“The battle. Against Giselle.”
A battle. It’s hard to imagine, as a girl from America who’s never seen active combat. I grew up in the suburbs, not even the city. The closest I’ve ever come to violence was Barnabus nearly dying. But Altair, and Dane - they’re off to kill other fae. To kill their own people, against their will. Because of me. Because I agreed to the contract. The guilt claws at my heart like a thousand hungry dogs. I suddenly trip over a step, eating it hard on the stone. The feeling of my right knee grinding against the cement is like razor sandpaper, and it’s justified, isn’t it, for what I’ve done? What I agreed to, blinded by greed. I nurse the wound with my sleeve, mopping up the blood there.
“Shitcakes,” I hiss, looking up at Quinn’s hand he offers to me. I blink at the red stain spreading on his white pants, just above his right knee. I look to my wound, then to his. “What the -“
“The linking ceremony, remember?” He says evenly. “Every wound you get from now on, we all get. Even the dormant high fae.”
He points to the nearest rose dome, where the red rose stands tall. I squint, and through the glass I can see what he’s pointing at exactly - one of the crimson petals has a hole worn through it all of a sudden.
“Oh no,” I whisper. “I didn’t know -“
“Now you do,” Quinn says simply, and disappears into the mansion.
****
A week isn’t supposed to pass in a blur, but it does. Miserably. Mostly because I’m miserable, and I know it. It’s hard not to know it when a bunch of fancy mirrored hallways show you your depressed face all the time. I look like hell, and I feel like hell. But at least only Sir Charles is really around to see me look like hell.
I feed the shield fae and the house fae and Barnabus again, Sir Charles too. I try to practice feeding Quinn without a blindfold, because I’ll be damned if - when Dane finally gets back - we have a repeat of what happened. I didn’t even get to feed him properly - he never shifted into his true form like Quinn and Altair did when they were satiated. Without a blindfold it’s a lot harder on my heart rate, but I manage. If I just focus on how beautiful Quinn is, how amazingly perfectly nature(?) has built all the face, I can momentarily forget he’s a guy. He’s just a gorgeous magical being until I get to the stomach and the pelvis is right there taunting me. But I get him fed properly, tease him about not falling asleep again, and with a single pout he wordlessly sweeps out of the room in his gorgeous sea-robe.
I avoid Vil whenever I can, and thankfully he’s too busy with the ‘battle’ to really seek me out. He’s usually in his room buried behind a pile of papers, not even coming down to eat dinner most of the time, the house fae bringing it up to his room with his silver cart instead. Which leaves me free reign of the house, even if it’s a hollow reign. Quinn spends the day cleaning and the nights at Seventh Circle, so busy with his work I hesitate to even ask him to hang out. Not that he would - he’s not the casual, laid-back ’hanging out’ type. Him and Dane have that in common, too.
The guilt only gets worse as the days go on, and pretty soon I start losing sleep over it - thinking about Altair fighting, about Dane bleeding. They get my wounds but I don’t get theirs, which is a small blessing. But it’s a heavy blessing. I try to bury myself in studying - re-reading my old textbooks and taking the mini-exams there, or walking the gardens and talking to Barnabus, and while those distract me the guilt is always there in the back of my mind, nagging like a worm at an apple.
I get done cleaning my knee wound and re-bandaging it for the day - the least I can do is take care of this shit properly now that I’m in charge of the feeding and the health of eight high fae. As my knee wound started to heal, so did the hole in the dormant high fae’s flowers. It’s almost gone, but that doesn’t erase the fact it happened to begin with. I catch myself turning book pages carefully in the library to avoid paper cuts, walking around big cracks in the ground to avoid tripping.
One morning after a heavy rain, everything outside smelling fresh and new, I find Quinn in the library dusting books. Not just any books, either, but the moving gold-word books I can’t read.
“Hiya,” I start.
“Good morning,” He answers dully.
I watch him dust the moving books. “Can you read those?”
“Some,” He says. “Others are dialects too old even for me.”
“How old are you guys, anyway?”
Quinn thinks it over, inspecting the spine of the book carefully with his pale blue eyes. “Time moves synchronously in the Bright Place with Earth, so I’m…” He pauses. “…seven hundred years?”
The room spins around me and I grip the back of a nearby chair to steady my wobbly ass. “Seven hundre-“
“Dane is much younger. Altair is much older. We were all born at different times, but the Bright Lady brought us together in one. And that’s part of why she was so -“ He stops himself. “Nevermind.”
“She was so, what? Special? Is there a book I can read on the Bright Lady or like, fae history? I just realized I don’t know squat.”
“And it should stay that way,” He agrees mildly. “Because in two months you’re leaving and never coming back, anyway.”
“How do you know I won’t come back?” I sniff.
“Because, like most humans, you aren’t the type to stay unless it benefits you somehow.”
His words should piss me off, but they sound so…sad.
