She held it up to me a moment, and then she ripped the sheet off the notepad and crumpled it. Blue flames licked her palm. She hovered her hand over the paper until it caught fire. We both watched the paper turn to ashes and the ashes to air. If only Lily were able to burn away what she’d done, too.

  31

  The Greenhouse

  In front of the farmhouse, there was music, a handful of pitched dome tents, and a stone-lined pit roaring with fire. An entire headless animal was skewered over the fire, a lamb or a pig. It was too charred to guess what it had been. Sweaty soft drink cans were arranged on the large tree stump Holly had used as a picnic table during the harvest months.

  Eyes sparked suspiciously as Jimmy and I got out of the car. Some of the hunters rose from the rugs they’d laid out by the fire. The ones who didn’t stand swiveled around to face us.

  I scanned all the faces, looking in vain for a familiar one. Then someone stepped out of the shadows, someone I recognized. Gwenelda’s hair was braided into an intricate rope decorated with small blue feathers. She would’ve looked like she’d stepped right out of Holly’s book, if it weren’t for her white T-shirt and jeans. She was also wearing a pair of Mom’s boots. It pained me to see them on her feet, even though I had given them to her.

  I forced my eyes back upwards, to the suede choker woven around her thin neck, to her square jaw, the full lips I’d never seen arch into a smile, the straight nose, and the slanted black eyes that looked as though they could see through you.

  “Hi, folks,” Jimmy said, flashing them his badge. “Mrs. Geemiwa.” He nodded toward Gwenelda, then leaned over to me and whispered, “Ace Wood lied about her being the wife of the dead medical examiner. She’s totally unrelated to him.”

  Gwenelda didn’t look at Jimmy, didn’t return his nod. She speared me with her gaze. I barely dared to move, much less breathe. She was a short woman yet commanded as much attention as a titan.

  “Catori, you have come.” That strange voice of hers sounded olden, as though her vocal cords had aged during the two hundred years she’d spent below ground.

  A man stood beside her, wheat-blond hair shorn close to his scalp, light eyes incandescent in the darkness. He wore army fatigues. Had he served our country or scored a uniform at Goodwill? From the breadth of muscle in his chest alone, I suspected he’d fought in some war, and now he was fighting in another.

  When he took a step toward us, Gwenelda raised her hand to hold him back.

  “You’re back,” I said. There were a million other things I would rather have said, but not in front of an audience.

  “This is my home,” she said.

  Was she speaking about Holly’s farmhouse or Rowan?

  A gust of wind blew the embers of the fire our way. They fizzed in the air like buzzing fireflies.

  “Don’t mean to interrupt your barbecue, but I got a complaint about unruly behavior.” Jimmy rubbed his eyes.

  Gwenelda thrust her jaw forward. “Unruly behavior, Officer?”

  “’Parently Kajika was teaching some of your friends here”—he sniffed loudly—“how to shoot an arrow in the woods.”

  “Is it illegal to shoot arrows, officer?”

  “On private property, it isn’t, but on public property, yes.” He blinked repeatedly. His nose and eyes were running. “Kajika was practicing on public grounds.”

  “I am terribly sorry. He must not have realized he had stepped across the invisible border. I will speak to him when he returns and make sure he does not repeat this terrible mistake.”

  When I saw him sponge the moisture from his face with his uniform sleeve, I whispered, “You okay?”

  “I think I’m having an allergic reaction to something.” He sneezed. “Probably just pollen.”

  I shot my gaze back over to the crackling pit. The flames were pale. I bet they were burning rowan wood, and that Jimmy, although just a tad bit faerie, was having an allergic reaction to it.

  “Thank you. You be careful now with those flames. We don’t want no fires spreading to our forest,” he said.

  “The fire never remains unattended,” she promised him.

  “Did you um…shoot this animal, Mrs. Geemiwa? Hunting is illegal in this part of the state.”

  “We have bought this beast from the store. Cuskoo.”

  “Cuskoo?” Jimmy asked.

  “Costco,” clarified the man beside Gwenelda.

