Page 97 of The Shadow Path
“I saw my mother.”
Laura’s face grew pale. “That’s impossible. There was a report. There were two bodies?—”
“Her Shadowkin,” Carys blurted. “No, her… I mean, it was her but it wasn’t, and at first I thought there was just a resemblance, but it was too exact. Even her voice was…”
Her heart was racing. Her skin felt clammy. She’d suspected. They both had.
Carys looked at Cadell. “It was her. It was?—”
“Her Brightkin.” Cadell put his arm around Carys and pulled her close. “Laura, can you take the coffee from Carys?”
“Got it.” Laura was already taking the jars Carys clutched to her chest. “Honey, go outside with Cadell. I’ll check out.”
“We knew.” Carys looked up into the dragon’s fierce gold eyes. “I don’t know why it was such a shock, because we… I mean we knew, Cadell.”
“We suspected, Nêrys.” He kept his voice calm as the aisle cleared in front of the massive man. “Suspecting your mother’s origins is entirely different from seeing your mother’s face on another and knowing that she was not what you thought.”
Carys was staring at a blackened smear of gum on the sidewalk when she heard Duncan’s voice.
“What’s going on? Is everything okay? I waited at the restaurant, and it’s been?—”
“Carys met her mother’s Brightkin.”
The air was filled with the sounds of imaginative Scottish cursing. Seconds later, the watery vision of the smeared gum was gone, and she was crushed to Duncan’s chest.
The crushing felt good. It broke her mind out of the frozen pattern she’d been circling before.
“Oh, lass.” He pulled away and tipped her chin up to meet his eyes. “What do ya need? A good cry? Privacy? We can go to my mother’s house if you want. We don’t have to go back right away if you’d rather?—”
“I called her mom.” Carys blinked, and tears fell down her cheeks. “She must have thought I was insane. And she was wearing a suit.”
Carys couldn’t get the image of the tidy woman who reminded her slightly of Helen Mirren out of her head.
Tegan Morgan hadn’t worn a business suit a single day in her life. She wore long flowered dresses, linen pants in the summer, and the occasional pair of faded jeans with feathers embroidered on them “to cheer them up” when she was gardening or hiking.
“Come on.” Duncan put his arm around her and hustled her down the sidewalk. “You’re in shock.”
“She’s not in shock,” Cadell said. “We knew this was a possibility. We already suspected?—”
“She saw her dead mother’s face on a living woman,” Duncan snarled. “Shut your mouth or go back to the gate, but don’t tell me she’s not in shock.”
Carys felt like she was spinning, stuck in a car skidding on ice. Her mind raced from one thought to the next.
Her hair was grey.
Her mother’s hair was only silver at the temples.
But this woman was older than Tegan had been when she died. Her mother never cut her hair; it hung nearly to her thighs. It looked nothing like the smart grey bob the woman in the shop had worn.
Of course it wouldn’t be the same. That woman was years older than her mother had been when she died. Of course she was different. She was Tegan’s opposite, in fact.
Dafydd was boisterous and a bit explosive. Nothing like her father’s steady, quiet demeanor, so of course her mother’s Shadowkin?—
Brightkin.
That had been her mother’sBrightkin.
Which meant Tegan Morgan—painter, dreamer, mother who left out milk for the brownies at the hearth—had been born in the Shadowlands, her essence brought to life in the shadow of the fae gates and pulled into reality by magic.
