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Copper Veins(16)



Mom smiled at that. “Aye. We were nothing if not happy.”

“If you’d like, I can ask the silverkin to set something up,” I suggested. “Maybe you could recreate when you first met, like a date.”

“It wasn’t what one would call a date,” Mom said. “He’d evaded my guards and breached my court. I nearly had him thrown into a cell.”

“Okay, maybe not that. Unless you’d like him in chains?” I waggled my eyebrows, and Mom laughed. She’d laughed so rarely since Dad disappeared. With a bit of fine-tuning, their relationship would be as close as it had always been, I was sure of it.

“C’mon,” I said, pulling her to her feet. “Let’s go talk to Shep. Those silverkin can whip up more than just food.”





8


Mom and I ended up spending the rest of the day in the far orchard, the one where the trees looked the least like anything found in the Mundane realm with their pinkish leaves and bright blue fruit hanging in clusters reminiscent of grapes. Unusual as the trees were, that orchard also just happened to hold a lovely green hill at its center, which the silverkin had decided to convert into a brugh in their own inimitable way. Due to the hill’s soft earth, making it into an actual hollow hill wasn’t a good idea, but they had managed to install a fairy door for aesthetics if nothing more. Once that was done, they busied themselves arranging the most epic of picnics on the lawn.

“It’s amazing,” Mom murmured, looking over the roughly hewn table made to look like the very one she had once feasted at as the Queen of the Seelie Court. “Beau will be amazed to see it here, so far removed from Eire.”

“I bet he will be,” I murmured. The Dad I remembered was a happy yet serious man, not one who was easily surprised. Still, I wondered how he would react to a version of the brugh here in the Otherworld. I hadn’t known him when he was a scrappy young thing, as Mom had once so eloquently put it, so maybe he wouldn’t enjoy the surprise. Even so, what man wouldn’t want to recreate the night he’d met his wife?

And, if the deep voice hailing us was any indication, it seemed that the man in question was making his way toward us.

“Don’t let him see me!” Mom shrieked, patting at her disheveled hair. “Or the brugh!” With that, she ran off like a schoolgirl to primp for her man. I didn’t even try to fight my smile as I walked through the trees and met Dad.

“What’s going on out here?” he asked, trying to peek over my shoulder.

“You’ll find out soon enough,” I said, grabbing his shoulders and turning him around. He turned easily, not like the father of my youth who was an immoveable bearded mountain. My present father, though, preferred being clean-shaven. And I was a lot bigger than the seven-year-old he’d left behind. “What’s up with you?”

“I have decided that you and Max should accompany me to the Mundane realm again,” he said. “The presidential election draws near, and I would like to disrupt the government’s agenda as much as possible.”

In my opinion, anything that disrupted Mike Armstrong becoming president of Pacifica was a good idea. I opened my mouth to say that I’d go tell Micah about our plan, when I remembered what he’d said before: that I had no ties to the Mundane realm, a realm I’d lived in for almost my entire life. Would he even care about the nearing election or the Mundane government’s agenda? It didn’t seem like it. And my father needed my help.

“All right,” I said, silencing the small voice in the back of my head urging me to tell Micah. If I did, he wouldn’t let me go. It was better if he didn’t know at all. “When do we leave?”

Dad and I collected Max, who was always up for a bit of troublemaking. After Max and I put on knit hats and dark glasses similar to the ones we had worn to Mike Armstrong’s political rally, the three of us portaled over to Capitol City. Since Sadie had only made two hats, Dad was going to have to make do with just glasses.

Interestingly, Capitol City was once called Portland, but not for any magical reasons—it was built alongside a lovely natural harbor, or port. After the magic wars had ended, any place names that were even vaguely magical were changed to the most boring things imaginable; thus Portland became Capitol City.

But it didn’t stop there. Portland had never been the capital of anything, not the country or its state or even its county. In fact, Portland was nestled in the far northeastern corner, home to sweltering summers and bone-chilling winters—really, no one in their right mind would have made it the capital of anything. Which is pretty much why Elementals had migrated to Portland in the first place.