I was back inside the house. Ricky had gone to help Ioan deal with the loss of a Huntsman and hound. Gabriel and I were with Rose in my parlor. Veronica, Grace, and Patrick were there, too. I’d never seen any of them quite as somber as they were that morning. Ida was dead. Walter was also dead, a traitor whose true story would never fully be known.

I thought about that. Mostly, I thought about it in relation to Ida. I remembered those noises on the stairs to the belfry when the sluagh had been talking about Walter’s betrayal and his death. That had been Ida, I realized, listening to confirmation of her mate’s treachery and his murder. What had that been like for her? He was her lover, her consort, her partner for centuries, and he’d turned on her and on Cainsville, and she would never know why. She died not knowing why.

I think that makes her more “human” to me than anything. It makes me grieve more, and I wonder if her sacrifice was in part to rectify the damage he’d done but also because, like Alexios, she’d lost her life partner. For her sake, I hope that, in those final moments, she was able to tell herself he’d done it for Cainsville—that, in a twisted way, he’d still done it for them.

But we weren’t talking about Ida or Walter or what would happen in Cainsville now that they were gone. We were talking about Seanna. We’d found her, sleeping as soundly as when my mother had been poised over her with a knife. All that drama, and she’d never woken. She still hadn’t, deep in her fae-induced sleep. Now we had to decide what was to be done with her.

“So what happens with her mark?” I said. “The elder sluagh is dead, but it’s still there.”

“As it will be, unfortunately,” Veronica said. “The death of the sluagh only means that one specifically cannot take her soul. She’ll still be collected, by other elder sluagh. However, now that the one who marked her is gone, I can remove it.”

“And removing it means she won’t be taken?”

Veronica glanced at Patrick. There was a long moment of silence.

“It doesn’t mean that?” I said.

“It does,” Patrick said. “But if you take away the mark, you give her back what they stole. Give her back her humanity.”

“Then that’s a no-brainer, right?” I glanced at Gabriel, sitting beside me on the sofa. “Sorry. I shouldn’t be the one talking. In fact, I probably shouldn’t even be part of this discussion.”

Gabriel’s hand reached for mine. “No, you should. What happens to her affects you, should she somehow regain her humanity and still decide to hurt you.”

“She wouldn’t,” Veronica said.