She folded her arms and leaned back in her chair. “You appeared to be in league with a Fae prince—and again, Pri-ya. You were stripping for it. What did you expect me to think? It wasn’t until I saw you threaten him with the spear that I began to understand differently. Speaking of which, I need to see that spear.” She rose, skirted the desk with the agility of a much younger woman, and extended her hand.
I laughed. She was crazy if she thought I was handing my weapon over. I’d sooner put it through her heart. “I don’t think so.”
“MacKayla,” she said sternly, “let me see that spear. We are your people. We are sisters in this war.”
“My sister is dead. Did you see her, too? Did you make the same snap judgment and turn her away? Tell her to go die by herself? Because she did,” I said bitterly. “The Fae ripped her to shreds.”
Rowena looked startled. “What is this of a sister?”
“Oh, please.” Here it was, the real reason I hated her. Not just for turning me away and shattering my beliefs about my family, but why hadn’t she found my sister? With her spelled signs, her advertisements, and her bicycling spies, why hadn’t she drawn Alina in? Taught her? Saved her? “She was in Dublin for months. She hung out in the pubs all the time. How could you not have run into her?”
“Would you expect me to encounter every single person in Chicago on a visit?” she snapped. “Dublin is a big city, and we have only recently become organized. Until a short time ago, I was busy elsewhere. How long was your sister here? What did she look like?”
“She was here for eight months. She was blond like…like I was the first time you saw me. Same color eyes. More athletically built. A bit taller.”
Rowena searched my face, as if absorbing and breaking down my individual features, trying to place them in random arrangements on another woman. Finally she shook her head. “I’m sorry, MacKayla, but no. I never met your sister. You must tell me what happened. You and I are sisters in more than vision and cause; we are sisters in loss. Tell me everything.”
“We aren’t sisters in anything, and I’m not giving you my spear, old woman.” She wasn’t going to suck me in with sympathy.
She gave me a hard stare. “I sent you away the first time. The second time I tried to get you to come back here with me, but you refused. We’ve both turned the other away once. I won’t make that same mistake again. Will you?”
“You should have found my sister. You should have saved her.”
“You have no idea how much I wish I could have. Let me save you instead.”
“I don’t need saving.”
“If you’re working with Jericho Barrons, you do.”
“What do you know about Barrons?”
“That there are not, and never have been, any male sidhe-seers, MacKayla. It is a gift of matriarchy.”
I scoffed. “A gift? It killed my sister and ruined my life. As for Barrons, what is he, then? Because he sure can see the Fae, and he helps me kill them, which is more than you’ve ever done.”
“Is that all one must do to win your trust, MacKayla? Battle alongside you? Let us go kill a Fae together then, right now. Do you know what’s in his heart? His mind? Why he does it? What he’s after?”
I said nothing because there was nothing to say to that. Most of the time I wasn’t sure he even had a heart, and whatever thoughts he entertained he kept intensely guarded.
“I didn’t think so. He tells you nothing, does he?”
“He’s told me more about what I am than you have.”
“You haven’t given me a chance.”
“I gave you two.”
“Try again, MacKayla. I’m ready to talk. Are you ready to listen?”
“Do you know what he is?” I pressed.
“I know what he isn’t, and that’s all I need to know. He’s not one of us. We are pure of heart, pure of purpose. You see that shamrock?” Rowena pointed to a picture behind her desk of a large green clover on a background of embossed gold. “Look at it. Do you know why it’s considered lucky, and has been for longer than anyone can recall?”
I shook my head.
“Before it was the clover of Saint Patrick’s trinity, it was ours. It’s the emblem of our Order. It’s the symbol our ancient sisters used to carve on their doors and dye into banners millennia ago, when they moved to a new village. It was their way of letting the inhabitants know who they were and what they were there to do. When people saw our sign, they declared a time of great feasting and celebrated for a fortnight. They welcomed us with gifts of their finest food, wine, and men. They held tournaments to compete to bed us.” She strode to the picture, snatching a pencil from the desk on the way to it. “It is not a clover at all, but a vow.” She traced the lines of the two bottom leaves, left to right, with the eraser. “You see how these two leaves make a sideways figure eight, like a horizontal Möbius strip? They are two S’s, one right side up, one upside down, ends meeting. The third leaf and stem is an upright P.”