The sylvan stamped his foot. “Are you with me so far? Good. Here’s the rest of it. He waited for his chance to get even, the way demons do. He was mostly smoke and dark magic, so aging wasn’t a problem for him. He could afford to be patient. He waited until your grandmother married and your mother came along. He waited for your mother to grow up. I think your grandmother believed she’d seen the last of him by then, but she was wrong. All that time, he was waiting to get back at her. He did it through your mother. He deceived her with his magic and his lies, and then he seduced her. Not out of love or even infatuation. Out of hate. Out of a desire to hurt your grandmother. Deliberately, maliciously, callously. You were the result. Your grandmother didn’t know he was responsible at first, and even if she had, she wouldn’t have told your mother. But the demon waited until you were a few months old and then told them both. Together.”
Nest stared at him, horrified.
His face knotted. “Told them why, too. Took great delight in it. I was there. Your mother went off the cliffs shortly afterward. I think maybe she did it on purpose, but nobody saw it happen, so I can’t be sure.”
His frustration with her attitude seemed to dissipate. His voice softened. “The thing that concerns me is that the demon wanted to hurt your grandmother, to get even with her for what she’d done to him, and that was why he destroyed your mother, but I think he’s after you for a different reason. I think he believes you belong to him, that you’re his child, his flesh and blood, and that’s why he’s come back-to claim what’s his.”
Nest hugged her knees to her chest, listening to the soft rustle of spruce and pine boughs as a breeze passed through the shadowed grove. “Why does he think I would go with him? Or stay with him if he took me? I’m nothing like him.”
But even as she said it, she wondered if it was so. She looked and talked and acted like a human being, but so did the demon, in his human guise, when it suited him. Underneath was that’ core of magic that defined them both. She did not know its source in her. But if she had inherited it from her father, then perhaps there was more of him in her than she wished.
Pick pointed a finger at her. “Don’t be doubting yourself, Nest. Having him for your father is an accident of birth, nothing more. Having his magic doesn’t mean anything. Whatever human part of him went into the making of you is long since dead and gone, swallowed up by the thing he’s become. Don’t look for something that isn’t there.”
She tightened her lips stubbornly. “I’m not.”
“Then what are you thinking, girl?”
“That I’m not going with him. That I hate him for what he’s done.”
Pick looked doubtful. “He must know that, don’t you expect? And it mustn’t matter to him. He must think he can make you come, whether you want to go with him or not. Think it through. You have to be very careful. You have to be smart.”
He put his chin in his hands and rested his elbows on his knees. “This whole business is very confusing, if you ask me. I keep wondering what John Ross is doing in Hopewell, of all places. Why would a Knight of the Word choose to fight this particular battle? To save you? Why, when there’s dozens of others being lost everywhere you turn? You’re my best friend, Nest, and I’d do anything to help you. But John Ross doesn’t have that connection. There’s a war being waged out there between the Word and the Void, and what’s going on here in Sinnissippi Park seems like an awfully small skirmish, the presence of your father notwithstanding. I think there must be something more to all this, something we don’t know about.”
“Do you think Gran knew?” she asked hesitantly.
“Maybe. Maybe that’s why the demon killed her. But I don’t think so. I think he killed your grandmother because he was afraid of her, afraid that she would get in his way and spoil his plans. And because he wanted to get even with her. No, I think John Ross is the one who knows. I think that’s what he’s doing here. Maybe it was your grandmother’s death that prompted him to tell you about your father-because of what he knows that we don’t.”