The Unkindest Tide (October Daye #13) - Seanan McGuire Page 0,22

in many ways; being a Selkie hadn’t changed the underlying softness of her bone structure, or stolen the riotous curls from her dark brown, almost black hair. Out of all Janet’s descendants, she was the only one who didn’t seem to have purchased her color from the “washed-out and pale” bin at the discount store. She was wearing sweatpants and a UC Berkeley sweatshirt, and she had never been lovelier.

Then she took a step toward us, and the air around her glittered, the way it always did when someone was wearing a disguise intended to let them pass for human. My heart sank again, this time with no accompanying uplift. She wasn’t human anymore. She couldn’t even wear her own face in her own home, not without alerting her father to the fact that something had changed, for good.

Gillian smiled when she saw the look on my face. It wasn’t a kind smile. “Liz has been teaching me,” she said, and snapped her fingers. The illusion around her fell away, leaving the smell of flowering fennel and primroses behind. It wasn’t the scent her magic would have had if she’d stayed Dóchas Sidhe, but it was close, so close. I breathed in deeply, memorizing the unique signature of her magic, before looking at her without her masks for the first time in months.

She still looked essentially like herself, only . . . different. Her eyes were so dark they verged on black, irises and pupils blending seamlessly. Silver streaks ran through her curls, echoing the color of the seal’s pelt tied around her shoulders. Her ears were dully pointed, not as sharp as mine or Tybalt’s, but distinctly inhuman. She held up one hand, spreading her fingers to show me the webbing that extended to the first knuckles.

“Daddy won’t be home for a few hours,” she said. “I don’t like being disguised all the time. It makes my ears itch.”

Again, that strange fluttering in my chest. “Illusions make me feel the same way,” I said.

“Huh.” Gillian finished coming down the stairs, looking first at me, and then at Tybalt. “If I’m not going to wear a mask, you shouldn’t either.”

“As my lady wishes,” said Tybalt, and let his illusion go.

To her credit, Gillian barely flinched when Tybalt’s human disguise wisped away and revealed him for what he really was. She turned to me.

“Your turn.”

I swallowed my sigh and flicked my fingers, willing the spell to break and disperse. I hate recasting my illusions when I don’t have to. My magic is stronger than it used to be, thanks to the shifted balance of my blood, but illusions still don’t come easy to me, and casting too many will leave me with a headache even my rapid healing can’t get rid of. I can heal a broken bone in minutes and bring myself back from the dead, and I still can’t cure migraines. Sometimes the world is just unfair.

Gillian tilted her head, studying me, and finally said, “If you’d looked like this when you came back five years ago, I might have believed you were really my mother. This is how you always looked in my dreams. Mom?”

“Yes, sweetheart?” said Janet, before I could open my mouth.

Gillian’s smile was earnest and sincere, and so quick it broke my heart a little, because she had never been talking to me. “Can we go to the kitchen? I want to have time to put my face back on if Daddy comes home early.”

“Of course,” said Janet, and put her arm around Gillian’s shoulders, guiding our involuntarily shared daughter away from the stairs, away from the windows through which a passing human might happen to see her, and into the room that belonged, more than anything, to Janet herself.

It was impossible to look at Gillian’s choice of venues and not see it, however unintentionally, as yet another signal that Janet was her real mother. Janet was the one who’d been there when she lost her baby teeth, when she learned how to ride a bike, for her first day of kindergarten and her last day of high school. I might have given birth to her, but I hadn’t raised her, and I still didn’t know whether she was ever going to be able to forgive me.

The kitchen was decorated in early kitchen witch. The window garden was lush with herbs and flowering plants; there was even a tomato bush that had somehow been coaxed into bristling with early fruit, each one golden orange and