Dani shrugged. “Whole thing about Ro never telling us we might be an Unseelie caste—said if you knew, it might be like a self-fulfilling prophecy. I say you gotta know what’cha are, know? Look in the mirror, eyes gotta meet eyes or quit looking.”
“What else?” I demanded. “Was there more?”
“There’s like this whole other … sub-prophecy. Says if the two from the ancient bloodlines are killed, things’ll play out different and the odds of success’ll be higher. Younger they’re killed, the better.”
A chill slid up my spine. That was brutal and to the point. Who would go how far to skew the odds more strongly in favor of the human race? I was surprised we hadn’t been killed at birth. Assuming I’d had one.
“So I was thinking that’s prolly why you and Alina got gave up. Somebody didn’t wanna kill you guys as little kids, so they sent you away.”
Of course. And we’d been forbidden to return. But Alina had wanted to go to Dublin to study abroad, and Daddy had never been able to deny us anything.
One decision, one tiny decision, and the world as we knew it began to fall apart.
“What else?” I pressed.
“Jo said they been talking to Nana O’ behind Ro’s back. Said the old woman was at the abbey the night the Book got out. Saw things. Sidhe-seers ripped to pieces, hacked apart. Said they only found little pieces of some. Others, they never found.”
“Nana was there when the Book got out?” She hadn’t mentioned a word of it the night Kat and I had talked to her at her cottage by the sea. Short of calling me Alina, telling us that her granddaughter, Kayleigh, had been Isla’s best friend and fellow Haven member, and that she’d felt dark stirrings in the soil, she’d told us little else.
Dani shook her head. “Showed up after. Said her bones told her her daughter’s immortal soul was in peril.”
“You mean her granddaughter, Kayleigh.”
“I mean her daughter.” Dani’s eyes sparkled. “Ro.”
My mouth shaped a silent O. “Rowena is Nana’s daughter?” I finally managed. Rowena was Kayleigh’s mother? How much more had Nana O’Reilly neglected to tell me?
“Old woman despises her. Won’t claim her. Kat and Jo searched Nana’s cottage while she slept and found things—pictures and baby books and stuff. Nana thinks Ro’s part of how the Book got out. Said Kayleigh told her they’d created a backup mini-Haven that Ro knew nothing about, with a leader that didn’t even live at the abbey. Name was Tessie or Tellie or something funny like that. Case something happened to the Haven members that lived at the abbey.”
My head was spinning. They’d been keeping me completely out of the loop. If I’d postponed celebrating Dani’s birthday, I never would have learned any of this. Here was the mysterious Tellie that Barrons and my father had both mentioned! She’d been leader of a secret Haven. She’d helped my mother escape. I needed to find her. Have you located Tellie yet? I’d overheard Barrons saying. No? Get more people on it. It seemed Barrons had once again beat me to the punch and had his men out hunting for her already. Why? How did he know about the woman? What had he learned that he hadn’t told me? “And?”
“Said your m—well, supposedly you ain’t human, so I guess she ain’t your mom—Isla got out alive. Nana O’ saw her leaving that night. Ain’t never gonna guess with who!”
I didn’t even trust myself to speak. Rowena. And the old bitch had probably killed her. Whether she was my mom or not, I still felt tied to her, protective of her.
“Aw, c’mon, you gotta guess!” She was getting blurry around the edges with excitement.
“Rowena,” I said flatly.
“Guess again,” she said. “This one’s gonna fry your mind. Nana never woulda known, ’cept you stopped by with him. Well, she don’t call him a him, she calls him an it.”
I stared at her. “Who?” I demanded.
“Saw Isla getting in a car with something she calls the Damned. Dude that drove off twenty-some years ago with the only survivor of the abbey’s Haven was Barrons.”
I was so wound up after everything Dani told me that there was no way I was going to be able to do something as lethargic as curl on a sofa and watch a movie. Plus, I had so much sugar running through my system I was nearly vibrating like Dani.
After she dropped the Barrons’ bomb, she hit play and began cracking up again. The kid is resilient.
I sat and stared at the screen, not seeing a thing.
Why would Barrons keep from me that he’d been at the abbey when the Book escaped twenty-odd years ago? Why hide from me that he’d known Isla O’Connor, my sister’s mother? I could relinquish a mother I’d never had, but I couldn’t give up my sister. Whether she was mine or not, that was how I was thinking of her, period. The end.
I remembered coming down the back stairs, catching him talking to Ryodan on the phone, hearing him say, After what I learned about her the other night. Had he been referring to the night we’d gone to the cottage? Had he been as surprised as I was to hear Nana tell me the woman he’d left the abbey with two decades ago had supposedly been my mother?
Had he taken her to this Tellie woman, who’d then helped Alina and me find an adoptive home in America? If Isla had left the abbey alive, why, how, when had she died? Had she even made it to Tellie, or had the woman agreed in advance to get her children out if anything happened to her? What part had Barrons been playing in all this? Had he killed Isla?
I shifted restlessly. He’d seen the cake. He knew I had a birthday party planned. He hated birthdays. There was no way he’d show his face tonight.
I picked at a piece of chocolate mousse icing. I stared around the bookstore. I contemplated the mural on the ceiling and fiddled with the cashmere throw. I plucked crumbs from the corner of the sofa and lined them up on my plate.
Rowena was Nana’s daughter. Isla and Kayleigh had practically grown up together. Isla had been the Haven Mistress. They’d felt it necessary to form a Haven behind Ro’s back. One that didn’t even live at the abbey. Isla had run the formal one, and the mysterious Tellie had run the secret one. All these years my mom—Isla—had been taking the blame for the Book escaping, and now it looked like it had been Rowena behind things.
She’d let us all take the blame: first Isla, then Alina, then me.
… the two from the ancient bloodlines ain’t got a snowball chance in hell o’ fixing our mess, cause they ain’t gonna want to.
I sighed. When I’d overheard my mom and dad in Ashford that night, talking about how I might doom the world, I’d felt condemned. Then Kat and Jo had showed me the prophecy—what I now knew was an abbreviated version—and I’d felt absolved.
Now I was back to feeling condemned. It was more than a little disturbing to hear that the sooner my sister and I got killed, the better off the human race would be.
If she’d lived, would Alina have chosen Darroc? In a fit of grief, I’d wanted to unmake this world for a new one with Barrons in it. Were we both fatally flawed? Instead of having been smuggled from the country for our own good, had we been exiled for the sake of the world? Was that why the DEG had given me THE WORLD card? To warn me that I was going to destroy it if I wasn’t careful? That I needed to look at it, see it, choose it? Who was he, anyway?
When I’d first arrived in Dublin and begun finding things out about myself, I’d felt like a reluctant hero, questing on an epic journey.
Now I just hoped I wouldn’t end up screwing things up too much. Big problems demanded big decisions. How could I trust my own judgment when I wasn’t even sure who I was?
I crossed my legs. Uncrossed them and raked a hand through my hair.
“Dude—you watching or doing couch calisthenics?” Dani complained.
I gave her a stark look. “You want to go kill something?”
She beamed. She had a chocolate ice-cream mustache. “Man, I thought you’d never ask!”