A Faerie's Secret (Creepy Hollow Book 4) (26 page)

I’m paging through
Gringel’s Potion Manual, Eighteenth Edition
on Saturday evening when Vi arrives home from work. After my visit to Mom, I gathered every book on potions I could find in Ryn’s house and spread them over the kitchen table. I know the possibility of me coming across something that all the expert healers and potion makers don’t already know about is slim, but I don’t have any homework and there’s no way drawing will distract me now, so this is all I’ve got to focus on.

I hear Vi talking to Ryn before she comes into the kitchen. She bends and hugs my shoulders and says, “Ryn told me. I’m so sorry. But at least there’s nothing wrong with her other than sleep.”

“A year, Vi,” I say as I page through
Gringel’s
. “A
year
. Or more! Imagine how much she could miss in that time?”

“It won’t be that long, Calla.” Unlike the false assurances of the healer, Vi’s voice carries actual conviction. “We don’t know how much of the potion your mother actually drank. And she’s been taking sleeping potions since she was a teenager. I’m sure she’s developed some form of tolerance toward them. Why else would she be in possession of one so strong?”

I tap a pencil against my chin and nod as Vi sits opposite me with a glass of her favorite energy-boosting, body-healing concoction. It’s a mix of at least twenty different ingredients, all of which taste disgusting. “I suppose that makes sense. That would also explain why she makes sleeping potions so often.”

“Exactly. You said she makes a new one every few weeks, right? She wouldn’t need to do that if she had a potion strong enough to last a year. Or two to three years, if you take into account all the waking hours in a day when she wouldn’t need it.”

“Right. Okay.” I sit back and close the heavy cover of
Gringel’s
. “Why didn’t I think of that before I spent all afternoon searching for every reference I could find of sleeping potions?”

Vi takes a big gulp of her drink, grimaces, and says, “Too anxious to think properly?”

“Maybe. So hopefully it’ll only be a few weeks before she wakes up.” I tilt my head to the side and add, “Do you actually like that stuff you’re drinking?”

“Ugh, no. But it works.” She downs the rest of the drink, shudders as she swallows, then stands and takes the glass to the sink.

“Whoa,” I say as she turns. “What happened?” Her hair is secured atop her head, and across the back of her neck are three deep gashes.

“What? Oh, just some training exercises with a manticore that got a little out of hand. The wounds have been treated already, and the Drink of Supreme Grossness—” she waves the glass she just cleaned “—will help. I’ll be healed in a few hours.”

“Great way to end a Saturday,” I mutter.

“It
was
great,” she says, enthusiasm lighting up her face. “This team has made so much improvement. They’re almost ready to go out there and fix up some real-life mess.”

The door leading from the living room swings open and Ryn walks in. “Isn’t it nice when the criminal you’ve been hunting down for weeks shows up unconscious on your doorstep?”

“How convenient,” Vi says. “Which doorstep are you referring to, exactly?”

“The Guild’s. So I need to go in for a few hours.”

“Don’t you guys ever get weekends off?” I ask. “Vi just got home, and now you’re off to work.”

“Uh, sometimes,” Vi says. “Why do you think he turned himself in?” she asks Ryn.

“Not sure yet. I think perhaps one of his own turned on him.”

“Sounds like the criminals are doing your job for you.”

“Not complaining,” he says with a grin.

“Lazy butt,” Vi says. “You should come to my Guild sometime. We do real work there.”

“Your
Institute
is filled with reptiscillas.”

“And that’s what makes it awesome,” she says in a sing-song voice. “Okay, I’m going to clean up before Calla and I make something amazing for dinner.”

“Hey,” Ryn says as she walks past him. “What happened to your neck? I didn’t see that when you came in.”

“Oh, just a few scratches.” Vi touches the side of her neck gingerly. “The manticore training was today, remember? It knocked me around a bit, but I’m fine.”

“It
knocked you around
?” Ryn looks horrified, which is puzzling, since getting knocked around is nothing new in the guardian line of work. “This is what I’m talking about, V. This is why it isn’t safe for you to work anymore.”

