Page 86 of A House of Cloaks & Daggers

And faelings are usually conceived by mates. Half-faerie children, too. For my mate to be one of the High Fae, even though I was born into a hopelessly human family, that suggests there are mating bonds between the parents of people like me.

My father—my real father—was my mother’s mate.

“So, if they find their human mates, why do they leave them?” I exclaimed, much louder than I had intended.

Morgoya gave me a puzzled look. “Your mother would have been given a choice, Aura. To stay with us or return to the human world. Most of the time, it is the human’s choice. They carry with them either the fascination or the fear of magic,handed down through the dilution of their bloodlines, but they almost always want to go home in the end.”

My mother.

In Faerie.

I didn’t want to believe it and didn’t want to talk about it anymore.

The life she could have given me instead…

“So, it was a war over your gifted magic,” I stated, to distract myself from everything else. From the anger I couldn’t justify, and therefore couldn’t acknowledge. “That’s why the rebels wanted to harvest the essence of the Witch Covens and ended up turning into Malum. But can you explain to me then why nobody told the rest of Faerie what had actually happened?”

Morgoya sat forward, drawing a pattern of lines and swirls in the sand. “We were in mourning,” she murmured. “The High King—hewas in mourning. His father was the leader of the rebellion, the architect of the spell intended to harvest the essence of the Witches. The spell that bred them into Malum instead.”

“Oh, no.” My heart…cracked. Moisture blurred my eyes, and my hands were too weak to wipe it away. “And I said all those awful things to him.”

The High Lady sighed morosely, looking at me over her shoulder. “It gets worse. The intended Malum bride is—orwas—Wren’s sister.”

Chapter thirty-six

Lochgrub

As I sat aloneon the beach, watching Morgoya’s tall, thin figure getting smaller and smaller as she walked along the water’s edge, I thought about it.

About the nights that I had spent lying awake in my single bed, tucked up beneath layers of blankets pulled all the way over my head with only my face free, and thought about killing my father.

My father figure.

My mortal louse.

Dark, disturbed thoughts—too wicked to be entertained by such a small child, but entertained and enjoyed, nonetheless.

I had wanted to end him, end his reign of tyranny over my mother. I had desperately wanted to make things right and safe and okay in a way that would be permanent.

But I could never bring myself to take it further than a single thought. It never became an idea or a fully thought-out plan. It didn’t matter how badly he beat her, or how much of our money he stole and gambled away, or how many pieces of furniture he broke in our home, or even what irreplaceable things he so violently ripped away from us.

I could never do it.

Wouldnever do it.

And so I understood why Lucais couldn’t do it, either, even if it was the right thing to do. Even if, maybe, the execution of the Malum would be a kindness.

There had been humans who wanted to hurt my father, too.

I had a boyfriend when I was sixteen, whom I had met at a regional school sporting event, and even he wanted to hurt him. He had seen the bruises on my mother, the large fingerprints marking my own skin, and he had promised that he wouldn’t let it happen again. He talked me through the violent things he would like to do to that man…and I had broken up with him the next day.

Some of my father figure’s friends had acted on similar thoughts. Better matched by age and strength, and fuelled by too many beers, I could recall more than one night where more than one friend had stood up to him for us. Swearing, bleeding, and throwing punches out into the street until the police were called.

But they never came back after that. Even if he didn’t.

A part of me had liked their violence. Related to it.

The other part of me was scared to death—not of them or what they might have done if they were ten years older or a few drinks more sober, but of the silence that would have followed once my father’s playlist came to an end.

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