Chapter 9 Silva #2
The realization that she had no idea how old he actually was had occurred to her at some point in the last year and a half, wondering how such a thing could even be accounted for.
According to Elshona, he’d disappeared for regular intervals, and the main point she’d picked up in her dark web rabbit holes was that time was a nebulous thing on the other side of the veil.
She’d lost an entire night of her life, only taking a few steps away from the Plundered Pixie’s door, then another whole night in the bathroom at the wedding, despite the fact that she’d never even let go of the handle.
Who knew how many years of his life had been lost to the Otherworld?
If he spent an evening there and lost a decade on this side, which accounting of the time was the correct one?
“Is-is there anything you need?” Silva asked at length, able to break her way into the conversation once more.
“You said you need something from a shop? Do you have enough wool?” she asked, remembering that day in the coffee shop and what he’d told her about his last conversation with his mother. “Tate said you knit and crochet.”
“Silk. I need some new silks. Spun silk.”
“I’ll make sure it gets to you.” She scrabbled for a pen, taking down the address with a shaking hand. He was gone, lost to Faerie, and now she was going to become pen pals with his estranged mother, evidently. All in a day’s work when your life is a fucking disaster.
“You choose the colors, dearest. I’ll make you something beautiful. As beautiful as your name. Will you tell him?”
Silva couldn’t hold back the tears then. How? How do you tell her? “Tate,” she began, feeling her face crumple, realizing this was likely the first time she’d said his name aloud since he’d disappeared. A deep, dragging breath, forcing herself to find a scrap of composure. “Tate, he’s—”
“Tate?” A dawning whisper from the other side of the phone, as if he were a brand-new topic, and not someone that had been referenced throughout the call.
“My Tate is gone.” The other’s elf’s voice had grown softer, smaller, almost trance-like, like a switch being flipped.
“Gone, gone. They took him. They took him. Gone. Sent me back a changeling. One of theirs. They took him. They took my baby.”
Silva pressed her knuckles to her teeth, holding back her own sob as she listened to the sound of the other woman crying, her volume increasing until Silva could hear the muffled sound of several other voices.
Soothing voices. Nurses. He’d told her that his mother was in a care facility, that she was well-cared for with as much company as she cared to have, and that she rarely got through an entire conversation with her son, knowing it was him on the other end of the phone.
How could she not be confused? How could anyone understand this?
It was the phone call with his mother that had steeled her resolve.
Silva wondered if she had ever had the opportunity to mourn the loss of her only child before he’d reappeared, upending her grip on what was real.
This had torn apart his family, she understood.
Shredded their lives to ribbons, as it was doing to her own.
She wasn’t brave, and she wasn’t ferocious, but she couldn’t stay here and do nothing.
She had no baby, nothing but a flutter, and no answer on what it was.
She had no happy marriage, no life she was content in.
There was nothing left for her in Cambric Creek.
There was nothing left for her anywhere, if she didn’t at least try to find him.
She hadn’t told anyone where she was going.
The thought occurred to her as she sat there, sobbing behind the steering wheel. No note. No explanation. No text to her husband or email to her mother. She could disappear today, likely would disappear, lost to fae tricks or torments, and no one would know where she'd gone.
Silva tried to imagine the aftermath if she did not return. Unanswered phone calls, confusion that would turn to panic, panic bleeding into grief and recrimination. What remains.
Her hands shook as she held her phone, tapping out a text to her mother, and then a message to her grandmother.
I just wanted to let you know I’m thinking of you and I love you.
And I know you love me too. It felt important to acknowledge, now that she stood at the precipice of whatever came next.
She might never see them again, and she wanted them to know she understood that it had all come from a place of love.
Misguided, but not cruel. And it was important to take the opportunity to say goodbye.
He’d at least done that. I’ll love you forever, Silva of the Nighttime.
It had taken her more than a week to choose the cemetery.
The relative ruralness of this part of the Unification meant that she had plenty to choose from.
The small graveyard in town was too crowded.
The one in the middle of nothing off the highway was too remote.
She didn’t have any specific criteria to work from and admitted to herself on more than one occasion that she was working off vibes and instinct and nothing else, but she decided to allow fate to continue pushing her in the right direction.
This was a municipal cemetery, hundreds of acres of open land, situated between the city and suburbs, and the in-betweenness of it was what called out to her.
There was nothing remarkable about the architecture, nor anything particularly beautiful about the landscaping.
It was huge and desolate and the best she was going to find, if the cat-like man in the shop had told her the truth.
It’s now or never. Because if this doesn’t work, you still need to drive home and pretend to be fine.
She winced at the cold, leaving the car once more, for the last time.
Her cell in the center console, the keys inside.
He had left everything behind, made it easy for everyone, and she did the same.
The wind was biting, a sharp cold that felt like a knife moving through her, despite her layers, and she did not dally while stepping into her previous footsteps.
The cold of the outside world was nothing compared to the icy burn of the key.
It had grown colder in the weeks of her possession.
Silva could feel the burn of it now, seeping through the leather of her glove, almost pulling into her hand, as if it recognized its proximity to its purpose.
Now or never, she repeated to herself, pulling the key from her pocket.
The lock was as old as the gate itself, its keyhole rimed with ice.
She expected resistance. She expected a struggle, for the key to not fit, for the lock to be too caked with ice and snow to work properly.
She had imagined it finally giving way with a grinding groan, like a tree slowly cracking its way to the ground.
Instead, the key slid home with an unsettling ease.
There was no resistance, no grinding protest of disuse.
It was as if the lock had been waiting, patient and untroubled by time.
The click it gave was soft and final, the gate swinging open without a sound.
There’s no coming back from this. There wasn’t, but doing nothing was not an option she could abide any longer. Silva stepped through the gate.
She didn’t know what she’d expected from this either.
You’ve read too many books. You were expecting a winter fairyland, with whipped cream snowdrifts and a glitter castle.
The snow-covered graves looked exactly the same on this side of the black gate as they had on the other, and she couldn’t pretend that she wasn’t a teensy bit disappointed.
The sky was the same mid-afternoon white-grey as it had been for weeks, the same biting wind made her tuck her nose down into her scarf.
The only difference was that she had apparently spent a fantastic amount of money on some charlatan’s attic detritus.
“Tate!” Silva called out, feeling that she had to do something to justify the past several months of nonsense. “Tate!” Her voice was swallowed by the wind. There was nothing and no one.
You need to go home. You need to go home, and tomorrow, you need to go to the club and join a committee or three. Tannar’s right — you’re not even trying and everyone is going to start noticing, if they haven’t already. Either that or you need to just disappear for good.
She had barely turned back around when she realized just how far she was from the gate.
She had barely taken two steps through the snow, yet the frost-covered gate was at least fifty feet behind her.
Silva felt the world pull, fractured memories of crooked trees and a shining little pond, the door to the Plundered Pixie getting further and further away from her.
Panic crowded her throat, her shoulders hitching as she gasped for breath, the cold making breathing at all nearly impossible.
Movement caught in her peripheral vision.
Something in the tree line. Something gaunt and hunched, with a long face and gaping black holes where eyes should be.
Beside it, a white hound, impossibly long, eerily silent.
The cat-eyed man was right. She was going to be eaten.
Run, you need to run! She needed to get back to the gate, needed to make it back to the black iron before either of the creatures broke from the trees, needed to get out of here before the option to do so was removed entirely.
“You may not wander.”