I woke first in the dark, windowless room, feeling slightly stiff from sleeping in the same position all night and instantly aware of warm, soft skin beneath my fingers. Less than a week ago I'd have been shocked by such intimate contact, but I'd been warming up to the idea of physical affection, and instead of jerking my hand away, I luxuriated in the nervous thrill of my flesh against hers. The good feelings lasted for several seconds until I realized my hand was flat against her ribs, pressed beneath the contour of her naked breast, at which point I did jerk my hand away, waking her.
"What's wrong?" she mumbled, half-turning toward me.
"Nothing," I stammered back, "I was dreaming."
"Bad?"
"No, not exactly."
"What time is it?"
I turned as far as I could without falling off the bed and tapped my phone. "Ugh, it's after nine."
"It's Sunday, nobody's going to yell at you for oversleeping." She pulled my hand back around her and hugged it against herself.
I leaned close and whispered in her ear, "Rachel's coming for breakfast and Becca's sleeping in the living room. Might be hard to explain that." Katherine mumbled a curse and sat up with a stretch.
"Fine. Maybe you can smooch our house guest and knock her out, then we can hide her in here or stuff her in a closet."
"You're a little frosty this morning."
"I'm just joking. Probably." She crawled over me, pausing to straddle my waist and lean in for a good morning kiss, deliberately settling her weight on my lap. "You sure you don't want to sleep in?"
"This doesn't feel like sleeping."
"Details." She kissed me again then slipped off the bed. "But you're probably right, we need to get ready." As she turned, she let the too-large pajama bottoms slip to the floor and cat walked the last few feet to the door. "Dibs on the shower!"
Katherine Faith Minett was a delight in almost every sense of the word, but she absolutely did not play fair.
I finally stood up, resorting to routine mental exercises to calm my thoughts and ease the tension in my groin before I felt comfortable leaving the bedroom. When I did, the water was running in the bathroom and Becca sat at one end of the sofa, the heavy Glim lying open in her lap while the hagstone dangled from its leather cord around her neck.
"Good morning," I said with a yawn.
"Morning." She smiled, "Katherine is in the bathroom. She didn't say anything but she dropped her shirt on the floor there, but it's way too big so I guess it's probably yours. Your girlfriend doesn't like me, does she?" I suspected dropping the shirt was a kind of challenge, emphasizing the night spent in my bed wearing my clothes—a symbol of her claim on me. Psych majors.
"She's just having a hard time adjusting," I said. "Neither of us anticipated another person. I don't imagine you expected to be here either."
"It's okay, I wouldn't like me either if I was her." She bit her lip and continued, "I'm sorry I tried to ask you out yesterday. I've never done that before. I guess I know now why I did."
"Why would you be sorry?"
"Well it's kind of weird having done that and now I'm living with you and your girlfriend. And we have to kiss and stuff."
"That's not even the weirdest part," I said, and she favored me with a shy smile.
"I guess you're right. She's really pretty," Becca observed again with a glance at the bathroom door.
I nodded, then out of nowhere I added, "So are you," and instantly regretted the instinct to protect her feelings. I was afraid I might have overdone it, but she took it in stride.
"You don't have to say that," she said, cheeks reddening again. "But thank you."
"Learn anything new?" I changed the subject, nodding at the artifacts in her lap.
"Oh! Lots, yes." She held up the polished length of wood she'd retrieved from the trunk. "I've been up for a couple hours reading about this."
Two hours? I thought to myself. I'd been surprised to find her awake at all. Katherine had slept almost ten her first time. Then again, Becca hadn't been awake that long when Miss Gold had broken through my front door with a corpse, so she'd spent most of the past fifteen hours unconscious.
"This is a Fferyn," she said, pronouncing it like 'friend' without the 'd' and rolling the 'r' slightly. "You can tell because of how the runes all line up. Like this," she pointed to a blurry image on the page. "You've seen those, right? The ones on the wood? There's a picture, too, and it works like it's supposed to."
"Works?" I asked, confused. "It's a stick, what's it supposed to do?"
"It's not a stick. It's kind of like the stone. Here, look at it." She removed the hagstone and held it out to me. Through it, the wood reflected her purple glow, but other than that there was nothing I hadn't already noticed.
"I see the markings, but it's still just a stick."
"Are you watching the runes?"
"Yeah."
Becca spoke slowly and carefully, "Oscail an'speir." Her aura flashed and the runes flared with the same violet light, exploding outward so quickly I nearly fell backward.
"Shit!" I exclaimed, "wh—what did you do?"
"I'm sorry!" Becca said and reached a hand toward me, then changed her mind and sat back, clutching the Fferyn.
