A Caress Of Twilight   ::   Гамильтон Лорел

"Why should our bodies, whatever they look like, make any difference toyou?"

"I told you what I want, Meredith."

I nodded, and I was nice enough not to blurt out her secret in front of everyone, though heaven knows she hadn't earned the courtesy.

"If anyone who aids me in such an endeavor is impure, then. ." She sort of nodded at me, trying to get me to finish the sentence in my head.

I leaned into her and hissed, more than whispered, "The child will be deformed."

No amount of glamour could hide the smell of cocoa butter, liquor, and cigarette smoke in her hair and skin. A sudden wave of nausea rushed over me.

I backed away from her and would have fallen if Rhys hadn't caught me, steadied me. "What's wrong?" he whispered.

I shook my head. "I'm tired of being here with this woman."

"Then we leave," Doyle said.

I shook my head again. "Not yet." I half clutched Rhys's arm and turned back to Maeve. "You tell me why you were exiled. You tell me the whole truth here and now or we walk away from you forever."

"If he knew I told anyone, he would kill me."

"If he finds out I was here, talking to you, do you really believe he'll wait to find out if you told me?"

She looked frightened now. But I didn't care.

"Tell me, Maeve, tell me or we walk, and you'll never find anyone else outside of faerie who can help you."

"Meredith, please. ."

"No," I said. "The great pure Seelie Court, how they look down on us. If a child is born deformed, then it is killed, or was, until you all stopped having children. Then even the monsters were precious. Do you know what happened to the babies after a while, Maeve? Do you know what happened in the last four hundred years or so to deformed Seelie children? Because, make no mistake, inbreeding catches up, even with the immortal."

"I don't. . know."

"Yes, you do. All that bright, shining throng know. My own cousin was kept because she was part brownie. You didn't throw her out, because brownies are Seelie — not court, but creatures of light. But when the sidhe themselves breed monsters, the pure, shining, Seelie sidhe, breed deformities, monstrosities, then what happens, where do they go?"

She was crying now, soft, silver tears. "I don't know."

"Yes, you do. The babies go to the Unseelie Court. We take in the monsters, those pure Seelie monsters. We take them in, because we welcome everyone.