Chapter Seventeen
The black shadow didn’t dissipate.
It condensed.
One second it was smoke and consuming darkness. The next, it stepped free of itself—solid, whole, unmistakably male.
My breath caught.
Garrat.
He looked exactly as he had at the antique shop—tall and broad-shouldered, built like violence wrapped in silk.
Ancient. Appraising. Hungry.
And then he smiled.
That same slow, precise, calculated smile.
Like he knew exactly what that smile would do to me.
“Oh.”
The word slipped out before I could stop it.
Heat bloomed low in my belly—sharp, dangerous. My body went rigid with want, my pulse kicking hard as something tugged at me from the inside. The pull toward him was immediate. Unnatural.
Magic.
Voss swore and lunged into my line of sight, shoving me backward hard enough that I stumbled. His gun came up in the same motion, aimed dead-center at Garrat’s chest.
Owen grabbed my hand at the same time, yanking me back—
“Stay away from her,” Owen snarled.
Garrat laughed, low and rich. “The druid’s son. Still so protective.”
“Piper, look at me,” Owen said urgently, his hand gripping my arm. “Don’t let him in your head.”
But I couldn’t move.
My feet were rooted to the earth. My gaze locked on Garrat as if invisible threads had wrapped around my spine.
Like at the antique shop.
“We meet again,” Garrat said softly, his gaze burning into mine. “Though last time, the fairy queen interrupted our conversation.”
“You can’t have her,” Voss warned, gun still raised.
“Oh, I merely wish to speak with her,” Garrat said pleasantly. “I want to finish what we started.”
“You can’t.”
“Oh, yes, he can.”
The words tore free of me before common sense—or self-preservation—could intervene.
Owen hissed my name. I barely heard it.
“You are a pretty thing,” Garrat said, taking one step. Then another. Each one deliberate. Measured. Until we were a breath apart and I could see the fine lines at the corners of his eyes, the glint of something feral beneath the beauty.
I was dimly aware of his hand lifting toward me.
“You touch her, you die,” Owen said, his voice tight with fury. Thunder rumbled overhead.
Garrat glanced aside, amused. “So fiercely protective. These druids always are.”
“What do you want?” I demanded, forcing the words past the pressure in my chest.
“Step away from the girl,” Voss snapped. His gun never wavered.
“Now why would I do that?” Garrat’s smile sharpened. “I’ve been looking for you, Piper. And I finally have what I came for.”
My stomach dropped. “What?”
“The truth you’ve been searching for.” His gaze burned into mine, dark and satisfied. “About who you are.”
“Don’t,” Owen warned. “Don’t listen to him.”
But I couldn’t look away.
Garrat’s smile widened.
“You are Alice’s daughter.”
The words didn’t stun me. They landed, hard and cold.
Silence crashed down around us. I couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe.
Owen’s grip tightened on my arm. Even Voss faltered, his gun lowering a fraction. I felt Tani’s presence behind me, sharp and suddenly still.
“No,” I whispered.
“Oh, yes. Quite true.” Garrat laughed, deep and delighted. “She never told you? How delicious.”
“I don’t believe you!”
I hadn’t meant to shout it, but the words ripped from my lungs as I stumbled backward.
The trance I’d been in snapped.
Revulsion surged where that pang of lonely fear had been. I could finally see him for what he was.
A predator.
A monster.
“Believe it,” Garrat said softly.
I didn’t want to. My mind rebelled, grasping for anything solid—but memories rose unbidden.
Alice’s house filled with photos of me.
Alice in the front row of every recital.
Alice encouraging me to leave, to grow, to live.
Alice leaving me everything.
Alice saying I would come back someday.
Because Alice knew I had to.
Voss stepped fully in front of me now. “What do you want with her?”
He pointed the gun at Garrat and inched forward. I was too stunned to move. To think.
“What I want,” Garrat said lightly, “is exactly what you’d expect. And now that I know who she is, delivering her becomes much easier.”
“She’s the Guardian,” Voss said flatly. “She’ll close it.”