“You’re right,” I put my hands behind my back and waltz around the library. “I probably won’t stay. I have a college degree to earn and a life to live, after all.”
I see Quinn’s eyes go flat, but he hides it carefully behind the work of dusting the books. “And pray tell - what are you going to use that almighty college degree for?”
His faint edge of a sneer doesn’t escape me. “I dunno. I’ve always wanted to teach. But I wanna do psychology, too. I have to decide soon, because the path sort of branches junior year. All I know is I wanna do something that helps people.”
His scoff is so quiet I barely hear it, but the library echoes it just enough. “Sorry,” He coughs. “Dust in my throat.”
I let it slide, but I can’t help but wonder.
“Why are you so worried about me leaving, anyway?” I ask. Quinn straightens in his butler uniform.
“I’m not.”
“And you expect me to believe that, after every contrarian thing I’ve heard you fae say?”
Quinn busies himself twice as hard with dusting, a cloud of it puffing up from the books. I’m not going to get anything else out of him, am I? I turn on my heel and start to leave when I hear him speak up;
“You’re not so bad.”
I turn. “Come again?”
“Van Grier is bad,” He says, meeting my eyes with his. “You’re not. So when you leave us with him alone again, it will be harder. It was harder. Before you came.”
I’m not sure what to say, so I don’t say anything at all.
“All humans were out to use me,” He says. “Until you showed up. And instead of taking and taking you just…gave. Give. You just keep giving like an idiot, without thinking of the consequences.”
“Like what? Putting you to sleep?” I tease, and he frowns.
“Brightness overdraw.”
“Doesn’t ring a bell, sorry.”
“When a fae is close to death, they absorb more Brightness than usual to compensate,” He says. “Absorbing more from the Bright Place is fine - it has plenty. But if it’s a Brightened feeding them, with limited Brightness, then the mortally wounded fae can overdraw from you.”
I blink, not getting it at all.
“And kill you,” He presses.
My heart skips. “Is that - is that why, when I fed Barnabus, afterwards I was so tired -“
“Yes. If you feed a fae too close to death again, you could kill yourself.”
I collapse in the nearest library chair. Vil had to have known,
right? That’s why he pretended not to know - because my Brightness has deadly consequences.
“Brightness feeding is rare,” Quinn continues. “Brightened human powers usually just manifest in the ability to bind fae. That’s the most common. We didn’t know - us high fae. We didn’t know that when you first came. The house fae found it in one of these books, and told the rest of us.”
“Dane included?” My voice sounds strained. Quinn nods.
“The house fae told him the night you exhausted yourself.”
I shade my eyes with my hands, my mind racing. I don’t want to think about that night, so I think about anything else.
“So people like Vil just waltz in here and abuse their power,” I say. “While people like Giselle try to seal the Bright Place and keep people like him out?”
“More or less. We’ve seen it come and go in cycles - the humans always fight over the Bright Place. Kill each other over it.”
“And you just let them.”
“We could intervene,” He muses. “But they would just keep coming. We’ve tried to wall the Bright Place off before, but humans always find a way in. Brightened will always find the Bright Place, sooner or later. That’s one of the few laws of this world that always remains the same.”
“And you deal with it like the weather - inevitable and unstoppable.”
He nods. I stare at the polished wood of the table I’m leaning both elbows on, my face reflecting back at me all distorted. Quinn’s seen this cycle happen for seven-hundred years. Dane’s seen it for less, but how many less? That’s still hundreds of years, I assume.
“Aren’t you tired of it?” I look up. Quinn’s pale blue eyes match the cloudless, ceramic-blue sky outside the window over his shoulder.
“I was. Until you.”
“I appreciate it -“
“Don’t,” He cuts me off dully. “Don’t appreciate it. Just don’t leave, instead.”
“I have a life, Quinn -“
“So do we,” He interrupts. “But we can’t live them.”
He touches the silver collar around his thin neck, and it glints in the sunlight. I look around nervously, like Vil is right behind me. Saying it out loud would be a bad idea, I’m pretty sure - even if Altair isn’t around to read minds Vil could still just rely on old-fashioned microphones. So I rip a piece of paper off the giant scratch pad by the globes and fish a pen from my pocket. When I’m done I slide it over to him, and he reads it;
‘How do we get the collars off you guys?’
He scribbles back, with a fancy old-style quill from what I thought was just a prop inkwell.
‘Tonight, after dinner. Find me in the magnolias’.
****
Of course Vil decides to come down for dinner that night. Of course he sits right across from me and eats his almond-crusted salmon and charred broccolini and white carrots with excruciatingly slow bites. I’ve never hated a fork so much in my life than the one that makes the agonizing journey from his lips to his plate and back again. He sips wine like it’s a dessert, enjoying every second of it. Great. Now I can’t inhale my food and leave like I’ve got somewhere to be, or he’ll suspect me. So I eat slow - not as slow as him - and his lips curl into a tanned smile.
