“No,” Neve said, her voice firm. “I don’t believe that. If the Ridden Druid managed to leave, then you can, too.”
“That’s not how it works, Neve.”
“To hell with how it works,” she snapped, eyes blazing. “To hell with that! You belong to us and the world, not the bloody Wild Hunt! Forsake it and stay.”
“I can’t.”
She drew a breath to protest but Phelan’s tightening grip forestalled what she was about to say. She threw a questioning glance in his direction and didn’t like the look she saw in his eye.
“How do we bargain you free?” Phelan asked quietly. “There must be some kind of loophole.”
“None that I’ve found,” Seamus said quietly. “But then after the first hundred years or so, I stopped trying to find one. I accepted what had become of me and tried to…temper…the Hunt.” He smiled a faint, weak smile. “It’s different from what it used to be. Mercifully.”
“Your influence?” Phelan asked, one corner of his mouth quirking upward.
Seamus inclined his head, smiling weakly. “You could say so. Of course, until recently it’s been difficult to operate. There’s very few places in the world where a pack of riders in cloaks wouldn’t be noticed before the conflagration.”
“Is that what you’re calling it?” Phelan murmured. “We’ve been calling it the end of the world.”
Seamus smiled faintly and shook his head. “You know as well as I do that it’s hardly the end. It’s just the end of the world as we all knew it, not that it was very familiar for most of our kith and kin.”
“It’s more familiar than you think.” Phelan’s lips thinned. “Teague is here, too. He has been for about ten years. I…barely left.”
Seamus’s eyes flicked toward his sister, who grimaced.
“Three years,” she whispered. “I’ve been back for three years.”
“How did—”
It was Neve who answered, a faint smile on her lips. “The edicts died with Father. We knew where we needed to be.
“Where we needed to be was here. It just took us a long time to realize that.”
“Much to our sorrow and regret,” Phelan said softly. “Though hopefully we’ll be able to make up for the lost time.”