“Will she?” Garrat’s gaze slid back to me. “Or will she be too distracted trying to figure out who her father is? Who Alice was hiding from? Why she gave away her own child?”
“Stop,” Owen said. Another crack of thunder.
“The truth hurts, doesn’t it?” Garrat stepped backward, into shadow, into bubbling dark. “Until next time, my dear. We have so much more to discuss.”
Then he vanished.
The woods seemed to inhale.
The sludge at the base of the tree surged again, angry and alive, as if whatever doorway Garrat used had made it worse.
My knees gave out. I hit the ground hard, breath shuddering out of me as the world narrowed to sound and heat and disbelief.
“Piper?” Owen dropped beside me.
“Leave me alone.” My voice shook. “I want to be alone.”
“No,” Voss said sharply. “It’s too dangerous here in the woods. The crossing is still open.”
“Then I’ll seal it.” The words came out raw. Furious.
Tani clapped her hands. “We’ll make another potion—”
“I will make another potion.” I didn’t hide the razor’s edge to my voice as I looked at the fairy. “Go back to your realm, fairy queen. I don’t need your help.”
Tani’s face fell.
“Piper—”
“Don’t, Owen,” I said when he opened his mouth. “Are we going to pretend that didn’t happen? That he didn’t tell me my whole life has been a lie?”
No one argued. The only sound in the woods was cicadas, birds chirping overhead, and the wet, sick bubbling at the tree behind us.
“That’s what I thought.”
I got to my feet and ran.
I was going to confront my parents for the truth.
If it were true, it would explain so much. It would explain why my mother seemed to hate me and treated me differently and why I never felt part of the family even after all this time.
If Alice was my mother, then who was my father?
“Piper, wait.” Owen panted as he caught up to me, shoving past tree limbs as he went. He caught my arm, pulled me to a halt. “Let me drive you.”
“No.” I shoved him away. “I don’t want you to drive me anywhere.”
“Then how are you going to get back?”
“I’ll walk!”
“Piper—”
I put my hands on either side of my head and squeezed my temples. “Owen, please. I don’t want to be with you or anyone right now.” I needed to be alone long enough to turn grief into anger and anger into questions.
“I’m trying to help you.”
“I don’t want it! Not right now. Take Voss to the bed and breakfast.”
His face fell, creasing with pain I had intended to give him. “What about Tani?”
“She has wings. She can fly. Or use fairy dust. Or whatever it is she does.”
Before Owen could reply, I broke into a run. I reached the road and started down the blacktop—heading straight for my parents’ house.
The walk burned.
Heat and sweat and fury tangled together until my skin felt too tight, my lungs too full. Every step closer to the house made the truth press harder against my ribs, demanding space it didn’t have.
When I reached the porch, I didn’t hesitate.
The door flew open under my kick, slamming into the wall with a crack that echoed through the house.
“Piper! Dear Lord, you scared me half to death.” My mother quickly recovered from her fear and then it turned to outrage. “What is the matter with you? Coming in here like that. You ought to be ashamed.”
“Ought I, Mother?” I sneered. “Maybe you’re the one who should be ashamed.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She resumed her position on the sofa and picked up her knitting. Ignoring me. As if I didn’t even exist.
“Alice was my birth mother, wasn’t she?” I blurted.
Her needles halted their clickety-click, and she looked up at me, meeting my gaze. My mother’s face was stricken with shock. “Who told you that?”
“So it’s true?”
“I don’t know who’s been filling your head with these notions,” Gladys said stiffly, reaching for denial like a lifeline.
“Answer the question!”
The words hit the room like a slap. For a long moment, no one spoke. Then Gladys stood, abandoned her knitting where it lay.
“I will not have you talking to me like that in my house.”
“Your house. Right. Because you’re the only person who matters.”
“You are out of line, young lady.”
“Am I? Why don’t you tell me the truth, Mother. I’m not yours. I never was. The only thing I can’t make sense of is why. Why would Alice give me to you to raise?”
She stared at me. Her face devoid of all emotion. Even hate. She said nothing when she stalked out of the room and up the stairs.
