The Walshes had tried to instill that voice in Seanna. According to Rose, Seanna seemed to get it. She told the story of watching four-year-old Seanna at a town picnic, salivating over a chocolate gargoyle won by a cousin. When the cousin walked away from her prize, Seanna had realized no one seemed to be watching, and then, with some effort, had pulled herself away and run to join the other kids.

“It seemed as if she was learning,” Rose said. “There were other indications, too, that convinced us she’d be fine. And then…she wasn’t.”

“Did she gradually get worse?” I asked. “Or did it seem sudden?”

Rose took a long drink of her spiked tea, looking exhausted. “I don’t even know anymore. We thought it was sudden, and then we thought maybe we’d been fooling ourselves that she was improving, and then…after a while, it was like putting our fingers in dike holes. We were so busy stopping the flood that we had no time to wonder when or how it started.”

“But if you were to give me a rough estimate,” I prodded.

“Around puberty. We thought it was that—typical teen rebellion. She ran away shortly after, and then her parents died and—” Rose’s voice hitched. “She didn’t care. That was the last straw for everyone else. Her parents died in a car accident while searching for her, and she couldn’t even bother coming to the funeral. The rest of the family gave up.”

“Except you.”

Rose reached for a cookie. She didn’t eat it. Just stared down at it. “No, even I gave up. I think that’s part of what happened, what went so wrong with Seanna. I…I had my own issues. My life just…imploded? Exploded? All I know is that I wasn’t there for Seanna. I had my personal meltdown, ended up in prison. After I made parole, I came home for her.”

“To be here for her.”

A twist of Rose’s lips. “Too little, too late. Next thing I knew, she had Gabriel, and when I saw her again, I barely recognized her. I kept telling myself that skipping her parents’ funeral was a misunderstanding, that deep down she loved them too much to intentionally miss it. I was wrong. The Seanna I met after I came home was exactly the sort of person who’d do that. She’d…”

“Lost something.”

“Lost everything. Everything that mattered.”

—

I stopped by Veronica’s next. The ponytailed young woman who opened the door looked like a teenager. She was lamia, a Greek subtype of fae that cannot age their glamours. For lamiae, there are only two forms: the teen girl and their true one, a snakelike human.