But first I wanted to cross a personal one off my list.

Cellphones didn’t get reception in the Silvers. Well, with the exception of IYD, which magically bypassed natural laws. As I moved toward the door I pulled mine out to call Mom and gasped. I’d been so busy I hadn’t looked at it since returning from the Silvers.

I had fifty-two voicemail messages and over a hundred new texts. My cellphone was on mute. I turned the volume back on and glanced at my texts first. Mom, Dad, Ryodan, Alina.

Alina? I thumbed them up and a long line of them whizzed by, leaving the last one on the screen:

Sept 11, 10:43 P.M.

Oh, for crying out loud, Mac, where ARE you? Mom and Dad are LOSING it! How did you handle them when I died? They totally melt down! Okay, so maybe I’m melting down, too. WHERE ARE YOU??????

I stared blankly. It was dated yesterday. I scrolled back. There were pages and pages of texts. I finally got to the first one:

August 8, 7:30 A.M.

Hey, little Mac—breakfast is ready!

August 8, 8:00 A.M.

Sissy, where are you?????

August 8, 9:02 A.M.

Seriously, Jr., what the fuck?

August 8, 11:21 A.M.

Mac, coffee’s getting bitter and so am I. Get your freaking petunia over here. I will NOT be stood up by my baby sis. You’re pissing me off.

Tears filled my eyes. How was she still here? Even though I’d put her on my list of personal goals, I’d been going through the motions, nothing more. I’d accepted that she’d been an illusion with substance, created by the Sinsar Dubh. I’d also accepted that since it had been rendered inert, she would no longer be here.

Was it possible the Book had genuinely brought her back from the dead? And whether it was contained or not, here Alina would remain?

I shivered. On some level, I found the thought unsettling, but I couldn’t pinpoint why. It was possible I’d just seen too many monkey’s paw type movies where you had to be really careful what you wished for because there was always some terrible karmic price for interfering with Fate. And although I’d once said I didn’t believe in the bitch, I’d decided that either I did or it didn’t matter because Fate believed in me.

I scrolled through Alina’s messages again. She was living with Mom and Dad in a townhouse on the north side of the River Liffey.

After memorizing the address, I hurried out into the storm.

LANDSLIDE

* * *

I learned, much later, after I’d hunted down the man named Seamus O’Leary, that I was the reason he’d broken my mother’s heart.

From my cage, I’d watched a good mom turn into a terrible mom and, finally, a mortal danger to me.

I needed to know why.

I was ten when I realized you couldn’t yield even an ounce of your essential self for any reason. Good people didn’t turn bad overnight. It happened from the accumulation of many small compromises, sacrifices, and losses.

Small, consistent erosions turn into landslides in time.

A widower with three sons, Seamus hadn’t been averse to marrying a woman with a child of her own and blending their families.

He’d found her funny and clever, pretty and kind. A junior partner at a law firm, he’d fallen in love with the gentle, downtrodden after-hours cleaning woman.

But she was cursed by the O’Malley bloodline, and while some men learned to live with the ancient heritage of the six sidhe-seer houses, to respect and love their wife and daughter’s gifts, not all men were so inclined.

And some were simply unwilling to believe at all.

Secure in his love, certain of his intentions, my mother told Seamus about herself, her heritage, and me.

His shock took a darker turn to concern for her mental health, this woman he’d nearly entrusted with his young sons.

This woman who actually believed she had a child that could move so fast no one could see her.

She’d presented him with an insane and vividly detailed delusion about fairies and women who’d been selectively bred to protect the world against them.

She’d affixed her delusional paranoia to real world people and businesses, insisting a local, highly respected abbey was really a secret society of women that guarded the world from these ancient, immortal monsters and, in Dublin, they posed as a bike courier company called PHI (that his office frequently used to dispatch files about town) so this special cult of gifted “fairy-killers” could keep tabs on their city, ever alert for threats to humankind.

She’d contended that her daughter had been so strong by the age of three that she’d shattered the toilet merely by crashing into it too fast in something she’d called “freeze-frame.”

(I remembered that day. I’d struck the commode with my little kid belly so hard it’d been black and blue for days. We hadn’t been able to afford another toilet for months. When she’d finally brought one home, it was cracked and discolored and she had to repair it. I have no idea where she found it. Probably in someone’s trash.)

Then, the coup de grâce—my mother told Seamus that she’d been forced to handle her very special daughter by keeping her locked up in a cage.

For years.

This woman he’d nearly taken home to his precious young sons.

I remember the look on his face when I freeze-framed into his office late one night, after everyone else had gone home for the day, leaving him alone. I’d been trailing him for weeks and had finally realized I would never get the answers I wanted without forcing them from him.

I’d blasted in, moving so fast I was undetectable, and whirled around and around the chair he was sitting in, unfurling thick, heavy rope behind me, tying him securely to it.

I remember his expression when I finally slowed down enough for him to see me—curly hair wild, eyes wilder. My strength so enormous by then that I’d been able to simply toss his heavy ornate desk out of my way without the slightest strain.

When I was done with Seamus that night, he believed.

Accepted that every word my mother had told him was true, even wept at the end.

If only he’d believed her sooner, if only he’d been willing to learn and accept, I might have gotten a father to help raise me. If only he’d come to the house, met me, kept an open mind, my mom could have proved the truth to him and he’d have gotten a wonderful mother for his sons. The erosion would have stopped. Erosions need new, solid soil to be brought in every now and then.