8. The Court of Beer and Bets
Chapter eight
The Court of Beer and Bets
M y mother slept for at least an hour.
When the smokeless fire had finished devouring the corpse of the caenim, I turned the hall light on so we weren’t waiting in the dark. I considered trying to move her to her bedroom, but Brynn was asleep, tucked in at her side. So, I sat against the doorframe with the baseball bat we usually stored on the shoe rack and kept one eye on the front door. It was unlikely that my father would return so soon, but I was ready if he did.
“Aura.”
At the sound of my mother’s voice, I straightened against the wall and whipped my head in her direction. She was in the process of sitting up, bundling Brynn in her arms like an infant, and looked completely and utterly healthy and alive .
I was glad that Wren wasn’t there because I might have thrown myself at his boots and wept with gratitude.
Knees wobbling, I rose to my feet and stumbled over to them, crossing sections of the room that had been burned clean of the caenim’s blood without scorching our worn carpet.
“How are you feeling?” I asked in a rushed whisper.
“I’d love a cuppa.” She smiled at me coyly, and I smiled right back. “I’ll meet you in the kitchen.”
Picking up the bat on my way out—just in case—I padded into the kitchen to put the kettle on.
The soft light over the stove was still glowing, illuminating my father’s empty beer bottles strewn across our small dining table in the centre of the floor. I tossed them into the trash and washed my hands before I started on the tea.
Like everything in our townhouse, the kitchen was small. It doubled as a laundry on one side with a fold-out bench next to the washing machine that looked about as old as Wren likely was, and the kitchen counter, sink, and stove on the other. The back door led out into our tiny courtyard, bordering on the strip of council land that sat between the edge of the housing estate and the river.
My mother plodded into the room as the kettle began to squeal, taking a seat at the table with Brynn’s head resting on her shoulder. She was still asleep.
I made two cups of chamomile with a drop of honey and brought them over to her, leaving the tea bag in my mother’s mug. She nodded her thanks as she wrestled an arm free from my sister and began to dunk it a few extra times.
“That thing…” she hedged after a few minutes of silence, looking up at me from beneath long lashes. “It’s gone?”
“Yes.” I pressed the warm ceramic against my mouth and breathed in the heady aroma of the chamomile. “How much do you remember?”
“Everything,” she admitted with a grimace. She took her first sip. “I’m so sorry.”
I took a sip of my own, frowning at her.
“I should have tried harder to get you to believe in fairytales,” she explained, averting her eyes to study the glass cabinet of mugs behind me. “You grew up so fast. Always so practical. I remember the day you came home and told me that Santa wasn’t real.” She smiled wistfully and took another sip of tea.
I placed my mug down on the table and stared at her in astonishment.
First John, and now my mother . Both of them were completely fine with the idea that faeries and monsters were real—that they were the same thing. He tried to drug me. Had he already drugged them ?
“I don’t mean to intrude on the reminiscing,” Wren said, stalking into the kitchen like he lived there.
I was glad I’d put my mug down, or else I might have spilled the tea everywhere. He’s so quiet when he moves .
He flashed a wicked grin in my direction as he walked straight to the washing machine and took a seat upon it, causing the steel to groan beneath his weight. He fixed his gaze on my mother, who was watching him with delight. “But now might be the time for you to take back your heinous allegation that you and I…” He cleared his throat delicately. “That we spent time together in the past. A great deal of time, in fact,” he added pointedly.
I blushed again, but laughter bubbled up and out of my mother’s mouth.
“No! God, no.” She gave me a firm but meaningful look. “Aura, no. Your father was High Fae, but not that High Fae.” She jerked her head towards Wren, who let loose a rough breath. “Thank you, by the way,” she said to him. “Aura’s father was from the Court of Light, too.”
“My father was from the Court of Beer and Bets,” I corrected, and then immediately regretted it for the shame that crossed my mother’s face. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, but this is impossible. I’ve known that man since I was a baby.”
Her eyes darkened, lashes fluttering. “It happened while we were together.”
“No, it didn’t.” That was too quick . I’d deflected that far too quickly. My brow creased as I bent my head to recapture her gaze. “Mama.”
“I am so sorry,” she whispered, placing her mug on the table in front of mine. “I knew from the moment I found out about you that you weren’t his. I had these vivid dreams of starlight and power, and sometimes, I could have sworn that you were playing with magic in my belly. I had this…this sensation . It was like you were dancing as early as six weeks.”
“Mama.” My voice cracked.
“He didn’t suspect it until you were about three years old because you look like me,” she went on. “But then he found you playing in the garden at our old house with wood carvings of fantastical creatures that you said your friends had made for you. The Little Folk used to bring you gifts.” She smiled ruefully. “I never told him about your heritage, but he grew suspicious about the presents, and one night—”
“I remember.”
I would never be able to forget the first time my father hurt her. The night he left her bleeding on the kitchen floor, her lower lip split straight down the middle and a fast-forming bruise colouring her cheekbone. That was the first night he left us, and when he eventually came back, everything had changed.
He’d always been an alcoholic, but he’d never been violent or angry. He returned as both of those things, with the added bonus of a gambling addiction supported by his unemployment benefits.
I’d never questioned what that fight had been about. I’d hidden in my wardrobe and covered my ears until I heard the front door slam and his car speed away, and then I raced into the kitchen to find my mother holding a bloody tea towel to her face.
“He found out you cheated,” I finished for her. “But not with… whom ?” It was better not to refer to faeries as a what when one of them was present in the room, I’d decided.
“No, not with whom.”
“And were you ever going to tell me this?”
Eyes softening, she angled her head to the side and shook it gently. “You were so human. After we moved, The Little Folk stopped visiting you. You never displayed any sort of powers or even an interest in magic. I thought it was better to let you live a normal life.”
A normal life .
I tried not to let my disappointment show—that she thought what I’d had was a normal life. That her denial had caused her to lock us into this existence, taking as many breaths as we could before my father returned and plunged us all into dark waters.
But I couldn’t say any of that to her. Not after what she’d been through.
“Three months ago,” I began instead. My eyes dropped to my hands, secured around my mug. I swallowed to clear the sudden tension closing around my voice box. “You sent me to a shrink because I thought my nightmares were real. You convinced me to let them medicate me—”
My mother gasped, prompting me to look at her. “Were the—” She broke off abruptly, glancing at the otherworldly man perched atop our washing machine, preoccupied with picking at his nails. “You didn’t tell me what they were about,” she hissed.
“I don’t know what they were about,” I hissed back.
It was true. I couldn’t remember the details from a single one of the dreams that had woken me, screaming and thrashing in my sheets every single night for three long months. According to my psychiatrist, I’d tried to tell her about them while they were happening but could never bring myself to get the words out. And then, as soon as they stopped, it was like I’d forgotten all about them.
They’d left me with a hollowness, though. And dark circles around my eyes. And two pills to take—one in the morning and one at night—until I stopped thinking about it.
“I’m sorry, Aura. I really am. I thought it was a trauma response, delayed—”
“It wasn’t.” I refused to look towards Wren, though I could feel him staring at me. “I’m pretty certain now that it wasn’t.”
The dreams weren’t a response to past trauma. I don’t have to remember them to know that. Not after tonight.
They were a warning .