"It's okay," I said, forcing myself to calm down. "I just wasn't expecting it."
"I know. It scared me too the first time, I should have warned you."
I peered through the hagstone again, watching as the runes marched serenely in a long, unbroken line, forming a sphere around us that ignored the dimensions of my living room. "You learned this from the Glim?"
She nodded.
"Okay, I'm impressed, but what's it for?"
"Um, you know how the stone lets you see things?"
"Impressions against the Veil."
"Kind of. It's like, I don't know, memories of things that haven't happened yet, or might never happen." Her brow knit around the concepts she was trying to explain, "The Veil isn't really a thing, it's like a big maybe waiting to become a thing."
"Miss Gold calls it the unmade lands."
"Yeah I guess, but it's not a land or even a lot of lands, it's kind of everything, just not yet, and while it's waiting to be something it's nothing."
She was starting to lose me. "What does it have to do with this?" I tapped the wood.
"Well, the stone lets you see things and this lets you do things. It sort of pulls on that nothing and brings it here. Inside the bubble it's like the Veil, it's just waiting. I don't know what it's for yet. Can you feel it?"
I nodded. A sense of expectancy hung suspended in the air around me, like static electricity raising the hairs on my skin. "Are we inside that—the nothing?" I worried, "Maybe you should turn it off."
"Why?"
"Just until we know what it's for." I only knew what I'd been told, but other than a few special effects and that surge in the back of my head, I'd never seen anything I could outright call magic. The idea of having access to unexplained, arcane power still made me nervous.
"How can we know for sure if we don't try it?"
"Humor me. Just... read more before you do anything else, okay?"
"Oh," she said and nodded, "Okay, I can do that."
"What else did you read in that thing?"
She held out her hand for the stone and I placed it in her palm. "The words turn it on, but I need to see to shut it off. There." She made a flicking gesture with her hand and the electric feeling vanished.
"I was kind of right about the leanan sidhe," she said, "but it's complicated. Did you know fairies aren't all from the same place?" I nodded again, but she continued as if she hadn't expected an answer. "I mean even the same kinds are usually from their own worlds and each one is a little different. Unless it's born here, which doesn't happen very often. It gets confusing."
"Right. What about the leanan sidhe?" I tried to steer her back on topic. "What do they do?"
"Oh, well, they do lots but what you're talking about is where they sort of supercharge a person's brain. When that happens, those people can do all kinds of unbelievable stuff and get really focused, but it's like driving a car too fast for too long. They burn out and the fairy absorbs all that extra energy. They can't do it to just anyone. It's like Miss Gold said, the people have to let them in or it doesn't work, so they use other abilities to convince them. I think that might be what you did to Rachel. The geas."
"They don't drink blood then," I said with relief.
"Well, they do that too, but just for food." I quelled a sudden urge to gag. "Don't worry though, I think if you stopped being able to eat people food, you'd probably know it by now."
"So," I coughed, "Miss Gold was wrong. The other part really is mind control?"
"No. Well sort of, I guess. More like talking someone into doing something, except you don't have to bother with the words. There's a note, wait a sec..." She flipped a few pages and settled on an illumination of a beautiful woman tucked into one margin, and what looked like Morticia from the Addams Family in the other.
"Here it is. They can persuade..." she paused, "I'm sorry, I don't know some of these words and the Glim has to sort of guide me until I can understand them in a different way." A few seconds of concentration later, she continued. "Okay, they can manipulate the human mind by... terms? No, degrees, inducing a revelation of the soul... something about ego... here it is, and once adjoined greater influence may be transported. So, that means it's a gradual thing, right? You start small and build it up."
"That's what it sounds like to me," I lied. It sounded like nonsense.
"Okay, so people open up little by little, like they do normally, but it's happening inside so the person doesn't know all the reasons why." She looked up at me and set the hagstone aside, "Tom, does this mean you can do all this stuff?"
I sighed, "I sure hope not."
"It would be scary, but I don't think this is you. It also says the leanan sidhe can use that ability to force their way in, but it burns their victims out all at once, and they don't get the same energy from it. I think that's more the kind of person you are." I took a step back, staring at her with my mouth open, feeling alarmed that I'd given anyone that impression.
"Oh no!" She gasped after an uncomfortable pause, "no, I don't mean it that way, I just meant I don't think you'd be sneaky, that you'd try to change someone from the inside without them knowing. You'd do it because you had to, not because it gave you something back." The trust in her eyes was so complete it hurt. I wanted to deserve it and wasn't sure I could.
"Give what back?" Katherine entered the room wearing a towel with her phone tucked into the top, using another to dry her hair.