“No, no, no,” she says, turning back to him and shaking her head. “That wasn’t part of the deal. We agreed I wouldn’t have to stop work now.”

“Well maybe we were wrong.”

“Um, should I leave the room now?” I ask.

“If you’re allowed to work,” Vi says, completely oblivious to my question, “so am I.”

“I’m not the one who’s—” Ryn cuts himself off as he looks at me. “We’ll talk about this later,” he says to Vi, then walks out of the room.

“Yes. We will,” she shouts after him. “I’ll be talking, and you’ll be listening to my side of things.”

“I can’t hear you,” he shouts back. Vi looks at me and rolls her eyes. A moment later, we hear a knock coming from outside the living room, followed shortly by Ryn saying, “Tilly?”

“Tilly?” Vi says, frowning. She hurries out of the kitchen, and I get up to follow her. “Tilly!” she shouts gleefully, and I walk into the living room in time to see her wrap her arms around someone with blond and pink hair. “I didn’t know you were coming.”

“I’m sorry for arriving unannounced,” Tilly says, “but I suddenly had some time off, and I thought, ‘Why not?’ So here I am! And I brought dinner. Hi, Calla!” She waves at me over Vi’s shoulder.

“Hey.” I smile and wave back. As far as Vi and Ryn’s friends go, wacky explorer Tilly is probably the most fun. She talks non-stop and tells amazing stories—which are made more amazing by the fact that they’re all true.

“Tilly, you have awful timing,” Ryn complains. “I’m on my way to work.”

“Oh, bummer.” Tilly looks sad for a moment, but then she grins. “Girls’ night!” She throws her hands into the air and accidentally whacks Filigree in his tiny owl face. “Oh! Sorry, Fili. I didn’t see you sitting there on that totally inconspicuous coat hook.”

Filigree flaps his disapproval, then lands on the floor, morphs into a cat, and walks off without another glance in Tilly’s direction.

“I really have to go,” Ryn says. “Enjoy your girls’ night.”

Half an hour later, we’re sitting at the kitchen table digging into the various containers Tilly picked up from The Brownie’s Munch Box while mouse-formed Filigree nibbles chocolate-covered nixles. Having never eaten anything from Brownie’s before—Mom has a strict home-cooked-meals-only policy—I make sure to sample something from all seven containers.

“So I’m lost in the middle of a jungle,” Tilly says between mouthfuls, “my stylus has been eaten by a giant toad-rabbit thing, I’ve fought off two lizards in order to keep the gem safe, and now I’m faced with a whole bunch of warrior dryads who obviously think I’m threatening their home. I’m thinking this expedition is an absolute fail when, out of nowhere, Jayshu comes swinging through the trees on a vine, bellowing like an ogre. He lands in the midst of the dryads, whips out the giggle spray, and within half a minute all the dryads are doubled over, laughing hysterically.”

“That did
not
happen,” Vi says when she’s recovered from her laughter.

“One hundred percent true story,” Tilly says. “Giggle spray. Jayshu’s planning to patent it. Gonna make a fortune.”

“Who’s going to buy that stuff?”

“The Guild. Once you guardians realize you can win every battle by making your enemies giggle.”

“That’s so ridiculous I don’t even know where to start.”

“I know. They’ll never see it coming. Oh!” Tilly waves her fork excitedly in the air. “I almost forgot the best part of the meal.” She reaches into the bag slung over one side of her chair and pulls out a brown glass bottle. “Galar mead. This stuff, ladies, is amazing.”

“Ooh, yes, I want to try that,” I say, reaching for the bottle.

“I’m not sure your mother would be too pleased if I let you do that,” Vi says.

“Mom’s asleep, remember? And when she wakes up she’ll have far more important things to worry about than the fact that I sampled—” I examine the label “—twelve-year-old mead. Wow. That’s quite old.”

“And it is quite amazing,” Tilly says, standing up and searching the cupboards for appropriate glassware.

“Oh, I won’t have any,” Vi says as Tilly returns to the table with three glasses.

“What? Don’t be so boring.” Tilly taps the cork with her stylus. The cork pops out, and Filigree scampers over to get a better sniff at the contents of the bottle.

