“I don’t know,” he said, with apparent regret. “Knowing Adele, I imagine she didn’t think it would be Christian. It’s possible that she didn’t even remember she had it by that time, or that she regarded it as a romantic love token but nothing more. After all, by the time her daughter’s illness became evident, it had been many years since I’d given it to her on Fintan’s behalf.”

I thought hard, trying to pare down this conversation to learn what I had to know. “Why on earth did you think telepathy would be such a great gift?” I blurted.

For the first time, he looked a bit miffed. “I thought it would give Fintan’s descendants an edge over their fellow humans for all of their lives, to know what other people were thinking and planning,” he said. “And since I’m nearly all demon, and I had it to give, it seemed a splendid gift to me. It would be wonderful even for a fairy! If your great-grandfather had known that Breandan’s henchmen were determined to murder him, he could have squelched the rebellion before it caught hold. Your father could have saved himself and your mother from drowning if he’d known a trap was set for him.”

“But those things didn’t happen.”

“Full-blooded fairies aren’t telepathic—though they can sometimes send messages, they can’t hear an answer—and your father didn’t have the essential spark.”

This seemed like a circular kind of conversation.

“So what this all boils down to is this: Since you two were such good buddies, Fintan asked you to give his and Adele’s descendants a gift, to stand as their—our—sponsor.”

Mr. Cataliades smiled. “Correct.”

“You were willing to do this, and you thought telepathy would be a dandy present.”

“Correct again. Though it seems I was mistaken.”

“You were. And you gave this gift in some mysterious demon way—”

“Not so mysterious,” he said indignantly. “Adele and Fintan each drank a thimbleful of my blood.”

Okay, I could not picture my grandmother doing that. But then, I couldn’t have imagined her consorting with a fairy, either. In point of fact, it had become obvious that I’d known my grandmother very well in some respects and not at all in others.

“I put it in wine and told her it was a special vintage,” Mr. Cataliades confessed. “And in a way it was so.”

“Okay, you lied. No big surprise there,” I said. Though Gran had been plenty smart, and I was sure she’d at least had suspicions. I waved my hands in the air. I could think about that later. “Okeydokey. So after they’d both ingested your blood, any descendants of theirs would be telepathic if they were also born with this essential spark.”

“Correct.” He smiled so broadly that I felt I’d gotten an A on my test.