Page 17

Chapter Seventeen

Damn it, I hadn’t heard him come in, and Madge hadn’t let me know he was home.

I stood, trying not to look guilty. “Hey. What are you doing here? I thought you had meetings all morning?”

“I decided to work from home. Wanted to make sure you’re both okay after last night.”

I smiled automatically, happy to see him. He wore dark jeans and a white shirt, far more pulled together than either of us.

He smiled at Gwen. “I’m so sorry about last night. How are you?”

She mumbled something like “good,” but she looked pretty shell-shocked, so I wasn’t sure it was that convincing.

“Alexei will cover your medical costs from last night. He wants to apologize in person when you’re up to it,” Damon said.

Gwen nodded, still looking distracted.

He shot me a glance, obviously wondering if she was okay.

I felt my smile turn lopsided. “So there’s been a development. I told you that Gwen had some matches on the DNA database.”

“I remember,” Damon said, his smile turning tight. Our conversation after Gwen and I had finally arrived home had been short, but Damon hadn’t let me get to sleep until I’d filled him in on all the pertinent details.

“Well, this morning, I got a notification from the national DNA database that my medical history had been accessed. That’s the first time that’s ever happened.”

He made the link almost instantly. “Wait, you two are related?”

His head turned from me to Gwen. I wondered what he saw. She was short and blonde and beautiful. I was tall and mousy-haired and…well, he thought I was beautiful, but I wasn’t half-Fae gorgeous. I had my mom’s green eyes. Gwen’s were blue.

Pale blue, like Jack’s, I realized. His were the same ice-blue shade. Another nail in the coffin of coincidence. “Possibly half sisters.” Cousins was possible, but my gut said no.

“So you’d have the same dad? I mean, her mom is Fae, right?” Damon asked.

“Yep,” I agreed.

“And she got a match with her dad, too?” He was watching me intently. Probably trying to figure out if I thought this development was good or bad.

“Yep.”

“Do you know who he is?”

“You don’t get that information from the database,” I said. “Only the medical history. You can send a contact request, but Gwen hasn’t?—”

“You didn’t get a match with him, too?”

“I didn’t do a parental search recently. And my info is locked down. So, no. Whoever it is should only get a notification about his medical history being released, same as me.”

“Well, she should do that,” Damon said. “That would be amazing, if you knew who…” He trailed off and I knew he’d remembered the photo when he muttered something distinctly impolite under his breath. “That photo of your mom. You think it could be Jack.” He stared at Gwen intently. “She doesn’t look like him.”

“He has eyes like hers. Such a pale blue isn’t common.”

“Jack has blue eyes?” Gwen interjected.

“Yes, like yours,” I said.

“The color could be a Fae thing?” Damon suggested.

“It’s possible,” I said in a tone that was more ‘probably not’. If Gwen’s eyes were purple or some absolutely non-human color, I could chalk that up to her being tanai, but pale blue was still human.

Damon pressed his hand to the back of his neck, digging his fingers into the muscles as he locked eyes with me. “You could do the search for your dad.”

“I told you I’ve done it before and never had a hit. So, if it is Jack and his DNA is in the database now, it’s been a recent addition, or, at least, sometime since I turned eighteen.”

“He worked in medical holographs, you’d think he’d be into medical tech,” Damon muttered.

“You tech boys are always the ones paranoid about data safety,” I pointed out. If Jack was Gwen’s father, he knew he’d left a kid behind in England. He’d made arrangements for her. Left her money. But if he didn’t want her to find him, that was the perfect incentive not to add his DNA to a database. So why had he changed his mind? And when? Did he know Gwen’s was here in San Francisco? That she’d come out of the realm? Or that she’d gone in there in the first place? Had he kept tabs on her from a distance all this time?

Too many questions. I regretted my second breakfast, as my stomach flipped and churned.

“Right,” Damon said. “Dammit. He’ll have the notification that his history was accessed, too, won’t he?”

“He already knew about Gwen. So it wouldn’t be a surprise,” I said. “He walked away from her. Maybe he won’t care.”

“Do you think he knew about Sara getting pregnant?”

“I doubt it. She made it very clear my dad had no idea I existed. I threatened to run away once and she told me there was no one else who knew I’d even been born. I thought my grandparents were dead until the police located them after her accident. Jack had money. If Sara had wanted something from him, she would have figured out how to get it.”

Which suddenly made me wonder why she hadn’t extracted every penny she could from Jack. My mother never met a dollar she didn’t like. So, why hadn’t she worked Jack like all her other marks? Had she...?

A thought struck me like a bolt out of a clear sky. She’d wanted to use me for the demon all along.

Bile rose in my throat. Was it possible? Could she have planned that far ahead? Had a kid because she thought she could make a bargain with the demon for whatever it was she wanted? It was the only thing that made sense to me for her not wanting to stick with Jack, at least long enough to saddle him with me and leave with a nice payoff.

Holy shit . Was that why she’d gone underground in middle America? Determined he’d never find out about me until she knew whether I had power and could be traded to a demon? I bent over, bracing a hand on the back of a chair, trying to remember how to breathe. Had my mom really been that callous? Or crazy? Jack was no picnic, either. What the hell did that say about me if those two had provided my genetic material? Was I one short straw away from cracking and trying for world domination?

