Over the Moon by Angela Knight

Author:Angela Knight
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2007-01-10T05:00:00+00:00

Her parents argued with her, of course, because they loved her and they were afraid. Her mother cried.

“You’re not going,” her father said adamantly. “You survived the last time. There’s no guarantee you’ll survive the next.”

“You don’t understand,” Cait said.

“I understand. I was with the sidhe for fourteen years. They will destroy you, baby.”

“Daddy, I have to try. Rhys sacrificed everything for me.”

“Why would he do that?” Janet asked.

“Well, he…” Cait floundered. Confessing to her parents Rhys had been her first lover didn’t seem like a good way to get her father on her side. “He felt sorry for me, I guess.”

“Good for him,” Ross said. “That doesn’t mean you have to kill yourself for him.”

“But I care about him.”

“Any feelings you have for this…fairy, the Queen will use against you. You don’t know what you’re up against.”

“So help me.”

“No.”

Cait cast desperately for an argument that would convince him. “You said you knew the sidhe. Maybe one of them could help.”

Janet turned troubled eyes to Ross. “Do you think Puck might…?”

“The minute she sets one foot off the trail, Puck will take her straight to the Queen.”

“Who’s Puck?” Cait asked.

Her parents ignored her.

Cait appealed to her mother, who could usually be counted on to see both sides of every argument. “I have to go.”

“You can’t,” Janet said.

The Queen’s words echoed in Cait’s head. There is more of your dam in you than I realized.

“Why not?” Cait cried, exasperated and afraid. “You did.”

“I loved your father. We were already lovers by then.”

Cait opened her mouth. Shut it.

An uncomfortable silence filled the hospital room.

“You’re not going.” Ross exchanged a long look with his wife. “Nobody is going. And that’s final.”

They didn’t know Rhys, Cait reasoned. They didn’t care about him. They loved her, and they loved each other, and the fairness of one half-mortal’s fate didn’t even enter into their decision.

But Rhys had loved her, too.

Or at least, Cait thought, torn between hope and anguish, he had cared for her enough to sacrifice himself for her sake. The debt he had taken on was her parents’; but the responsibility for his fate was hers.

Even if she hadn’t exactly figured out what to do about it yet.

I went to the fair folk on Midsummer’s Eve…

Cait let her parents bring her home. She gave herself time to heal. She made an appointment to have her stitches removed and endured four more rabies shots spaced over the next month. She called Jill to congratulate her roommate on her engagement and to beg off their rendezvous in Hot Springs. She even applied to the graduate program in Library Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, to begin in the spring semester.

And on June twenty-first, Cait packed her bag for a campus visit, said good-bye to her parents, and walked off the trail south of Wayah Bald.

The sun slanted gold and green through the trees. The air was warm and still, with the stickiness of an approaching storm. Cait trampled the rioting wildflowers, trying not to think.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.