“This one cannot.” Mills looked at the foreman. “I trust you know how it can be handled?”

“Not myself, sir, but I know folks that do. The question is how you’ll want it dealt with. Like those foxes, we can smoke them out and hope they’ll relocate. That’s what I’d advise myself.”

Mills shook his head briskly. “No. I told Napier I don’t have time for that with the foxes, and the same goes for these . . . whatever they are. I want them gone. Permanently. Get them gone and call in a priest to bless the land. I want a good Christian home for my wife and our children.”

The foreman looked uneasy. “These aren’t foxes, sir. They’re—”

“—a far more dangerous sort of vermin. Get them gone. If you can’t, I’ll find someone who can.”

Mills strode off, disappearing as he walked. I turned back to the foreman. He’d vanished, too. The ruins reappeared, and the little girl, who stood watching me, waiting.

“There were fae here,” I said. “But they weren’t the sort that are in Cainsville.”

“They were and they weren’t. When the woodlands began to vanish in the Old World, some fae came to the new one and founded towns like Cainsville.”

“Where they could control their environment. Keep to themselves and maintain the boundaries. Mingle with humans only as much as they cared to mingle.”

“Yes. As those safe havens grew, some of the wilder fae found homes there. But in the early days, they took refuge where they could. In places like this. Today, wherever they might live, the Tylwyth Teg and the Cwn Annwn are kept safe by human ignorance. One cannot fear what one doesn’t believe exists. In the early days, though, there were more believers, and sometimes it ended like this . . .”

The sun flashed, blinding bright, forcing my eyes shut, and I reopened them to a moonless night. Men carried torches at the perimeter of the main property. A dozen men with torches and bags. They dumped something from the burlap sacks in a ring around the grounds.

“What is this?” one man called. “It looks like . . . metal shavings.”

Iron. They’re sowing iron.

I shivered in spite of myself and rubbed my arms. I glanced around, but Gabriel and the little girl were gone. It was just me, alone in the yard, watching the men work. At a whisper, I saw a shadow slip behind a tree.

“Cad atá ar siúl?”

I turned toward the voice. A woman stood beside me. Or it looked like a woman—I struggled to focus on her, as if she were behind old glass, her form and features shifting and blurring. She was my height, with dark hair and sky-blue eyes. Those eyes were fixed on the men.

“Cad atá ar siúl?”