“You dragged me out of the water?” I asked.

“Couldn’t let you drown, even if you were trying to steal my Aelvestone.”

Aelvestone. I liked the sound of that. I looked around the room for it.

There was no shortage of stones. Piled on every surface were smooth, rounded river stones, along with pieces of polished driftwood and other flotsam and jetsam that I imagined the old woman had salvaged from the river: shards of broken glass that had been worn milky by their tumble over the rocks, bits of rusted metal twisted by the currents, and enough broken china to make a tea service for twelve. But no Aelvestone.

“I have her safe, or safe as can be. The Aelvesgold works its way with folks – different ways with different folks – but never for good. Most regular folk don’t see it.” She leaned forward in her rocker and squinted at me. Her face did look younger than it had before. “But you ain’t regular folk, are you?”

“I have a feeling neither are you,” I replied, wincing at the sharp pain in my head as I tried to sit up straighter. “My name’s Cailleach McFay. I work at the college. And you are …?”

“You mean you don’t know?” She started to laugh but the laugh turned into a hacking cough. She spit into a cloudy looking Mason jar and wiped her mouth on the cuff of her flannel shirt. “You must be new to the town not to have heard the story of Lura Trask.”

“Trask?” The name was familiar. I searched my brain until I recalled the story Soheila had told me in the woods about the fisherman who had fallen in love with an undine. “Are you Sullivan Trask’s daughter?”

She made a hoarse noise of consent and spit into the jar again.

“Then your mother …” Lura gave me a sharp warning look, but I persevered. “Your mother was an undine.”

Lura scowled. “And what if she were? What’s it to you?”

“Nothing – it’s just that I didn’t know that undines could have human children.”

“There’s a lot folks don’t know about undines. Most folk don’t even know they exist …” She looked at me suspiciously. “How do you know about them?”

“I helped the other undines find the way into Faerie yesterday.”

She leaned back in her chair and looked out the only window that wasn’t covered with plastic. It gave a glimpse of the river flowing fast and glinting in the late afternoon sunlight. I must have been unconscious for some time.

“I heard them going,” she said, staring into the fire. “I knew it was the day … and that they had to go …”

“They were your sisters,” I said, putting together the bloodlines and realizing that if Lura really was the daughter of the undine who had seduced Sullivan Trask then she must be close to a hundred years old. “Of course you’d miss them.”

She made a harsh noise. “Miss them? Hardly. They kept me up half the nights with their singing. They’d swim down here and tangle my fishing lines and steal my bait. Silly, mindless creatures. Good riddance, I say.”