Changeling

"Not very much, I'm afraid," was his quiet reply. "I wasn't a good father, Morgan, not to them, not by a stretch of imagination."

"Why?"

He grimaced. "I didn't love their mother. I was tricked into marrying her because my mother, Eloise, and Grania's mother, Greer Murtagh, wanted to unite our covens. I was just eighteen, and Grania got pregnant, and they promised me leadership over the new, very powerful coven. I would inherit all their knowledge, my mothers and Grania's."

I knew he was lying about being tricked into marrying Grania, but I played along. "Why would you inherit and not Grania? I thought the lines were supposed to be matriarchal."

"They usually are. But by the time Grania was eighteen and had been initiated and all the rest, it was clear she lacked the ambition, the focus, to lead a coven. She wasn't really interested." His words were tight with derision, and I felt sorry for Grania. "But I was amazingly powerful. I could make the coven something new and stronger and better."

"So you married her. But she was pregnant. She didn't get pregnant by herself," I pointed out primly.

Ciaran's body tightened with surprise, and he looked at me as if trying to look through my eyes to something farther in. Then he threw back his head and laughed, an open, rolling laugh that filled my car and seemed to make the darkening twilight brighter.

I waited with raised eyebrows.

"Maeve said the exact same thing," he said. Saying her name, he grew more solemn. "She said the same thing, and she was right. As you are. My only excuse is that I was an eighteen-year-old-fool. Which is not much of an excuse and not one that I've ever accepted from Killian. So I have a double standard."

His frankness was disarming, and I tried to picture him as a teenager. A very powerful Woodbane teenager. I had to lead him back to my question about Imbolic.

"Then I met Maeve," he went on, and his voice took on a richer timbre, as if even remembering his love made his throat ache with sadness. "I knew almost instantly that she was the one I should be with. And she knew it about me. Her eyes, the wave of her hair, her laugh, the shape of her hands—everything about her was designed to delight me. We were drawn to each other like—magnets." He looked at his own hands, fair skinned, strong, and capable. The hands that had set my mother on fire.

I desperately wanted to hear more, more about her, about them, about what had gone so terribly wrong. But I struggled to keep my focus on Starlocket. I had to put other needs before my own.

"Imbolic is coming up," I said. "Are you going to celebrate with Amyranht? Is Amyranth the coven you inherited from Greer?"

Inside my car it became very still. We kept our gazes on each other, each of us measuring, waiting, judging.

Then Ciaran said, "Amyranth is part of the coven I inherited from Greer. Not entirely—not everyone from Liathach wanted to join. And Woodbanes from other covens have joined us. But for the most part, those are people I grew up with, who I'm related to, who I can trust with more than my life." His words were soft, his voice like warmed honey. "We share blood going back thousands of years," he went on. "We're intensely loyal to each other."

"Like the mafia?" I said.

Again he laughed.

Still, I found his description oddly compelling. The idea of being among people who were completely accepting and supportive, who only wanted to help you grow and increase your powers, who, you could trust implicitly, no matter what—it would be amazing. That picture of a Woodbane clan was to painful to think about—I could almost taste my own longing for it, and it terrified me to know that I was thinking about Amyranth. The coven that had tried to kill me. The coven that right at this moment was planning to destroy Starlocket. From the inside, I realized, it might not feel evil at all.

No one in my life had ever accepted me exactly the way I was. I didn't fit in as a Rowlands. Within my coven I stood out as a strong blood witch, and it had become clear to me that not even Robbie and Bree, my closest friends, could feel entirely comfortable around me anymore. Hunter and Sky and Eoife all seemed to want different things of me, for me to be different somehow, to make different choices.

My glance flicked back to Ciaran. How far could I push this? Was this the time to ask about the dark wave? Surely he suspected I was up to something.

"You're nervous," Ciaran said softly. "Tell me why."

It was dark now, and somehow there in the car I felt safe.

"I'm incredibly drawn to that picture of Woodbanes," I told him honestly. "But I hated Selene Belltower and everything she stood for. She tried to kill me, and I know she had murdered others. I don't want to be like that."

He waved his hand in dismissal. "Selene was an overambitious, overconfident climber—in no way did she represent what my coven is about."

"What is your coven about?" I asked clearly. "I saw what you were doing in New York. What was that? Is there some larger plan?"

Ciaran sat back against the passenger door. His eyes on me were bright in the darkness, his powerful hands still on the wool of his coat. Slowly, slowly, his lips parted in a smile, and I saw his white teeth and his eyes crinkling.

"You are very interesting, Morgan," he said quietly. "You are a wild, untamed thing with the power of a river about to overflow its banks. Are you afraid of me?"

I looked at him, this man who had helped create me, and answered truthfully, "Yes and no."

"Yes and no," he repeated, watching me. "I think more no than yes. Yet you have every reason to be terribly afraid of me. I almost took your life."

"You almost took my magick—my soul—which is much worse than taking my life," I retorted. "But you didn't because you are my father."

"Morgan, Morgan," he said. "I find you very—gratifying. My other children are afraid of me. They don't ask me hard questions, they don't stand up to me. But you…are something different. It's the difference between a child born of Grania and a child born of Maeve."

Frankly, I was feeling kind of sorry for all of us, his children.

"You alone I see as being able to appreciate my coven," he went on. "You alone I feel would understand. There is something being planned—"

I caught my breath silently, willing him to continue. He stopped and looked out then window, as if he hadn't intended to say so much. "I really should be getting back," he said absently.

I squelched my disappointment and frustration. It would be too east for him to pick up on them. Without a word I started my car and backed out of the parking space. We drove back through the night, toward town. I tried not to even think about what he'd almost said, what we'd talked about. There would be enough time for that later.