Seanan McGuire - One Salt Sea

“You can’t. This is a choice you only get to make once. You’re either fae, like me, or you’re human, like your father. Please.”

She hesitated again before asking, very softly, “Which one lets me go home?”

Her words stabbed me like knives. I forced my voice to stay level as I replied, “Human. You have to be human if you want to go home. If you choose fae . . . I’m sorry, honey, but if you choose fae, you have to stay with me.”

“Forever?” she whispered.

I couldn’t bring myself to answer that. I swallowed hard, and nodded.

“I . . . I want . . .” She stopped for a long moment before saying, rapid-fire, “I want you to take it all back. I want you to have never left us. You’re magic, right? Like a Fairy Godmother? Can you do that? Can you make it so you never went away?” Even her tears smelled like primroses.

“Nobody has that much magic, baby. I’m sorry. I love you, and I’m sorry.”

“I am, too.” She kept crying as she slid her hands into mine. “I love you, Mom. I wish you’d never gone away. I want to go home now. Please let me go home now.”

“You have to say the words, Gillian. You have to tell me what you want.”

She sighed. “I want to be human. I just want to go home.”

“All right, honey. If that’s what you want, you can go home.” I let go of her hands, gathering her into a hug. It felt good, and right, and like it was everything I’d been missing since I came back from the pond. “This is going to hurt, okay? But it has to hurt if you want to go back to your dad.”

“Okay,” she said, sniffling, and buried her face against my shoulder.

I closed my eyes, the smell of grass getting stronger, the smell of copper overwhelming the primroses. Even with my eyes closed, I could see everything she was, every trace of her heritage. And I reached out, still holding her close to me, and grabbed hold of everything that wasn’t human—including the poison that was struggling to kill her. Wipe away one, wipe away the other.

Set her free.

Her screaming was the worst thing I’d ever heard—but if I stopped, she’d die, so I kept going, changing and twisting and wiping away, until the screaming stopped, giving way to silence. And I opened my eyes.

GILLIAN WAS STILL UNCONSCIOUS on the floor, but the wound in her shoulder had closed. That seemed to be the only immediate change. Her fae blood was thin enough that removing it hadn’t visibly altered the shape of her face; she still looked like my little girl. And she still wasn’t breathing.

“Move,” said the Luidaeg, pushing me roughly to the side as she moved to put her hands on my daughter’s chest. She looked up, pupils expanding until her eyes were consumed by blackness. “Go to your Selkie,” she said. “You don’t need to watch this.”

I nodded numbly, climbing to my feet. I swayed there for a moment, and then I turned and ran to Connor.

He was lying where he’d fallen, motionless, save for the shallow, strained rise and fall of his chest. The arrow was still in place, sticking out of his body like an accusation. See? it seemed to say; see what happened because you let him love you?

“Oh, Connor.” I knelt, letting my fingers brush against his cheek. “You idiot. You wonderful, stupid, beautiful idiot .”

Gillian whimpered. I didn’t let myself turn around.

“I love you,” I whispered, and leaned down to kiss Connor’s cheek. My lips left a bloody print behind. “Sleep well.”

Something was wrong. The blood in the room was trying to tell me what it was, but I was tired, and everything was so jumbled that I couldn’t tell what was happening anymore. I stood, wiping the tears from my eyes and the blood off my lips and chin. “Come on,” I said, to no one and to everyone who was listening. “Let’s go bring those damn kids home.”

The room only had two doors. We entered through the first, and so I walked toward the second, not looking to see who followed me. I was exhausted. My head ached from the strain of what I’d just done to my little girl—a thing I would have said was impossible a year ago. “Impossible” no longer seemed to have much place in my life. Connor was . . . Connor was asleep. I refused to admit to anything more than that. As for me, I was somewhere past “done” and accelerating toward “completely finished.”

“Toby?” asked Quentin. He ducked ahead of me as I opened the door into the next section of the shallowing, revealing a long, dark hallway. The pixies flew ahead of us, lighting it. “Are you okay?”

“No,” I said, stepping past him. A blue-winged pixie landed on my shoulder, providing a dim but steady local light. “We’re looking for two teenage boys. They’re probably scared, so try not to startle them.”

“Are we quite sure Rayseline had no other little helpers?” asked Tybalt. I glanced back to see him making his way through the doorway.

“No,” I said. “But if she did, they were probably more hired thugs, and they’ll run when they realize they’re not going to get paid. There’s no way she paid them enough to stay—Dugan could never have stolen that much from the Queen’s coffers without getting caught, and Raysel didn’t exactly have resources of her own.”

“You have such a generous view of fae nature,” said Tybalt mildly.

“I’ve earned it.” The pixies illuminated the hall, showing doors lining the walls. “From what Bucer said, I don’t expect the shallowing to be huge. Let’s stay together. I don’t want to be surprised by something nasty.”

“Your wish, our command,” said Tybalt, falling into step behind me. Quentin fell in beside me, and together, the three of us walked silently on.

The smell of blood followed us from the main room, but every step we put between us and it made it a little fainter, and a little easier to ignore. That was good; that wasn’t the blood I was looking for. Tybalt had his sense of smell to depend on. I had something similar. Dean bled when they cut his finger off. If he was here, I’d find him.

Tybalt cleared his throat before beginning, uncertainly: “October, I’m not sure—”

“Are you going to say something useful, or are you just going to see how hard it is to get me to punch you?”

“I’m sorry.”

The words were offered quietly, almost as if he was apologizing for saying them as much as he was apologizing for everything else. Tears jumped to my eyes, blurring my vision and making it briefly impossible to see. I shook my head, dragging my hand across my eyes as fiercely as I could.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said, voice sharp.

“I understand.”

The worst of it was, he probably did. As King of Cats, he’d buried more subjects than I could imagine losing. And that didn’t make a damn bit of difference. Connor was going to sleep for longer than I’d been alive, and no apologies were going to change that. Nothing ever was.

We walked in silence, the pixies periodically darting ahead to keep lighting our way. Tybalt and I stopped almost at the same time, both turning toward the same door.

“Do you smell that?” I asked.

“There,” he said.

“What?” asked Quentin.

“It smells like . . . wet stone and eucalyptus.” I stepped closer to the door. A new note introduced itself underneath the others: blood. My eyes widened. “Dean’s in here.”

Quentin frowned. “How do you know?”

“I can smell him.” I was going to have to ask the Luidaeg what this new level of sensitivity meant—and whether it was going to go away. It was a lot easier to cope with the smell of blood when it didn’t bring a person’s entire history with it. “Okay. Both of you, stay behind me.”