“Maggie?” Damon said, crouching down beside me. He put a hand on my back, rubbing it gently. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m sorry. I just figured out my mom was worse than I thought.” I stifled a half hysterical laugh and straightened. Gwen stared at me, looking thoroughly confused and paler than ever. “Can we find out if it is Jack?” I asked Damon. “Another way, I mean. A…less direct way?”

He frowned. “I’m not sure. Those databases will be locked down tight.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Are you telling me you couldn’t do it?”

“Don’t look at me like that,” he said. “I’m not supposed to break?—”

“Not ‘supposed to’ being the relevant part of that sentence,” I said, making air quotes. “We need to know. Jack will have been notified his medical history was accessed, too. I mean, he knows about Gwen, but what if he decides he can use her in some way? She’s half-Fae…” Half-Fae and half-witch. Untrained. Vulnerable.

“Fuck,” Damon pulled a face.

“Exactly,” I said.

“Someone want to tell me what’s going on…what did Jack do?” Gwen asked.

“We can’t tell you. Not without the Cestis okaying it,” I said. “We can ask Cassandra when we tell her about this.”

“Why would Cassandra need to know?”

“Because Jack’s a witch. Which makes you…well, I’m not sure. More than tanai. I don’t know how common that is, but we have to tell Cassandra.”

Gwen half rose from her chair, as though she was going to flee. I put a hand out, catching her arm instinctively. “Hey, none of this is your fault. No one’s going to be mad at you.”

Mad, no. Concerned about her magic, yes. I didn’t need to be Cestis to realize that.

“It will be okay.” I put gentle pressure on her arm and she thumped back down into her chair.

“She doesn’t necessarily have witch magic, does she?” Damon asked. “Not all witch’s kids do.”

Gwen perked up. “Yeah, maybe I don’t.”

“She has some magic. She’s tanai. I don’t know about the other part.” Other than Jack was strong. You couldn’t summon imps if you weren’t.

“You can’t tell from her—” he waved his hand at Gwen, an encompassing swirl of his hand around the general outline of her body. “You know, energy field.”

“It looks a little smoky, like Callum and Cerridwen. Other than that, well, she hasn’t used magic around me. And, if she did, I’m not sure I could tell whether it’s Fae or witch magic she was using. Cassandra probably could.”

Damon shook his head. “So we ask Cassandra.”

Gwen slumped back in her chair. Obviously not so keen on the idea of the Cestis here getting interested in her.

“Which brings us back to who her—our—dad is. And why we need to know. If it’s just Joe Normal from the middle of nowhere, then we can all relax.” How Joe Normal would meet and knock up a Fae was the hole in that argument. I mean, it had happened back in the day…Fae stealing humans away, but not since the contract.

“Gwen can refuse a request if he tries to make contact,” Damon said. “Doesn’t that solve the problem?”

“She can refuse the request,” I said, “but we know Jack has friends who have no scruples crossing the lines of data privacy and hacking. He might choose to pursue other avenues of access, too.”

Damon’s expression turned dark. He could hardly argue that Jack was going to play by the rules. I could see him turning the possibilities around in his head, his brain running at its usual genius speed as he analyzed the problem. I let him think until he shook his head once and squared his shoulders. “So the first thing we want to do is get your records out of the database. He can’t hack information that’s not there.”

He had a point. “How?”

“Your information is in the Cestis database, right?”

I nodded, not surprised he knew about the Annex database.

“So ask Cassandra. She’s in charge. The Cestis database interfaces with the regular ones. But the Cestis control it. And I’m sure it’s well protected. They wouldn’t want the government having access to the names of every witch in the country, would they?”

“No,” I said. The relationship between witches and humans hadn’t always been friendly. There were still countries where magic had been made illegal and witches were underground if they hadn’t fled. So I couldn’t imagine the Cestis would give the government any more access to the database than was strictly necessary. “You’re right. So we need to call Cassandra. And Meredith. But Cassandra first.”

Gwen looked like she wanted to object. I squeezed her arm again. “It will be okay.”

She started gnawing on the thumbnail of her free hand.

Damon passed me his datapad and I called Cassandra, putting the call up on a holoscreen.

“How do I get my record out of the Annex DNA database?” I asked when she answered, skipping even a hello. “And Gwen’s.”

She frowned at me, her initial smile when she’d answered the call replaced by her eagle-eyed, no-nonsense expression. Her Cestis face where the normal silver-haired, curvy, non-threatening, sweet old lady meets Mrs. Claus persona she used to make people comfortable around her vanished and you were left with no doubt you were dealing with someone of vast power and authority. Someone not to be messed with, because they would probably mess you up with ease. “Good morning to you, too, Maggie. You have to put in a request.”

“How long does it take?”

“A few days, a week. I’m not sure how often they review these days. We get reports, of course, but that’s always been more Ian’s thing. He liaises with a lot of the government departments we have to work with.”

“Okay, can it be faster?”

“I can authorize a priority request.” She leaned forward, her eyes glowing gold through the screen.

“Great,” I said, looking down. “Let’s do that. Gwen and I need to get our records out fast and you need to tell them to be on the lookout for hacking attempts.”

Her gaze sharpened even more. “Back up. Tell me what’s going on.”

“Well, first thing you need to know there’s a possibility that Gwen’s my half sister and the second is, if she is, Jack Miller might be our father.”