“I’m not, I just don’t feel like—”

“No. Not feeling like it is not an option. I went all the way to the Slievaran Mountains where the Galar dwarves make this stuff. Do you have any idea how far away that is?”

“Um … five seconds via the faerie paths?”

With a deadpan expression, Tilly blinks and says, “Fine. Do you have any idea how hard you have to focus to wind up at precisely the right spot on the Slievaran Mountains in order to find this stuff?”

“Very hard?”

“Exactly. That’s how far away this place is. So you
have
to try the mead.”

Vi groans. “I’m sorry. I wish I could, but I’m just really not feeling like it.”

Tilly passes me a glass with a small amount of mead, then leans back and examines Vi with a frown. “We’ve drunk mead together before.”

“We have.”

“You liked it. A lot. You said it was your new favorite drink.”

“I know, but—”

“Ohmygosh.” Tilly straightens suddenly, her eyes wide.

“What?” Vi and I ask at the same time.

“Ohmygosh. Oh. My. Gosh.” Tilly’s smile stretches wider than I would have thought possible, as if she’s squealing silently. “You’re having a
baby
!”

I almost drop my glass. “
What?
”

Vi’s expression is frozen, her mouth half open and her cheeks rapidly turning pink. Then she slaps her hand down on the table. “How the freak do you know that?”

“Oh, it is
so
obvious.”

“It is not!”

“THAT IS SO EXCITING!” I yell, jumping up and flinging my arms around her, splashing half my mead on the floor. A second later, Tilly joins us, completing our group hug with bouncing and squealing.

“No—stop—it’s not exciting, it’s terrifying!” Vi exclaims, attempting to swat us away.

“Well of course it’s a little bit terrifying,” Tilly says as she and I return to our seats, “but it’s
mainly
exciting, right?

“A little, I suppose,” Vi says. “But I’ll be the first to admit that this wasn’t part of the plan for at least the next fifty years.”

“This is what you and Ryn were arguing about, right?” I ask. “This is why he doesn’t want you working.”

“Yes,” Vi says with a sigh.

“Well, now that this baby thing is happening,” Tilly says, holding up her glass and clinking it against mine, “you guys should probably get married. Make it official.”

Vi rolls her eyes. “We are married, Tilly.”

“Oh please. That boring-as-mud gathering we had at the Guild where you guys signed a scroll and then went straight back to work? That was
not
a wedding.”

“You’re right. It wasn’t a wedding because we’re not human and we don’t call them that. We call them union ceremonies.”

“Ugh, you sound like my grandmother. Just call it a wedding. Almost everyone else does these days.”

I sit back, sip my slightly dry, honey-hinted drink, and watch the argument playing out in front of me. I know Tilly’s going to win, and I’m fine with that. I happen to agree with her.

“Fine. Wedding. Whatever,” Vi says. “And we tried to have one
three times
, remember? It just never worked out.”

“Right, because some end-of-the-world emergency always came up that one of you had to run off and deal with.”

“Exactly.”

“Well, not this time. This time
I’m
planning your wedding, and someone else can deal with the earthquakes and floods.”

“It was a volcano.”

“Whatever.”

“Yay!” I lift my glass into the air again. “Wedding time!”

CHAPTER

TWENTY-THREE

Monday morning comes, and I’m still riding the high of knowing I’m going to be an aunt. The fact that Mom is still in a potion-induced sleep is a bit of a damper, but I’m almost certain it won’t be long before she wakes. Couple that with the fact that I’m no longer furious about her lying to me—my anger is diminishing a little each day—and this looks like it could be a good Monday. Even an interrogation about my fugitive mother—which I’m pretty sure is coming—can’t ruin my day, thanks to one tiny and obvious fact I remembered yesterday about Guild interrogations.

An envelope appeared on our kitchen table last night with a note from the Guild informing me that training would return to normal today. After everything that’s happened since I left the Guild on Friday morning—traveling to a distant mountain, falling down a chasm, my parents’ attack, Mom turning out to be a Seer, Vi and Ryn’s baby—I’d completely forgotten about the enchanted storm the Guild considered a potential threat.