CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Cedar stood in the middle of a child’s bedroom. She walked carefully around it, picked up the porcelain figure of a unicorn and set it back down, ran her hand along the frilled curtains, then finally sat on the flowered bedspread, a small pink and brown stuffed rabbit in her hands. She had just traveled three thousand miles in a single step, in a blur of wind and color, but somehow seeing this little girl’s bedroom in her own house was by far the bigger shock.
So they were right. They had all been telling the truth. The apartment was empty, save for her and Finn and Rohan. As soon as they had arrived on the shores of Halifax, Rohan had called Nevan, who was already at Cedar’s. Eden and Nuala were not there, she told him, but it looked as if they had been. Nevan had also tried to contact Maeve using telepathy. There had been no response, so she had gone to Maeve’s apartment, only to find it empty. Rohan had insisted on visiting Cedar’s place himself, and Cedar and Finn had gone along with him. He stood in Eden’s room now, watching Cedar closely.
“Is this what you saw through the sidh?” he asked.
She nodded, unable to speak. “We’re going to meet up with the others,” Rohan said, turning to leave. He paused then, and said to Finn, “Why don’t you stay here with Cedar for a while. Your mother says, well, she is quite sure you can help her remember.” He gave Finn a significant look, and Finn nodded back, his eyes on Cedar. Then Rohan left the two of them alone.
After he was gone, Cedar looked up at Finn, who was standing in the doorway, watching her.
“What kind of a person am I,” she whispered, “that I could so easily forget that I have a daughter?”
A tortured expression crossed Finn’s face, and he sat down next to her. He took the stuffed rabbit from her hands and examined it, holding it up to his face and breathing in the scent.
“Nuala’s power is very great,” he said. “There are few of us who can resist her. Don’t blame yourself.”
She shook her head. “Nuala’s power only works when she can tap into something true. They told me that’s what happened with Jane. So it must mean that deep down inside, I don’t…want…” She couldn’t continue, but let the horrible truth hang in the air between them.
Finn wrapped his arms around her and pulled her to his chest. She didn’t resist. She was too tired, too in need of comfort. “No,” he whispered. “This is not your fault. I’m the one who left. I did everything wrong, Cedar. I left you alone, with good reason to hate me, to raise a child who reminded you of me every single day. It’s not that you didn’t want Eden. It’s that you didn’t want that constant reminder of me, of your pain. Don’t you see the difference? You love her deeply—anyone can see that.”
Cedar closed her eyes and breathed in slowly. Finn smelled just as she remembered, a mixture of honey, lime, and black pepper. Then she smelled something else familiar, and sat up and looked around.
“What is it?” Finn asked.
“Lavender,” Cedar said. “I remember this room smelling of lavender.” She reached under the pillow and pulled out a small sachet of dried flowers. She held it to her nose and inhaled.
“You’re remembering!” Finn said. He hugged her again. When he moved to let go, she held on to him.
“Wait,” she said. She tried to relax her body as he held her in his arms. She closed her eyes again.
“I remember…looking for something. I remember feeling panicked and…desperate.”
Finn pulled her even closer. “Yes,” he said, resting his chin on the top of her head. “You were looking for Eden. Finding her was all that mattered to you.” Then he gently tilted her face up so he was looking her in the eyes. “It’s all that matters to me, Cedar. Finding Eden, and being with you. Putting our family back together. Believe me, please—it’s the only thing that has ever truly mattered to me.”
Cedar met his gaze and felt something stir deep within her. It felt like a breath of wind coming in from the ocean, and it filled her with longing for something she couldn’t quite grasp. She tried to hold on to it, but it slipped through her fingers, drifting away. As it passed, she saw in her mind a faded picture of a small girl with wild brown hair and eyes…eyes the same as those peering at her now. “Eden…” she whispered, determined to hang on to the fleeting memory.
The picture was starting to solidify in her mind when the sudden sound of shouting interrupted the silence. Cedar jumped, and the image of the girl dissolved into nothing.