"Becca's telling me how to use vampire powers," I said, still off balance. "Apparently she gets along with this stupid book."
"It isn't stupid," Becca said defensively, "It's really helpful, and you're not a vampire, you're—"
"Thomas," Katherine ignored her, "I spoke with Rachel and she sounded irritated. She said she was only waiting for us to call her, so I told her to come on over. If you want a shower, you'd better do it now."
"Oh gosh," Becca said, "Can I clean up too? I don't even have any clothes here."
"I doubt you have time to wash up, but we'll figure something out," Katherine's smile was saccharine-sweet while she urged me toward the bathroom. "Rachel is on her way, Thomas, we wouldn't even have this much time if she didn't walk everywhere. Go, I can handle our guest."
I rinsed and wet my hair while trying to avoid thinking about how much damage I could do to the people I cared about. First my father, the gean canagh, made me a walking sex-drug, now I apparently had the traits of an ancestor that scorched a person's mind before drinking their blood. If that wasn't bad enough, the impossible combination of my Fae ancestry was potentially so unstable and dangerous that the immortal ruler of the Winter Court wanted me dead, and to top it off, my godmother, the only guide I had through this strange, hidden world was aloof and secretive, sharing only half-truths when it was convenient for her. If I was going to inherit superpowers, why couldn't it be something cool, like eye lasers or flying? I couldn't even read the damned instruction book.
When I emerged, once more betoweled, Becca stood in the living room, her ears and nose bright red as she hugged herself in embarrassment. Katherine had given her a pair of shorts that fit like hotpants and a top that would have been cropped even on my much-shorter girlfriend.
"We're lucky her hips aren't any wider than mine," Katherine explained, "but I don't have anything that'll fit those legs."
"What about the shirt?"
"What's wrong with it?"
"I—I'll be okay." Becca said, trying futilely to cover more than a foot of exposed midriff. She was clearly uncomfortable, and after some argument, I persuaded Katherine to pull out a summer dress that reached Becca's thigh. She wouldn't have won any fashion awards, but on Becca it seemed somehow right.
I was fairly sure Katherine had been counting on me to step in. After hearing about her past, I couldn't believe she'd given in to malice and was hazing Becca only as a personal catharsis, not because she wanted the girl to be miserable. At least I hoped that was true.
More than twenty minutes had passed, and I'd begun to think Rachel changed her mind when she rang the bell and Katherine buzzed her up, offering introductions while I tried to find something in the refrigerator worth serving a house guest. I had no idea how to play host, but Becca surprised me by offering to help while I fumbled with a carton of eggs.
"Do you have any fruit?" she asked.
"Apples and raisins." Those were two of the snacks my former regimen tolerated so I kept them on hand.
Becca nodded, "Brown sugar?"
"No, sorry."
"What about honey?"
I'd bought some during my last trip to the store and got it out for her, then she asked me to join the others at the table to give her more room and set about her business.
"So," Rachel said once we were settled, "you won the lottery and decided to hire a maid?" She cocked an eyebrow at Becca. I considered several responses. Rachel seemed in good spirits with no signs of withdrawal, but she'd brought her purse, the one with the hidden compartment, and hadn't removed it from her shoulder. I felt a little extra pressure to keep the mood as relaxed as possible.
"I'm tutoring," Katherine said before I could come up with a decent reply, "She's having problems finding someone to help out, and I had some extra time."
"Right, because you're not going to your own classes," Rachel accused.
"I'm keeping up just fine, thanks."
"Did you have plans for the heavy cream?" Becca asked, and I shook my head.
"Becca works nearby and takes online classes," I explained, opting for a version of the truth, "She just needed a little guidance, and Sundays are slow for all of us. Since we were doing the group breakfast thing, we thought she might like to join." That seemed to satisfy Rachel, and small talk occupied the next several minutes before Becca served everyone a bowl of hot oatmeal cooked with raisins and topped with heavy cream, apple slices, raisins, honey, and walnuts.
"Oh god, woman," Rachel said between bites, "this is the shit."
"I don't—" Becca watched me instead of making eye-contact with Rachel. She couldn't seem to decide how the comment was intended.
"She likes it, it's a compliment," Katherine said flatly, "Rachel takes some getting used to."
Rachel's spoon was still between her lips so she answered with a middle finger and turned back to Becca after swallowing, "I usually just grab a thing of yogurt for breakfast and go jogging, this is amazing."
"And then burgers and fries in the afternoon." Katherine added, chin propped on one hand.
"After working out, yeah. You burn twelve-hundred calories a day, you can eat burgers too."
"I work out," Katherine said with mock offense.