  “Would you like to stay for dinner, Officer? We have been blessed with a most bountiful supper.”

  The man next to Gwenelda flashed his eyes over her face. He didn’t seem too pleased about inviting a law enforcer to dinner, or did he sense Jimmy’s faerie blood? Could the new hunters sense faeries? It wasn’t as though Jimmy glowed. At least, not to me. Then again, he had a minute amount of faerie blood, and Ace had told me the less the amount, the less the glow.

  I wondered what eating meat cooked over rowan wood fire would do to Jimmy. Would it poison him or just make him sick, or did the magic not penetrate the seared flesh?

  “That’s kind of you, ma’am, but my mother’s waiting for me for dinner. Have a pleasant evening now, and please, no more training with bows and arrows. We’ve had enough deaths around here to last us a decade.” He rubbed his face with his sleeve. Even his large forehead was coated with sweat. He started toward his car but stopped when he didn’t see me follow. “Cat, you coming?”

  “I need to talk to Gwenelda. I’ll walk home, Jimmy. Thanks for the lift.”

  “I can wait—”

  “Go. I’ll be fine. Right, Gwen?”

  “No harm will come to you, Catori,” the huntress said.

  Jimmy got back into his car and idled a couple minutes, as though giving me time to change my mind. Even though the crowd around me looked about as friendly as a pack of wolves, I stayed.

  Once his car rumbled away, Gwenelda approached me.

  Her new clan whipped arrows and bows from their backs and pointed them at me.

  “Lower your weapons,” she said. “Catori is one of us.”

  Some frowned; some hissed.

  I was most definitely not one of them, but there was no way in hell I would tell them that. I didn’t want to end up impaled like their roast.

  She stopped a few feet away from me. Far enough that she didn’t have to bend her neck at a sharp angle to look up at me, but close enough that I could see the brown and yellow dots in the blue feathers. “Have you come to join us, child?”

  Child. I had to remind myself that she only looked twenty-nine. That in fact she was two hundred twenty-nine. “Can we talk in private, Gwen?”

  She gestured to the semi-circle of taut-bodied hunters behind her. “They are friends.”

  “They might be your friends, but they’re not mine.”

  “What is she, Gwenelda?” the army thug asked. He’d moved closer to us. Too close. I noted a swirly tattoo peeking from the V-neck T-shirt he wore underneath his unbuttoned camo jacket. Had he already confiscated a faerie’s dust, or had he visited the ink parlor?

  “She is family, Tom,” Gwen said, scrutinizing me.

  “She doesn’t read like you. She reads—”

  Gwenelda lifted her hand, and he stopped talking. What did I read like? A faerie? Or was he about to say human?

  “I will walk with you, Catori, but I must remain close to my clan in case the golwinim return. They have been making regular visits to our land.”

  “That might be because you’ve created an army and killed two of their people,” I said.

  Gwen’s eyes gleamed in the darkness. “They attacked first, Catori. They wielded their gassen. We had to defend ourselves.”

  “By killing them?”

  “We did what we had to do. Have you come to criticize our ways, or have you come to speak in earnest?”

  “I’ve come to speak.”

  “Then set aside your scorn.”

  I gritted my teeth and fell into step next to the huntress. We walked away from the camp, toward Holly’s greenhouse that was foggy with trapped steam. “Where’s Kajika?”

  “Resting,” she said.

  The feathers wound in her hair fluttered. When we’d go on walks through the forest, and I’d find a feather, Mom would braid my hair and spear it in. I’d believed they were the greatest treasures and had started a collection. I filled a giant cookie tin with these delicate, multicolored possessions, which I would sort through regularly. I hadn’t touched that tin in years.

  “Who lit the rowan wood fire in Holly’s room? You or Kajika?”

  “I did, Catori. Kajika had nothing to do with her death.” Was she protecting him by taking the blame, or was she telling the truth? “I have no qualms about my actions since I simply abided by her wishes.”

  “Were they really her wishes?”

  “Yes.” Her voice didn’t falter; her expression didn’t waver.