Finn stood up first, and together they ran out into the hallway toward the shouts, which were coming from outside the front door. Cedar reached for the knob, but Finn pulled her behind him. “Wait,” he said. Then he opened the door to find a very irate woman with purple bangs yelling at someone Cedar didn’t recognize.
“You’re like what, twelve? I don’t know who you are, but I am Cedar’s best friend and if she’s in there, I’m going to talk to her! Don’t think that I’m scared of your voodoo or whatever the hell it is you people can do!” Jane stopped her tirade when she noticed Finn standing in the doorway.
“It’s all right, Brian,” Finn said to the young man in the hallway. He looked at Cedar and explained, “Rohan thought it would be best if one of us stood guard.”
“Ceeds, where the hell have you been?” Jane said once she had elbowed her way inside. “I’ve been calling you. And then I come over to check on you and this frakkin’ young punk tells me I can’t come in!”
Cedar gave Jane a hug, feeling ridiculously relieved to see someone from the “normal” world. She tried to look apologetic when she said, “I’m sorry, Jane, I should have called. I told you I was going to be away.”
“You didn’t say ‘away,’ you said ‘busy.’ There’s a big difference. And I’ve never known you to be so busy that you couldn’t answer your phone. You didn’t even call in to work! Don’t worry—I told everyone you were sick. So? Did you find her?” Jane asked.
“Um, no,” Cedar said, looking sideways at Finn. “But we’re getting close.”
Jane turned her attention to Finn. “Is this…?”
“Yes. Jane, this is Finn. Finn, Jane.”
Jane narrowed her eyes at Finn, who blinked and said, “I’m going to talk to Brian for a few minutes. See how guard duty is going.” He stepped out into the hallway, closing the door behind him.
“I’m sorry for not calling,” Cedar said again. “Things have been insane.”
Jane shrugged and sat down beside Cedar. “I’m just glad you’re okay. You are, aren’t you? They haven’t brainwashed you or anything?”
Cedar laughed nervously. “No, nothing like that.”
“Good,” Jane said. Then she leaned closer. “Holy crap, Ceeds, Finn is smokin’ hot. I’m just saying. But what’s going on?”Cedar faltered as she tried to answer. “Um, well, apparently he’s been living overseas all this time. But he came back to help,” she finished lamely.
“Uh-huh,” Jane said with a skeptical look. “Is it totally weird to see him again?”
“You could say that, yes,” Cedar said with a small smile. “So, how are you?”
“I’m all right. Same old. But who cares about me? Are you sure you’re okay? What have you been doing?”
Cedar thought about everything that had happened over the past couple of days—everything she could remember anyway—then shook her head. “I’m going to have to tell you later. I can’t think straight right now.”
Jane grabbed her hands and said, “You’re going to find her, Cedar. I saw what Eden can do, and she’s one smart kid. All she needs is a chance and a door, and she’ll be back here with you. Right?”
Cedar nodded mutely.
“How’s your mum holding up?” Jane asked.
“You know, I really have no idea,” Cedar said, frowning. She tried to remember the last time she had talked to Maeve. “I spoke with her yesterday morning, I guess. But she wouldn’t tell me where she was, or what she was doing. We tried to call her tonight, but she’s not answering her phone.”
Jane wrinkled her nose. “That’s weird. I mean, as if you don’t have enough to worry about.”
Cedar tried to remember her recent conversations with her mother, but they seemed hazy to her. She wondered if they had spoken about Eden, and that’s why she couldn’t remember them clearly. “I just know that she’s always hated Finn,” she told Jane. “She’s angry that I’m letting him and his parents help me.”
“Seriously?” Jane said, her face the perfect picture of indignation. “You’re her daughter. She should be helping you, no matter who else is. Jeez. She should at least be here with you. Although if I had someone who looked like Finn in my apartment, I wouldn’t want my mother around either.”
Cedar smiled despite her exhaustion.
“No offense, but you look like the walking dead,” Jane said. “When was the last time you slept? Do you want me to stay here with you, or to come back after Finn leaves?” She looked at Cedar knowingly. “If he leaves?”
“No, no, I’m good,” Cedar said, shaking her head. “Really, thank you, but I’ll be fine. I’m just going to go to bed.”
