Шарлин Харрис - Dead Reckoning

He nodded his round head.

“You were good friends with my birth grandfather, Fintan. Dermot’s brother.”

“Yes, Dermot’s twin.”

“But you don’t seem that fond of Dermot.”

He shrugged. “I’m not.”

I almost got off on a tangent there, but I stuck to my train of thought. “So, Fintan was still alive when Jason and I were born.”

Desmond Cataliades nodded enthusiastically. “Yes, he was.”

“My gran said in her letter that you visited my dad and his sister, Fintan’s actual children.”

“I was here.”

“So, did you give them — us — a gift?”

“I tried, but you couldn’t all accept it. Not all of you had the essential spark.”

That was a phrase Niall had used. “What is the essential spark?”

“What a clever question!” Mr. Cataliades said, regarding me as if I were a monkey who’d opened a hatch to retrieve a banana. “The gift I gave to my dear friend Fintan was that any of his human descendants who possessed the essential spark would be able to read the minds of their fellow humans, as I can.”

“So, when it turned out that my dad and aunt Linda didn’t have it, you returned when Jason and I were born.”

He nodded. “Seeing you wasn’t absolutely necessary. After all, the gift had been given. But by visiting Jason and then you, I could know for certain. I was very excited when I held you, though I think your poor grandmother was frightened.”

“So only I and — ” I choked back Hunter’s name. Mr. Cataliades had written Hadley’s will, and she hadn’t mentioned Hunter. It was possible he didn’t know Hadley had had a child. “Only I have had it so far. And you still haven’t explained what the spark is.”

He gave me an arch look as if to say he sure couldn’t get anything by me. “The essential spark isn’t easy to pin down in terms of your DNA,” he told me. “It’s an openness to the other world. Some humans literally can’t believe there are creatures in another world besides ours, creatures who have feelings and rights and beliefs and deserve to live their own lives. Humans who are born with the essential spark are born to experience or perform something wonderful, something amazing.”

I’d done something pretty amazing the night before, but it surely wasn’t wonderful . . . unless you hated vampires.

“Gran had the essential spark,” I said suddenly. “So Fintan thought he’d find it in one of us.”

“Yes, though of course he never wanted me to give her my gift.” Mr. Cataliades looked wistfully at the refrigerator, and I got up to make him another ham sandwich. This time I sliced some fresh tomato and put it on a little plate, and he piled every single bit on the sandwich and still managed to eat it neatly. Now that was supernatural.

When he’d finished half the sandwich, Mr. Cataliades paused to say, “Fintan loved humans, and he especially loved human women, and he even more greatly loved human women with the essential spark. They aren’t easy to find. He adored Adele so much that he put the portal in the woods so he could visit her more easily, and I’m afraid he was mischievous enough to . . .”

And it was Mr. Cataliades’s turn to stop and look at me uneasily, weighing his words.

“He took my grandfather for a test drive every now and then,” I said. “Dermot recognized Fintan in some of the family pictures.”

“I’m afraid that was very naughty of him.”

“Yes,” I said heavily. “It was very naughty.”

“He had great hopes when your father was born, and I was here the day after to inspect him, but he was quite normal, though of course attractive and magnetic, as those who are part fae are. Linda, the second child, was, too. And I’m sorry about the cancer; that shouldn’t have happened. I blame it on the environment. She should have been perfectly healthy all her life. Your father would have been, if the terrible infighting hadn’t broken out among the fairies. Perhaps if Fintan had survived, Linda’s health would have stayed with her.” Mr. Cataliades shrugged. “Adele tried to reach Fintan to ask if there was anything he could do for Linda, but by then he had passed away.”

“I wonder why she didn’t use the cluviel dor to cure Aunt Linda’s cancer.”

“I don’t know,” he said, with apparent regret. “Knowing Adele, I imagine she didn’t think it would be Christian. It’s possible that she didn’t even remember she had it by that time, or that she regarded it as a romantic love token but nothing more. After all, by the time her daughter’s illness became evident, it had been many years since I’d given it to her on Fintan’s behalf.”

I thought hard, trying to pare down this conversation to learn what I had to know. “Why on earth did you think telepathy would be such a great gift?” I blurted.

For the first time, he looked a bit miffed. “I thought it would give Fintan’s descendants an edge over their fellow humans for all of their lives, to know what other people were thinking and planning,” he said. “And since I’m nearly all demon, and I had it to give, it seemed a splendid gift to me. It would be wonderful even for a fairy! If your great-grandfather had known that Breandan’s henchmen were determined to murder him, he could have squelched the rebellion before it caught hold. Your father could have saved himself and your mother from drowning if he’d known a trap was set for him.”

“But those things didn’t happen.”

“Full-blooded fairies aren’t telepathic — though they can sometimes send messages, they can’t hear an answer — and your father didn’t have the essential spark.”

This seemed like a circular kind of conversation.

“So what this all boils down to is this: Since you two were such good buddies, Fintan asked you to give his and Adele’s descendants a gift, to stand as their — our — sponsor.”

Mr. Cataliades smiled. “Correct.”

“You were willing to do this, and you thought telepathy would be a dandy present.”

“Correct again. Though it seems I was mistaken.”

“You were. And you gave this gift in some mysterious demon way — ”

“Not so mysterious,” he said indignantly. “Adele and Fintan each drank a thimbleful of my blood.”

Okay, I could not picture my grandmother doing that. But then, I couldn’t have imagined her consorting with a fairy, either. In point of fact, it had become obvious that I’d known my grandmother very well in some respects and not at all in others.

“I put it in wine and told her it was a special vintage,” Mr. Cataliades confessed. “And in a way it was so.”

“Okay, you lied. No big surprise there,” I said. Though Gran had been plenty smart, and I was sure she’d at least had suspicions. I waved my hands in the air. I could think about that later. “Okeydokey. So after they’d both ingested your blood, any descendants of theirs would be telepathic if they were also born with this essential spark.”

“Correct.” He smiled so broadly that I felt I’d gotten an A on my test.

“And my grandmother never used the cluviel dor.”

“No, it’s a one-use thing. A very pretty gift from Fintan to Adele.”

“Can I use it to take away the telepathy?”

“No, my dear, it would be like wishing away your spleen or your kidneys. But an interesting thought.”

So I couldn’t help Hunter with it. Or myself, either. Damn.

“Can I kill someone with it?”

“Yes, of course, if that someone is threatening someone you love. Directly. You couldn’t cause the death of your tax assessor . . . unless he was standing over your brother with an ax, say.”

“Was it a coincidence that Hadley wound up with the queen?”

“Not really, because she is part fairy, and as you know, part fairy is very attractive to vampires. It was only a matter of time before a vampire came into the bar and saw you.”