“How are things going with you, Miss James?”
“Just fine,” I take a sip of wine, too. Just a sip. I don’t want to drink enough to say something incriminating, but I don’t want to look worried or uptight. “School’s over officially, so.”
“Yes. Perhaps you should take up a hobby? Let me know if you decide on something, and I can provide you the materials for it.”
“Seriously?” I raise my eyebrows. “You’d do that for me?”
“Of course,” He laughs warmly. “You’ve done much for me already, my dear - you set the high fae in fighting order. Any small thing I can acquire to make your stay more comfortable is a well-earned reward on your behalf.”
“Sure, I’ll, um, think about it.”
Both of us are dead silent, the only sound the clinking of our silverware against the china.
“I don’t need to remind you that fae are dangerous, Miss James. Do I?”
My head shoots up. Is he onto me? “No. I mean - no, I get it. They have snake fangs and drink blood. That’s a pretty clear no-no sign, if you ask me.”
He chuckles. “Indeed. It’s just…Dane’s ability to recognize sin is very sensitive, and I have access to it, however faintly. I hope I don’t need to tell you that humans who engage with fae never come out the other side for the better - no matter if it’s your own free will or the glamor.”
I gulp, my cheeks going red. He’s talking about the feeding thing, isn’t he. He drains his wine glass and smiles with all his teeth at me.
“After all - they are immortal. You are not. They are monsters - you are not.”
The whole of my stomach curdles up. The way he says those heavy things so casually, like they mean nothing to him - he’s the monster. He’s the one who tortured Dane with ash wood stakes. I grip my fork and beat back the urge to rip into him. This isn’t the time. There’ll be a time and this isn’t it.
“I know, Vil,” I say as evenly as I can muster.
“Do you?” He chuckles louder. “Good. Because if I sense you consorting with any of the fae in a sexual way again -“ He inspects a serrated steak knife carefully, and then turns his smile back to me. “Well. Let’s just say there are many ways to interrupt a romance.”
“It’s not -“ I gnaw my mouth, fear trickling down my spine. “It’s not that. It won’t ever be that.”
“Of course it won’t. Because they are mine. They are my fae, and they will never be yours.”
The possessiveness in his voice is so weird - but it’s raw and true and leaks from him unbidden. He watches me with his mild brown eyes like a fox watches a rabbit hole - for hours on end. Seemingly satisfied, he finally, finally, puts his napkin down and stands. He adjusts his tie as the house fae picks up his dishes and piles them on the silver cart, his voice all business again.
“Oh yes - Dane and Altair will be returning from the front in two days time. They will need a feeding.”
“Alright,” I disguise my nervousness at the idea of seeing Dane again in my napkin.
“I’ll be sending Quinn out to take their place. But he can’t go alone - the high fae always work better in pairs. Sythiel is occupied in the human realm, so I’m thinking of waking a dormant high fae.”
“Which means what?”
“You’ll need to feed them immediately after they’ve awoken,” He says. “Fear not - I’ll let you know before I bring them to the feeding room.”
“Right, okay. Two days.”
“Two days. Try to make space in your feeding schedule for a new addition,” He agrees. “Have a pleasant evening, Miss James.”
“You too.”
When I’m sure he’s gone my instinct is to immediately book it to the magnolias in the garden, but I stop myself. What if Vil’s still watching, somehow? What if he’s ordered the house fae to watch me, report on where I go? I thank him for dinner and head up to my room. Twenty minutes of acting like I’m reading, and then I can make the excuse I want some air. That’ll seem natural enough, right?
I wait and read, the words just papering on the outside of my brain instead of really seeping in. When the halls are quiet, I make my way to the front door, certain every shadow is Vil waiting to spring on me. But nobody stops me - and I pause in the front door.
It would be easy to turn around, to go back to my room and play Vil’s game until two months was up and I got the forty-thousand. My whole life spreads out before me in a blink - I go to college, I graduate, I make Mom and Dad so proud and relieved they don’t have to pay for anything, I get a job somewhere and steadily make my way up, all on my own. Without anyone’s help. The fae will stay here, trapped under Vil’s thumb but I could go back to the way my life was before - easy and simple and w
ithout magic and biting rituals.
But if I step out of this doorway, if I meet Quinn and try to free them, I could get hurt. Vil’s threat was clear tonight; he’d hurt me if I tried to do anything he didn’t want me to do - touch his fae, break his rules, try to break the fae out of his rules. Creep. What a fucking creepo -
I shake my head. No - I might standing at a crossroads but the path before me is clear. I can’t let a creep like Van Grier torture these beautiful, wild, unknowable fae. They don’t deserve to be caged like animals. No one does. If I can free them, getting hurt is a small price to pay.
I’m not the sort of girl who’s afraid of pain, but I’m very, very afraid of regrets. Those wounds haunt you for much longer.