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Carried me over? My mind reeled. “I was—I am a…changeling?”
Puck nodded. “I couldn’t tell you before, but I truly thought you’d remember. I visited you from time to time. That was one of my jobs, checking up on all of you. We had terrible problems with failure to thrive.” He waved at Walt. “Remember me? Your imaginary friend.”
I’d had an imaginary friend too. I’d called him Casper and he’d had mismatched eyes, one grass green, one marble blue. Walter made a choking sound, half laugh, half sob that managed to articulate exactly how I felt too. “You meanthat’swhy I felt like an alien my entire life? Because I’m actually a fae baby?”
“More than half, at any rate,” Puck qualified. “At least your parents are still alive. And your sister.”
Starling realized first, horror, chagrin and astonished joy comingling in her being. I felt bad for her, but happiness seemed to win out over losing the possibility of romance. “Baby Brody?” she asked Walt and he winced.
“Bad luck for us, eh?” He tugged on her hair. “But it explains why we get on so well.”
“Not to make this about me…” I turned back to Puck, frenetic dread crawling up my spine. Though I knew. It explained so much. The formless longing. The never fitting in. I couldn’t look at Fafnir. “But…”
He cocked his head at Fafnir significantly and winked. That cord leading from Cecily out and back in. No wonder I couldn’t find the end. It led to me. From my birth mother.
Had I wept for her in my heart before? For that baby, ruthlessly wrenched away and consumed? I wanted to weep now. Or to shatter the dome in my rage. It felt possible and real in a way nothing else did. My human mother and father, my family—no blood relations of mine.
I had no family.
Fafnir cleared his throat and I stared at him, a bit wild, remembering dancing with him, slicing him apart with my claws. My mother’s mummified corpse drifting into dust before me.
“I’m not sorry,” he got out. “I know you may be, but I can’t. I’m proud to call you my daughter. Cecily would be too.”
He’d transformed in those brief minutes, the sense of time and defeat flaking away. He was no longer the one with nothing left to lose—and he shone with new life. As for me…I had no idea how to feel. Never in my whole life had the man I’d thought was my father said that he was proud of me. In fact, he’d always been vaguely disappointed in me.
I had to turn away, blindly anchoring to Puck. Deeply ironic that only he made sense in this vortex of kaleidoscopic uncertainty.
“She—Cecily—” I couldn’t call her my mother. “She was also a changeling?”
“Yes, but with none of your magic. She passed for human quite nicely though.” Puck pondered. “Some thrive. Some die. The ones who need to make their way back here. But really, it was a bad plan all along. Eggs are better. Isn’t that what you discovered?” He waved at the bloody bed with distaste.
“What about the baby my mother gave birth to—her human child? What became of her?”
“She’s around here somewhere.” Puck shrugged. “Not my job to track the human ones. I mean, who really cares—”
Athena coughed ostentatiously and Puck shrugged. “Not my job.”
This, no doubt, was where the human population in Faerie came from then. How many centuries had Titania been running her breeding plan? And Puck—carrying the babies for her back and forth.
Back and forth.
“Where have you been?” I eyed Puck’s suit with suspicion.
He grinned sunnily at me and executed a little jig. “Babysitting. That Dog is terrible at it. And Blackbird and Fergus are too busy.”
I stared at him, assimilating my sudden and desperate hope.
“What about my—our—parents?” Starling glanced at Walt. “Is that where they went—across the Veil to find Brody?”
“Oh.” Puck rolled his eyes with grandiose melodrama. “Fergus is ever the hero, isn’t he?”
“What does he mean by that?” Walter demanded.
“Fergus—your father—has an interesting magic.” Amazing how collected I sounded as I ran the possibilities through my mind. “He’s not a sorcerer like you, but he instead acts as a kind of conduit. It actually transforms him into a champion who can’t be defeated. If my theory is correct, then Tita—” even with her theoretically destroyed, I didn’t like to speak her name, lest it evoke her, “—our late, unlamented Queen Bitch had plenty of changelings still in the human world. Sleeper spies who would…what, Puck?”
He gave me a weak smile. “Much mischief.”
“An ominously vague assessment.”
