“If I’m your daughter, then why do I have memories that belong to the Unseelie King?”
Isla gasped. “You do?”
I nodded.
“I told you she might do it,” Pieter reminded.
“Who?” I demanded. “Do what?”
“The Seelie Queen came to see us shortly after the Book escaped, before we left Dublin. She said she would do everything in her power to help recover it,” Pieter said.
“She was very interested in you,” Isla said grimly. “You were barely three months old. I remember like it was yesterday. You had on a pink dress with tiny flowers and a rainbow hair ribbon. You couldn’t stop looking at her. You kept cooing and reaching for her. The two of you seemed fascinated by each other.”
“We were afraid then that the queen had meddled with you. She’s notorious for that. She looks to the future and tries to adjust minuscule events, nudging here and there to achieve her ends,” Pieter said. “A few times I was almost certain someone had been in your nursery moments before I walked in.”
“And you think she planted memories of the Unseelie King? How would she have any to plant? I thought she drank from the cauldron. It would have erased everything she knew.”
“Who could say with her?” Isla shrugged. “Perhaps they were false memories, cleverly crafted, or lifted from another. Perhaps she never truly drank from cauldron. Some say she pretends.”
“Who gives a fuck? What did you come here for?” Barrons said impatiently.
Isla looked at him as if he must be crazy. “You’ve been taking care of her, and for that we can’t thank you enough, but we’ve come to take her home.”
“She is home. And she’s got a world to save.”
“We’ll take care of that,” Pieter said. “It’s what we do.”
“Bang-up job you’ve been doing so far.”
Pieter gave him a look of rebuke. “Not as if you’ve been doing any better. We’ve been directing the majority of our efforts to hunting the amulet. The true one.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Why?”
“The Triton Group has been searching for it for centuries for various reasons. But recently it became critical that we find it, because we’ve discovered it’s the only way to re-inter the Book,” Pieter said. “A representative from our company heard—too late—about the auction where it was sold. We arrived at the Welshman’s castle shortly after Johnstone’s massacre. But the Goth punk seemed to vanish into thin air.”
“Thick rock,” I muttered. I would never forget my hellish incarceration beneath the Burren.
“We had no idea where it was for months. We suspected Darroc had it but couldn’t get any of our people close enough. He had no tolerance for humans. Then we received reports that MacKayla had infiltrated his camp and was at his right hand.” His gaze glowed with pride. “Well done, darling! You are as brilliant and resourceful as your mother.”
“You said ‘the true one,’ ” I said.
“According to legend, the king made many amulets,” Isla replied. “All capable of sustaining varying degrees of illusion. Used together, they are formidable. But only the last one he made can deceive the king himself. The Book has grown too powerful to be stopped by any other means. Illusion is the only weapon that will work against it.”
“We were right!” I exclaimed, looking at Barrons.
“The prophecy is clear. The one who was inhabited must use the amulet to seal it away.”
“Already on it,” Barrons said coolly.
“It’s not your fight,” Pieter said gently. “We started this. We will end it.”
I sat forward on the edge of the sofa, elbows on my knees. “What are you saying?”
“Your mother is the one who has to do it. Although if you’re anything like her, darling, you think it’s your problem. That’s what we were worried about, why we rushed here tonight. Isla is ‘the inhabited.’ Twenty-three years ago, when the Book escaped, it possessed her, inhabited her. She knows it. She has been it. She understands it. And she’s the only one who can lay it to rest.”
“It never leaves a human alive,” Barrons said flatly.
“It left Fiona alive,” I reminded.
“She’d been eating Unseelie. She was different.”
“Isla was able to wrest it from her body,” Pieter said. “She is the only one we know of that has ever been able to resist to the point where it jumped from her while she was still alive and took another, more complacent host.”
Barrons didn’t look remotely convinced. “But not before it made her kill most of the Haven.”
“I never said it was easy,” Isla said softly, eyes dark with remembered grief. “I despise what it made me do. I live with it every day.”
“But it’s been tracking me,” I protested.
“Sensing your bloodline, looking for me,” Isla said.
“But I’m epic,” I said numbly. Wasn’t I? I was so tired of not knowing my place in things.
Was I going to doom the world? Was I the concubine? Was I the Unseelie King? Was I even human? Was I the person who was supposed to re-inter the Book?
The answer was no to all of the above. I was just Mac Lane, bumbling around, getting in the way a lot, and making stupid decisions.
“You are, darling,” Isla said. “But this isn’t your battle.”
“Your destiny is another day,” Pieter said. “This is only the first of many battles we’ll be called upon to fight. There are dark times ahead. Even with the Book contained, there’s still the matter of the walls between realms. They can’t be rebuilt without the Song of Making. We have our work cut out for us.” He smiled. “Your brothers have their talents, too. They can’t wait to meet you.”
“Oh, MacKayla, we’ll be a family again!” Isla said, and began to cry. “It’s all I ever wanted.”
I looked at Barrons. He wore a grim expression. I looked back at Pieter and Isla. It was all I’d ever wanted, too. I wasn’t the king. I’d been born. I was a person with a family. I couldn’t wrap my head around it. But my heart was already trying.
Family reconciliations aside, Barrons didn’t like the change in the game plan, and neither did I.