Free Tooth and Nail by Jennifer Safrey

was.
    And looking at my mother curled up in the corner of the sofa I had spent so many hours on, in the living room I had lived in, I believed.
    “It was never my intention to take you off the fae path to peace.” Mom got up. Standing, she was tall enough to look me straight in the eye. “I left so you would have peace in this world. I couldn’t give you over to fight their battles.”
    A thousand more questions crowded my head and I opened my mouth to let the next one spill out, but the doorbell rang before I could make a sound.
    Mom and I both looked at the door, then at each other. “Avery,” she said, her tone dissolving from that of Scheherazade storyteller and re-solidifying as mother. “He called earlier and said he’d meet you here for dinner.”
    I actually felt my shoulder blades quiver with tension. “You didn’t tell me that.”
    “Seems like keeping information to myself is my character flaw,” she said. “Go open the door.”
    I stood rooted to my spot on the carpet, completely unnerved. I wasn’t ready to see Avery. Since he’d left the house this morning I’d met a faerie, been told that my mother was a faerie, been informed that I was half-faerie, and melted into a sensual puddle at a guy leaning against a lamppost who I was now relatively certain also was a faerie.
    Not faeries. Fae.
    Yeah, that distinction really just wasn’t sinking in.
    “Open the door,” Mom repeated gently, and placed her hands on my shoulders. “Go on. You’re no different than you were before now. Your self-awareness is the only thing that’s changed.” She kissed my forehead, but I saw her crease her own before she left for the kitchen. Somehow I got to the door and opened it.
    >=<
    I didn’t remember what the three of us talked about over roast turkey, or how many glasses of white wine I had, or how Avery must have kissed me and said, “No problem,” when I told him I wanted to stay overnight with my mother and I’d be back in the morning.
    When my mother and I were finally alone again, we made a mutual silent pact to not resume our discussion, and I retreated to my old bedroom. She knew I had questions, and I knew she had answers, but I needed to own this for a while, to turn this new information around and around and inspect it from every angle, the way I would spin and examine each row of a Rubik’s Cube.
    Although my glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling had been scratched off years ago and my golden throw rug had flattened into a roughened scrap, this room was still mine. I pushed against the wooden window frame, throwing my whole body behind it once, twice, before it rose, creaking with resistance, the chilly breeze lifting the hem of my T-shirt. I was grateful for it, and for my room, and for the momentary normalcy.
    Sinking cross-legged to the floor, I pulled out Frederica’s card and my cell phone, flung both onto the threadbare rug in front of me, and thought.
    I thought for a long, long time.
    I thought about destiny— my destiny. Mom hid me from it. Dad ran away from it. Frederica invited me to accept it. Avery didn’t know a thing about it.
    “We need you, Gemma Fae.”
    I was half innocence and peace, and half chaos and conflict. Had I always known that, deep down?
    My emotions had taken hold of me and shaken me senseless for the last few hours, so I let my brain take over for a while, cooling my core with logic and analysis.   My mind only had to turn everything around a few times before it told me what Mom hadn’t yet: That the morning fae, knowing I was out there in the world, had chosen to leave me alone, biding their time. Tracking me down now meant they had a reason, a strong reason.
    If there were fae everywhere and they had a large recruiting pool, they could have asked any local fae to join the D.C.-area collection. So this wasn’t just a help-wanted plea. They bridged a three-decade communication gap to find me , the hybrid, and I knew why.
    There was a threat to the fae