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too open, too exposed for her liking, so she walked as quickly as she could without appearing to run past the Union Oyster House and into the T station at the Haymarket.
    Once she was underground, she felt dangerously exposed on the platform as she waited for the train. There were a few dozen other passengers waiting as well, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that the Fae she had just fled from was going to emerge from behind one of the pillars, as he had in the alley.
    Gran should have warned her about that. That they could pass . Whatever that meant. Some kind of superfast travel ability, no doubt. Sorcha now had the distinct impression that she didn’t know enough about the Fae to survive another encounter with one.
    Finally the orange line arrived. Twelve stops to home. Two minutes between stops. Thirty seconds at each station, if she was lucky and the platforms weren’t too crowded.
    At every stop she expected her Fae pursuer to appear when the doors opened, but she reached the cavernous concrete and glass station at Forest Hills without incident and began the long walk to her house.
    Normally Tommy would walk with her at night, but she hadn’t wanted to wait for him. If she’d gone back into the Black Rose, if he’d come home with her, he would have stayed the night and made it more difficult to slip away in the morning. She would pack and prepare the house for her absence tonight and make her way back into Boston tomorrow with the commuters, safe in the rush-hour crowd.
    When Sorcha had lived with Gran, she’d seen the old farmhouse with a child’s eyes. She’d liked the attics in the main structure and the service wing, the ell that projected at a right angle from the back, because they were secret and private. She’d loved the fireplace in her room, even though Gran had never used it, because it had seemed romantic and old-fashioned.
    She’d never noticed all the iron. It had just seemed like part of the antique decor. She’d seen similar door latches on other old houses, similar gate hinges, hooks, and railings, but never, she realized when she’d returned as an adult, so much in one house.
    The batten doors were banded with iron and studded with iron nails for good measure. The fireplaces all had iron dampers. Most of the ground-floor windows were covered with iron grilles that Sorcha had always assumed to be security bars, a precaution against the crime that flourished in Jamaica Plain when she was a child and had still not been banished by the community’s slow gentrification. The rest looked like leaded glass casements, but they were really panes of glass set in iron muntins.
    It was only when she’d come back to claim her inheritance, after one of the lawyer’s dozens of letters had reached her at the home of a college friend, that she‘d seen the house for what it was: a fortress meant to keep out the Fae. But if she stayed here and let that Fae track her, it could just as easily become a prison.
    As it had always been, Sorcha now understood, for Gran.
    It was late by the time she had a bag packed and the water turned off where it entered the house in the basement. She would call to disconnect the power once she was on the road. She was exhausted and eager to climb into bed, trying not to think about how much she would miss the comfort of the thick down topper and the burnished wooden headboard, nearly buried behind feather pillows, when the phone rang.
    Sorcha would have never bought a fancy phone with caller ID, but Gran must have done so some time before she’d died, because the cordless beside the bed had been there when Sorcha had come back.
    It was Tommy calling from his cell phone. She considered letting it go to voice mail, but decided against it. Tommy had known about the Fae in the crowd, seen Sorcha talking to him. She hadn’t told him she was leaving. He would have good reason to worry, and knowing Tommy, if he couldn’t get her on the phone now, he’d come to the house, and