  Carrying out a long-winded debate about whether it was murder or assisted suicide seemed pointless. I didn’t trust Gwenelda, and I never would. “I wish you’d told me she wanted to die. I would’ve liked to speak to her before.”

  “You were away, and when you returned, Aylen unearthed the grave where my mother lay. There was never a proper time to tell you.”

  “If you didn’t feel guilty, why did you leave?”

  “I left because I needed to grieve. It is hard to lose a mother.”

  I ground my teeth. “No kidding.”

  “I am deeply sorry I took yours away.” There was an apologetic gleam in her eyes. I knew it wasn’t technically her fault, but the fact remained: she was here and my mother wasn’t. “I heard the faeries stole the book Holly wrote about our family.”

  “They did, but it’s no longer in their possession.”

  She stopped walking. Anticipation honed her features into sharp, stiff angles. “They returned it?”

  “Not exactly?”

  “Then who possesses it now?”

  Respecting Ace’s wish to keep the Unseelie a secret from the hunters, I asked, “Why did you make so many hunters, Gwen?”

  She wanted an answer, not a question, but until I received answers to my questions, she would have to wait. “The first was an accident. I did not mean to make one. I sliced my palm open on broken glass, and the woman who stopped my bleeding had a small wound on her finger. Our bloods mixed then. The golwinim hunted me down, lashed out at me for creating a hunter, threatened to raze our species if I did not stop. It was only then that I understood what my blood had done. As soon as I understood my mistake, I returned to find her.”

  “But then you thought it wasn’t such a dire mistake and decided to make more?”

  “We are too few. And in this way, we did not have to sacrifice human lives to awaken our family.”

  “Because turning innocent people into faerie prey sounded more humane to you? Gwen, these people aren’t weapons.”

  “I did not force any of them to join us. I spoke honestly. I gave them a choice.”

  I felt my eyes bulge. “So you’ve been going around, blabbing about magic and faeries, and people actually believed you?”

  “I explained my family was being attacked. I asked who would be willing to help me defend them.”

  “Did you explain why they were being attacked and what defending them entailed?”

  “Yes. I wiped the minds of those who decided not to participate. There was no coercion involved. All of those you have seen have come willingly. Only Alice was told afterwards. I regret what happened to her. She was unhappy to have been transformed and acted wildly. She killed a faerie by mistake. I imagine you have heard, have you not?”

  I nodded.

  “It took Kajika days to make her forgive us, days of consoling her. And now she has.”

  Gwenelda placed her hand on my wrist, wrapped her fingers around it softly. “You have hurt my brother greatly, Catori. He has not been willing to tell me what happened, but I can sense his melancholy, and it pains me. What occurred the afternoon he returned to Rowan?”

  I was about to answer her when something thumped loudly against the hazy glass of the greenhouse. At first, I thought it was a bird, but when I looked in the direction of the noise, I realized it was no bird; it was a body part. A bare bottom that extended into a narrow waist and a bare back.

  Gwenelda started walking again. “Come.” She tugged on my wrist to get me to move. To get me to stop looking. I did neither.

  Blonde hair slid against the glass, and then a second head materialized in the crook of the woman’s neck. This one was topped with black hair.

  The girl’s body struck the glass again. And again. And again.

  “Please, Catori, do not watch,” Gwenelda said, still trying to uproot me. But there was no uprooting me.

  I didn’t need to see the man’s face to know who it was. Goose bumps rained down over my skin when he raised his face, and his tiger eyes met mine. His forehead glistened with sweat and so did his bare shoulders. Instead of stopping or moving away from the glass, Kajika stared straight at me and pounded into the blonde whose loud moaning seeped through the glass panes.

  “Catori,” Gwenelda said sharply.

  I finally squeezed my eyes shut. My heart thumped, and my cheeks flooded with heat. I should not have gawked at the spectacle. I should’ve listened to Gwenelda and walked away.

  When I felt I had myself under control, I opened my eyes and stared at the short huntress. “He seems to have found a way to get rid of his pain.”

  Gwenelda grimaced. “It is still you he loves.”