“Mmm hmm,” Jane said, unconvinced. “Well, I’m going to call you tomorrow, and answer the damn phone this time, will you? I love you. Now go to bed.” Jane gave Cedar a tight hug and let herself out.
Cedar leaned against the back of the sofa and closed her eyes. Her head was swimming, but she couldn’t give in to her exhaustion yet. There were still too many mysteries, too many unanswered questions. She thought about her mother. She’s hiding something, something big, but do I even want to know? Can I handle any more revelations? She shook her head to snap herself out of it. Yes, she could handle it. She was determined to find out the truth—all of it.
Her thoughts were interrupted by Finn’s reappearance. He lifted her up by her arms and stood her on her feet, saying, “You need some sleep.”
She frowned. “I don’t want to sleep. I want to figure this out. Can we go back into the girl’s room? I think I was starting to remember something before Jane showed up.”
They stood together in the center of the pink room, and Cedar tried to recall the image of the girl. Nothing happened. She picked up a copy of Little House on the Prairie from the dresser, examining the cover. “I loved this book as a child.”
When she looked up, she was surprised to see that Finn was grinning.
“Do you remember meeting when we were kids?” he asked.
Cedar stared at him, shocked. “We met when we were kids? When?”
He grinned at her. “You were ten years old, and scrawny as a barn cat. Not that I was much better. Remember how Nevan told you we escaped from the war in Tír na nÓg? The escape route we found was a sidh that happened to be in the cellar of Maeve’s house, the house where you grew up. That’s how she first got wrapped up with all of us. We weren’t properly introduced, of course, but I saw you there when we first arrived.”
“What? There was a sidh in our cellar? Did my mum know about it?” Cedar searched her memory, trying to remember a group of strangers emerging from the cellar, but nothing came to her. How could she have forgotten something like that?
Finn opened his mouth to respond, but it looked like he was struggling to form words. He closed his lips and frowned, then tried again. Finally he said, “She did, but you wouldn’t have noticed it. The sidh can be hidden. The way Eden opens them, with an actual door—it’s not the way it was done before.”
“Done before. By the High King, you mean,” Cedar said.
“There were many sidhe once, all over the place,” Finn said. He looked ill, as if he were trying not to throw up. Then he seemed to recover and said, “You should know the truth about why I left.”
Cedar felt the familiar pang in her stomach and looked at her feet. “I know why you left,” she said. “You’re a god, or some kind of superbeing, anyway. I’m only human. It’s pretty simple, isn’t it?”
“No,” he said forcefully. “It’s not simple. Listen to me.” He placed a hand on her shoulder, and she turned around, still looking at the floor.
“If I had stayed with you, they would have killed you,” he said.
This made her look up. “Who would have killed me?”
“My people. Nuala, specifically.”
“Because you’re not supposed to be mixing with humans?”
“It’s complicated, but yes. We couldn’t risk exposure. If we got close to humans, they might begin to suspect, or we might be tempted to tell them the truth. But we’re social beings, to put it mildly, so we were bound to slip up occasionally. That’s where Nuala came in. She would be dispatched to make the human forget about whichever one of us had broken the rule. Sometimes it worked well. Even if the human began to suspect something was up, they often didn’t want to believe what their mind was telling them, so it was easy to convince them they had imagined everything, including their friendship or encounter with one of us. But other times…” He trailed off, looking at Cedar with worry.
“If she couldn’t make them forget, she would just kill them,” she finished for him.
He nodded. “We don’t have any proof, and Rohan never endorsed it, not outright, but neither did he explicitly forbid it. We just never talked about it. Sometimes humans would just go missing, and if we asked her about it, she would shrug and say, ‘They’re not a problem anymore.’ Her attitude toward humans was the fewer of them, the better. It’s inexcusable, I know. I can’t imagine what you must think of us.”
Cedar pressed her lips together, saying nothing.
