Dead and Gone

time for a young ’un to come visiting, and who’s to say they couldn’t follow me to Remy’s little house? So far none of them knew about Hunter. I hadn’t even told my great-grandfather about Hunter’s special talent. If Niall himself didn’t know, maybe none of the hostiles had uncovered the information.
    On the whole, better to take no risks.
    “I really want to meet with him and get to know him. I promise I’ll help him as much as I can,” I said. “Right now, it just isn’t possible. But since we have a little time to spare before kindergarten . . . maybe in a month or so?”
    “Oh,” Remy said in a nonplussed way. “I was hoping to bring him over on my day off.”
    “I have a little situation here that I have to resolve.” If I was alive after it was resolved . . . but I wasn’t going to imagine that. I tried to think of a palatable excuse, and of course, I did have one. “My sister-in-law just died,” I told Remy. “Can I call you when I’m not so busy with the details of . . .” I couldn’t think of a way to wrap up that sentence. “I promise it’ll be soon. If you don’t have a day off, maybe Kristen could bring him?” Kristen was Remy’s girlfriend.
    “Well, that’s part of the problem,” Remy said, and he sounded tired but also a little amused. “Hunter told Kristen that he knew she didn’t really like him, and that she should stop thinking about his daddy without any clothes on.”
    I drew a deep breath, tried not to laugh, didn’t manage it. “I am sorry,” I said. “How did Kristen handle that?”
    “She started crying. Then she told me she loved me but my kid was a freak, and she left.”
    “Worst possible scenario,” I said. “Ah . . . do you think she’ll tell other people?”
    “Don’t see why she wouldn’t.”
    This sounded depressingly familiar: shades of my painful childhood. “Remy, I’m sorry,” I said. Remy had seemed like a nice guy on our brief acquaintance, and I had been able to see he was devoted to his son. “If it makes you feel any better, I survived that somehow.”
    “But did your parents?” There was a trace of a smile in his voice, to his credit.
    “No,” I said. “However, it didn’t have anything to do with me. They got caught by a flash flood when they were driving home one night. It was pouring rain, visibility was terrible, the water was black like the road, and they just drove down onto the bridge and got swept away.” Something buzzed in my brain, some kind of signal that this thought was significant.
    “I’m sorry, I was just joking,” Remy was saying in a shocked voice.
    “No, no problem. Just one of those things,” I said, the way you do when you don’t want the other person to fuss about your feelings.
    We left it that I would call him when I had “some free time.” (That actually meant “when no one’s trying to kill me,” but I didn’t explain that to Remy.) I hung up and sat on the stool by the kitchen counter. I was thinking about my parents’ deaths for the first time in a while. I had some sad memories, but that was the saddest of all. Jason had been ten, and I had been seven, so my recollection wasn’t precise, but we’d talked about it over the years, of course, and my grandmother had recounted the story many times, especially as she grew older. It never varied. The torrential rain, the road leading down into the little hollow where the creek ran, the black water . . . and they’d been swept away into the dark. The truck had been found the next day; their bodies, a day or two after that.
    I got dressed for work automatically. I slicked my hair up in an extra-tight ponytail, making sure any stray hairs were gelled into place. As I was tying my shoes, Amelia dashed downstairs to tell me that she’d checked her witch reference books.
    “The best way to kill fairies is with iron.” Her face was lit with triumph. I hated to rain on her parade. Lemons were even better, but it was kind of hard to slip a fairy a lemon without the fairy realizing it.
    “I knew that,” I said, trying not to sound depressed. “I mean, I appreciate the effort, but I need to be able to knock them out.” So I could run away. I didn’t know if I could stand to have to hose down the driveway again.
    Of course, killing the enemy beat the alternative: letting them catch me and do what they wished with me.
    Amelia was ready for her date with Tray. She was wearing high heels with her designer jeans, an unusual look for