Jenna Black - Glimmerglass

I thought about this a minute. “You had her declared incompetent and put under your care,” I said, and he nodded. I was afraid I knew what that meant. “In other words, she’s just as much your prisoner as I am.”

“Yes.”

I grimaced. I’d forgotten how brutally honest he could be. Emphasis on brutal .

“Keep in mind that as long as I have her under my care, she will be sober. I’m sure it’s not much of a consolation to you—and I’m also sure your mother will hate me for it—but it is something.”

So basically, I was trading both my and my mother’s freedom for her sobriety. I wasn’t absolutely certain it wasn’t a fair trade. Not that I had a say in it. I chewed my lip while I thought it over.

“Dana,” Dad said softly. “Even I cannot hold you against your will once you turn eighteen, unless you feel like developing a drug or alcohol problem to give me an excuse as your mother did. As much as you may dislike my methods, you will have to endure them only a year and a quarter. And during that time, I’m going to have to convince you to remain under my protection when you turn eighteen. I am not a fool. I will not win you over by mistreating you or your mother. It won’t be as bad as you think.”

Hmm. A year and a quarter in a gilded prison, and then I’d be paroled. It seemed like a long time when I considered all that had happened to me in Avalon since I’d arrived. But it was also a year and a quarter of enforced sobriety for my mom.

There was a part of me that believed Dad was right, that forcing my mom to stay clean wouldn’t actually cure her. But at least it would give her body some time to recover from the damage she’d done to it. And at least for that short time, I would have a mom I could relate to, whom I didn’t despise and wasn’t ashamed of. I would have the mom I glimpsed ever so briefly when she wasn’t drunk, the mom who was witty, and clever, and … fun.

No, I didn’t have a choice in the matter. Dad had made that quite clear. But I did have a choice as to how much of a pain in the butt I was going to be about it.

I swallowed all my protests and took a deep breath. I could do this. I could accept my fate with dignity and regain my dad’s trust. And when I turned eighteen—assuming I lived that long, of course—I could decide for myself whether I was better off in Avalon or in the mortal world.

I nodded briskly. “All right,” I said. “I promise to be a good little inmate.” If my hands hadn’t been outside the sheets, I might have crossed my fingers. After all, it is a girl’s prerogative to change her mind, so I might not be telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Dad’s wry smile said, “I’ll believe it when I see it.” But he didn’t put that thought into words, merely patted my hands in another one of those reserved Fae gestures of affection.

He was almost out the door when I stopped him.

“Dad?” I said, and he turned to me with raised eyebrows.

“Thank you for sending Finn to save my mom.” My throat tightened as I remembered once again the terrible pain that had slammed me when Grace had ordered my mother’s death.

He looked at me gravely. “No thanks are needed. I proved myself remarkably useless under the circumstances. It was Alistair who delayed Grace, and it was Finn who saved your mother. I did not arrive on the scene until everything was over.”

“Yeah, but you live halfway up the mountain,” I said, realizing he genuinely felt bad about not being my own personal white knight. “Ethan would have called his own father before you, and I’m guessing you called Finn because he lives closer to the hotel. Right?” He nodded. “So if you’d come running to the rescue yourself, my mom would have died before you got there. You did the right thing.”

He smiled at me, but his eyes looked sad. “I know I did. That doesn’t mean I have to like it.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, but I was saved from having to figure it out by the doctor making his rounds.

I wasn’t shocked to discover that my “secure location” turned out to be underground in Avalon’s massive tunnel system. The good news was that I had electricity, running water, phone service, and an Internet connection. The bad news was that I hated the tunnel system with a passion. I hated being without natural light. I hated the claustrophobic feeling that the ceiling might collapse on me at any moment. (Never mind that I knew perfectly well that wasn’t going to happen.) And I hated the memories of things that had happened to me underground.

After my week of being grounded was up, I was finally allowed to leave my little mini-suite, though only during the daytime, and only with a bodyguard. Still, it was amazing how free that felt after being confined for the week. It’s all a matter of perspective. I even renewed my lessons with Keane, who never once mentioned my escape attempt or my hospital stay. I wondered what that was all about.

My mom was occupying the room in Dad’s house that had once been mine. She was still not a happy camper, even after the d.t.’s had run their course. But at least she was sober and semirational.

She reminded me, though, of what my dad is capable of. I’d been reluctant to broach the subject with her, but eventually I had to ask her why she had signed over legal custody to my dad. It seemed like the last thing in the world she would do, and I halfway believed he was lying about it.

“I’m tired, honey,” Mom said when I asked. “I’d like to take a nap.”

I snorted. If that wasn’t the most pathetic attempt to avoid the subject I didn’t know what was. “I deserve to know, don’t I?” I pressed, though from long experience I knew how hard it was to get Mom to answer questions when she didn’t want to.

“I just … thought it would be best for you,” she said, but she couldn’t look me in the eye when she said it, and she couldn’t sit still, either. Her hands twitched, she squirmed in her chair, and she tapped one foot against the floor. Some of that was her desperate desire for a drink. But not all of it.

“I can always ask Dad,” I bluffed. I knew Dad would tell me the truth. I’d already established that he had no trouble with that whole brutal honesty thing, but I really wanted to hear it from my mom. If I had to keep nagging her for weeks, then so be it.

But maybe the lack of booze weakened my mom’s will, or just made maintaining the lie more trouble than it was worth. Still twitching and fidgeting, she spoke while looking just past my shoulder.

“He had Finn bring me here after he took me from the hotel,” she said. “He … wouldn’t give me anything.”

Any booze, she meant.

“I got … desperate,” she continued. “But he still wouldn’t help me. Then he brought me all these forms and asked me to sign them. He wouldn’t tell me what they were, and he wouldn’t let me read them.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “You mean you sat here and signed away your rights to me without even bothering to find out what you were signing?”

Her shoulders hunched, and her gaze dropped to the floor. “Not immediately,” she murmured. “At first, I refused. But I kept feeling worse and worse, and Seamus still wouldn’t help me.”

And I guess I was beginning to understand how Dad’s mind worked, because I figured out the rest for myself. “He said he’d give you a drink if you signed the papers,” I whispered, because if I spoke any louder my voice would crack.

Mom’s face was a picture of guilt. “I suspect it wouldn’t hold up in a U.S. court of law,” she said. “I wasn’t in my right mind when I signed it.” She grimaced. “To tell you the honest truth, I don’t even remember much of this, but my signature is on the papers, and I have no reason not to believe I signed them just as Seamus said I did.”