’m actually on board with that plan, because I think I need to set a few things straight with my mate when I get home.”

“Me too,” she agreed, flushing pink. “I mean with Roark. Gods, can you imagine if we were…?” She smothered a giggle with the back of her hand before shaking her head. “Is there anything else you need to tell me?”

“Nope, I have nothing else to hide. I might be a fae princess, and I’m mated to your brother. If I have any other big secrets, I don’t want to know about them.”

“Seriously, is anyone even working here?” She pushed up on the table, trying to get a better view over the back of the booth.

Baptiste appeared like she’d been summoned, and Ciara settled into the booth. “Sorry. We got busy preparing for tonight. There have been some changes to the schedule, so I’ll take care of you myself.”

“Thank you. I think we’re going to stick to celebrating,” Ciara said, her smile growing sloppy from the wine. At least celebrating sounded better than drowning our sorrows. She tapped the menu. “A bottle of this and two slices of Doberge.”

I had never needed cake so badly in my life.

“Oh, bless your heart. I think you misunderstood what I meant by ‘take care of you.’” Baptiste reached into the pocket of her half apron. There was a flash of movement that my brain couldn’t quite process, and then Ciara froze as the barrel of a 9-millimeter pressed to the back of her head. Baptiste chuckled. “Now, let’s not ruin the tablecloth.”