Page 40

"You didn't know about me."

"We did not know about you."

"Because my grandmother sealed me."

"Because it should not have been possible for there to be a you," the Fae said, "and we are not in the habit of searching for things that cannot exist."

The truckers laughed at something over by the register and the sound made my heart skip a beat. One clapped the other on the back.

"Okay." My voice came out level, which surprised all of us. "So, if you're not here to kill me, at least tell me what I am."

"You are Hazel Ashthorn."

"That's a name. It's not what I asked."

"It is a considerably larger answer than you presently realize." He smiled again, and this time it reached his eyes. I didn't like what was in them. He was angry. He'd been angry since before I walked in, sitting in that booth with his hands folded and his coffee going cold. The courtesy he was bestowing on us was a facade to cover his fury. "Ask a better question. I'm told imprecision runs in the family."

I thought about a ferryman with a silver coin sewn into one eye socket, hunched down on a riverbank to mock me, and my own temper came up through me like lava.

"Are you threatening me?" I hissed and leaned into his face. "Are you going to be a problem?"

"We might be a problem indeed." He smiled as if admitting he was a threat to me was something to be proud of.

"Is there a version of this where I don't have to worry about you lot?" With an exhausted sigh, I rubbed a hand over my face. I was tired and looked it, too. I didn't expect an answer.

"Yes."

"Are you here to decide that?"

"No." He unfolded his hands and laid them flat on the table. Every other thing he'd done since I walked in had been the same practiced movement. The cup, the tilt of his head, the smile. This was the first time he'd moved like he meant it, and my skin crawled from it. "I am here to look. Others decide. But somebody should tell you what you're standing in the middle of, girl. Because you are in it for the rest of your life, and as far as I can establish nobody has told you the truth about anything in twenty-six years."

He let those words hang between us long enough to turn the blood to ice in my veins.

"There is a house that holds you to be an heir. There is a house that holds you to be an abomination. Both are correct, which is the difficulty, and nobody has been able to settle which of the two you are for the simple reason that it hangs on a question none of us can currently answer."

The coffee machine hissed and spat.

"What question?"

"Whether your father is alive." He stared at me unblinking. "And whether he meant for you to exist."

I'd like to say I stayed cool.

What actually happened is my hand jerked and River's coffee went over the edge of the table before we could grab it. It hit the floor with a wet splat and a black stain spread over the dirty tiles. Neither of us moved to pick it up. The woman behind the counter in the apron looked over and thought better of it.

"He's alive," I told him before I thought better of it myself.

"Is he." Something sharpened behind that beautiful unrememberable face.

"I was told he's alive." I was horrible at backtracking and all three of us knew it.

"By whom?"

And there it was. The one question I had no good answer to, in a truck stop off a highway exit, forty miles from the coven that wanted me dead, with a fallen angel beside me and one toenail painted pink.

Because the honest answer was three ancient forces of destiny who live in a book my grandmother took out of my bedroom. Come to think of it, maybe I should have sicced him on Danika. He could have solved that problem for me at least. Although I never let others fight my fights.

"Sources," I said instead.