  “No, Gwen, the woman he loves was never me. I just looked a hell of a lot like her.”

  “It was not just your resemblance that attracted him to you.”

  The land was soaked in starlight, every blade of grass perfectly outlined, every crooked cheery tree sketched out to perfection. “Right. It was also because of the boy who lives inside his mind.”

  “If that were the case, then I would be attracted to your father, and I am not.”

  I wrinkled my nose. “Thank the Great Spirit.”

  The sound of breaking glass shook the night. Several hunters rounded the farmhouse at dizzying speed, stopping just short of the greenhouse. The door had shattered when Kajika had flung it open. The glass lay in twinkling shards amid the ochre grass.

  He stormed toward us, bare chested, bare footed. At least he’d put his jeans back on. Anger rolled off him and flavored the air until the entire land crackled with it. When he reached us, he was breathing hard, his chest rising and falling in bursts.

  “Didn’t mean to interrupt,” I said.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I’ve just returned from Detroit and thought I would come by to check up on you.”

  The rapid tempo of his breathing didn’t diminish. If anything, it seemed to escalate. The blonde whose buttocks I was now intimately familiar with walked up behind him. I recognized her from the picture Ace had shown me the day I’d had tea with the three faeries at Bee’s. She wrapped her hand around his bicep.

  “Leave!”

  Shocked by his tone, I turned and started to walk away.

  “Not you, Catori,” he said, shrugging off the blonde.

  “I’ll come back tomorrow.” I kept walking. “When you’re less busy.”

  “Stay!” he growled.

  I stopped halfway down the grassy slope and turned around. “My father’s waiting for me at home.”

  Kajika stalked toward me, long legs moving fast. “Please, stay.” There was a thickness in his tone that made me pause. It was almost as though he were about to cry.

  “I really do need to go.”

  “You abandoned me,” he murmured.

  “I went to Detroit to look for—”

  “In the woods, you chose them over me. You defended Borgo.” His shoulders were tight, yet they quivered. “You do not know what that did to me.”

  “You’re still here, but Borgo isn’t, so I think his hurt trumped yours.”

  Kajika flinched. “He took the most precious thing I had away from me, Catori. He took Ishtu. He took her memory.”

  “How exactly did he do that? He didn’t kill her.”

  “She was mine!” He made a low sound in the back of his throat. “Her body was not hers to give away.”

  I blinked. “I thought she was spying for your tribe. I thought—”

  “You believed I would have let her lie with a faerie?”

  “That’s what you said.”

  “Because I was indignant and appalled. Not only did my aabiti forsake our marriage cot, but she forsook it to be with one of them.”

  “So she really did betray you?”

  He stared down at his empty hands, balled his fingers into fists. “It was I who deserved your pity.” His voice sounded like thunder. “Not Borgo.”

  I stared at him in pained silence.

  “I longed for you to step away from him and come to me…come with me. But you chose him. You chose them.”

  I was still at a loss for words.

  “I thought that what I felt for you, you felt for me. I thought”—his voice cracked—“you cared about me.”

  “I do care about you,” I said.

  Kajika stared hard at me, into me. He tipped his head to the side. “Then why did you wait days to come and see me?”

  I stared at the hunter’s chiseled face, at his wide, hooded eyes, at the swirls of ink on his bare chest. A patch of skin that had formerly been inked was bare. He’d confiscated Borgo’s dust the day Ishtu died. The faerie had finally gotten it back, but he no longer had any use for it.

  “Why do you have to care about everyone, Catori?”

  “I don’t care about everyone.”

  He gave me a soft smile. “You do.” He raised a hand to my face, cupped my cheek. When I remembered that he’d cupped another type of cheek only moments ago, I stepped back and shuddered. “Don’t touch me. You didn’t even wash your hands.” I rubbed my face with my sleeve. I’d need to soak my cheek in Lysol.

  His hand, which hung in the air, settled back limply at his side. “I’m sorry.”

  I wondered if he meant about touching me or screwing the new huntress. “You’re allowed to blow off steam however you want…with whomever you want.”

 

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