“You coward,” I shouted.
But I would find out the truth.
“I can tell you why.” My father’s quiet voice made me spin around to face him. He stood outside the kitchen, a cup of coffee in his hand and his pipe stuck between his teeth. “Sit down, Piper.”
I moved into the living room and perched on the edge of the same chair I sat in when I learned Alice had willed me everything. My father took his place on the sofa, setting his cup on the nearby table.
“You shouldn’t have talked to her that way,” he said in his quiet scolding way.
Perhaps not. But I had been through a lifetime of disappointment with that woman. Even so, I felt the need to apologize.
“I’m sorry, Dad.”
He leaned back and puffed on his pipe. “I understand why you think she hates you, though. She’s not the most affectionate woman. She never has been.”
Cold was the word that came to my mind. I leaned forward. “Tell me the truth, Dad. Was Alice my mother?”
“Yes.” He said it without hesitation and I knew it to be true.
I leaned back in the cushion of the chair, exhaling a breath I hadn’t realized I had even sucked in.
“I don’t understand. Why did she never tell me?”
“We were sworn to secrecy,” he said. “She made us promise that we would never tell you.”
“But why?”
He puffed out a cloud of white smoke. “When Alice learned she was pregnant, she knew she could never keep you. She begged your mother to take you and raise you as her own. She was afraid.”
“Of what?”
“Losing you.”
I considered this. If Alice was a witch, then what did that make me? “Dad, is Mom a…” I paused, unwilling to squeeze out the word.
“A witch? No. Gladys is not a witch. But Alice was. She feared you would be one, too.”
I glanced at my father, wondering. Had he and Alice had an affair? Was I half his? I had to ask.
“Are you… my father?”
“No.” He cut a glance to me. “I mean, yes. But not your biological father. I’ve always thought of you as my own, though. Since the day Alice handed you to us.”
“Why did she? Why did she do that and then stay in Hickory Hollow?”
“She thought she’d be safe here. It was so isolated from the real world back then. She was sure she could watch you grow up.”
“That’s why I spent so much time with her,” I mused. “But then why did Mom make me stop seeing her? I was in high school then.”
“Your powers were starting to manifest. Gladys felt that if you were with Alice, then you would start to suspect and you’d want her to teach you.”
“So why didn’t she?”
“Because she didn’t want you to know what you were. She wanted you far from that life. As far as possible.”
He was quiet then, his mouth tightening around his pipe. “She didn’t hide you because she was ashamed. She hid you because she was afraid your father would find you.”
That got my attention. I stared at him. “My father?”
“That’s all I know about that.”
But something told me he knew more and wasn’t saying. Maybe because it was an old wound he didn’t want to reopen. There was no knowing.
It was another secret I would have to crack open.
Things must have started to go wrong for Alice after I left for college. Or maybe things were going wrong for her all along and I didn’t know it.
She’d changed her will to leave me the estate. She’d written me the letter telling me I was the only one she trusted. She must have known that something was going to happen to her and she had to find a way out. Someone to avenge her death or at least discover who the true killer was.
“How did Alice die?” I asked.
“Heart attack,” my father said. “You know that.”
So he must not know the truth. Only I, Owen, and Mr. McAllister did. And how much did my father know about the town anyway?
“Alice was always secretive about some things, Piper. I’ve been worried about you ever since you inherited her estate.”
“There’s nothing to worry about, Dad,” I said.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
I couldn’t bring myself to tell him there were shadow-things out to kill me. Or an open crossing in the woods. Or that I was the new Guardian of this magical place. He may not believe me. And if he did, he’d try to talk me out of it.
“Be careful, okay?”
“I promise.”
But the promise rang hollow even as I said it.
Garrat hadn’t come looking for me by accident. He’d appeared at the antique shop to test if the grimoire answered me. He’d appeared here to weaponize the truth about Alice.
Someone had known who I was long before I did. Long before Alice died.
And now that I knew the truth, I had the sickening certainty that whatever was hunting me had only just begun.