“I didn’t want that to happen to you,” he said, his eyes full of pleading. “It’s my fault, I know. I knew the risk I was taking the first day we met; when we met again as adults, that is. I didn’t think it would go anywhere. I didn’t think it was possible I could love you so much. And I tried to be careful. I changed shape every time I left your place so they wouldn’t see me coming and going. I had as little to do with my people as I could so I wouldn’t have to lie to them so much. But then Nuala saw us together once, at the busker festival, and she could see your heart even if she couldn’t see mine.” He looked away, sorrowful lines marring his beautiful face. “She could see how much you loved me, how happy you were, and she hated you for it. Everyone thought she and I were meant to be together, but I didn’t love her. I didn’t even like her. When she found out, I knew she wouldn’t settle for just erasing your memories. She wouldn’t be able to handle the insult that I had chosen a human over her. She would want you dead.”
Cedar picked at a loose thread on her shirt, trying to make sense of what he was saying. “So why am I still alive?” she asked.
“Only because of my father’s position within our community,” he answered, “and my mother’s compassion, I suppose. I begged them to forbid Nuala to go near you. Finally, they agreed, but in return I had to swear an oath that I would leave you, that I would never contact you in any way or leave any trace of where you could find me. The break had to be absolute.”
“It was absolute,” Cedar agreed. She rubbed her temples, remembering the excruciating pain of those first few weeks, and the numbness that had followed.
And yet she could feel the anger she had been holding onto slip away, withdrawing like a slow tide. It was being replaced with a swirl of new emotions—horror that Nuala had dispatched other humans so cavalierly, relief that her own life had been spared, guilt over the way she had been treating Finn, when he had just been trying to protect her, and something else—a small shoot of hope that was breaking through the hard soil of her heart.
“I thought about you every single day,” he said. His voice was quiet but strained, as if he longed to pack as much meaning as he could into each word. “Each day, I wondered where you were and what you were doing, if you were married, if you had a family. But I was forbidden to contact you, or even to watch you from afar. They thought that if enough time went by, I would forget about you; I would get you out of my system, come back and marry Nuala, and start producing offspring to further my race. But my people have long memories, and after seven years my feelings for you are as strong as they were on the day I last saw you.”
Cedar could feel the tiny shoot of hope in her stirring, reaching. But she was afraid—afraid to give it air or room to grow.
“It doesn’t change anything, does it?” she asked. “The rules still apply. You’re still Tuatha Dé Danann, and I’m still human.”
Finn put his arms around her. She stayed there, perfectly still. “Everything has changed, Cedar. Everything,” he said. “The rules don’t apply anymore. You already know about us, you know the truth about me. We have a child together, and we can have a life together. I never stopped loving you. But I need to know that you forgive me. Please forgive me for leaving you.”
She reached up and rested her hand on his cheek. He leaned into it and closed his eyes. She had held onto her pain for so long, first as a way to hang on to him, and then as a way to protect herself from being rejected again. She saw herself clearly for the first time in years. She didn’t want to be like that anymore, running from what she felt, trying to shut down the best parts of herself because they reminded her of him. She wanted to be whole again and happy and free. She wanted to believe him, to trust him—but first she had to trust herself, and let go.
“Yes,” she whispered. “Yes, I forgive you.”
As soon as the words left her mouth, his lips were on hers, one hand tangling in her hair and the other wrapping around her, pulling her close. She closed her eyes and felt the hurt of the last seven years dissolve away under the gentle pressure of his lips. Her body relaxed, and he tightened his grip on her, as if he were afraid she, too, would dissolve into nothingness. She remembered how it had been to kiss him, how it had seemed like nothing else in the world existed. She heard music in her head, erupting like fireworks.
And then other memories started rushing in, crashing into her like rolling waves. The smell of a newborn baby, an olive-skinned toddler chasing seagulls around the harbor, a pink backpack bobbing behind a little girl on the first day of school. An argument over a man one wanted to know and the other wanted to forget. The midnight glow of pyramids in the Egyptian desert. A frightened child screaming for her mother on a pile of rocks in the Atlantic Ocean.
Gasping, Cedar pulled away from Finn and looked at him, her eyes burning.
“I remember her,” she said. “I remember everything.”