"Yoga doesn't count, you still got those fat tits."
Becca failed to hide a grin behind her hand.
"They're not fat!"
"That's why you won't go running with me anymore, isn't it? Too many black eyes from those things bouncing around."
Becca failed even more spectacularly, so I jumped in to cover for her, "Katherine's right, the stuff she's doing is pretty advanced."
"Of course, you'd take her side." Rachel said, polishing off another bite.
Katherine smirked, "You're just jealous that I caught a good guy."
"I met someone, actually." Rachel said with a shrug. It wasn't the kind of comment that should kill a conversation, but it did. All things considered, it wasn't a good time for Rachel to complicate things with a new boyfriend.
"Really?" I asked, trying to play it cool, "What's he like?"
"I just met him, but he's great. Super hot."
Katherine's brow knit in worry, "It's not that guy from track?"
"Nah," Rachel said, setting down her spoon and sitting back in her chair, "Josh was fun, but too skinny."
Becca picked up on the tension and responded by quietly collecting dishes from the table and depositing them in the sink. The otherworldly lights that surrounded her were dim and fluttering while Katherine's were brighter and steady, and that's when it occurred to me that there were none at all surrounding Rachel. What could that possibly mean?
"Does he have a name?" I asked.
"Probably," Rachel said dismissively. "Thanks for the breakfast—Becca, right?"
"You're welcome," came her quiet voice from the kitchen behind me.
I couldn't shake the feeling that something was wrong. If the lights opened in response to a person's affection for me, did their absence mean Rachel didn't trust me anymore? Or did the new guy have something to do with it? The answer to that seemed critically important. Katherine echoed my confusion and jerked her head toward Rachel, eyebrows arched with unspoken questions. I shook my head slowly.
"So, you're feeling better now?" Rachel asked, turning to her friend. Katherine nodded without looking away from me.
"Yeah, much."
"Good, we should hang out this afternoon, it's been a few weeks since we got together."
"I—well, I don't know. It sounds like fun, but—"
"Then let's do it. We can hit the mall. Bring your tutee if you want. Tutu? What's the word for someone you're tutoring?"
"Rain check?" Katherine asked, her discomfort apparent. Rachel frowned in response, and my sense that something was off intensified.
"Is it because of Tom?" Katherine didn't answer and the glare turned toward me, "You should let her out more." She seemed artificial, like she was putting on a show, or reading from a script.
"I'm not stopping anyone," I said.
"She won't leave because of you." She scowled, "I get it now. Fine," she crossed her arms in front of her, "I've got a date anyway."
"Why did you want her to come with you on a date?" Becca asked. I'd almost forgotten she was behind me. Rachel ignored her.
"Rachel, everything is fine," Katherine jumped in, "we've already talked about this. Maybe we can get together next weekend?"
"Yeah, whatever," she said casually, but her eyes darted back and forth and she was shaking so slightly that I only noticed it in her fingertips.
"Why are you being this way?" Katherine asked, "You've always liked Thomas."
"I do, but—" she gave me a very brief look and a few tiny motes flickered to life then immediately vanished.
"Are you okay?" I asked.
Her jaw quivered, eyes suddenly shimmering with tears, but her face remained hard. She slid her chair back and stood up, and when she spoke, her voice was quiet and firm.
"He told me what you're doing."
"Rachel?"
"Shut up, Katherine. He told me."
"Who did?" I asked, preparing to stand, but I wasn't fast enough. Rachel raised her leg and kicked the table hard into my chest, knocking my chair over backward and me with it. Katherine screamed, and when I looked up, Rachel stood over me, her right arm in a straight line pointing at my face, her black pistol clenched in her fist.
"It's loaded this time," she said, her voice shockingly calm. "I'm sorry, Kath. I know you love Tom, but he told me to do it. You'll understand when you meet him."
"Meet who?" Katherine shrieked, taking a careful step toward me, "what are you talking about?"
Rachel's full attention was on me. She'd begun to shake visibly, as if fighting something inside her. "I have to," she whispered as if to herself, her voice no longer steady.
"What?" I demanded, acutely aware of her finger wrapped tightly around the trigger. "Tell me what you want, Rach, I'll do it, just put the gun away."
I glanced at Katherine, trying to warn her not to attempt tackling Rachel again, but dared not take my eyes off the barrel aimed at my head. Rachel's cheeks were flushed, chest rising and falling in quick, deep breaths. A tear escaped her eye, tracing a line down one cheek. That surge of power welled up in the back of my mind and a distant roaring filled my ears. The barest hint of fairy dust shimmered in the air.
"I'm sorry, Tom" she said, now visibly shaking, "he told me to kill you."
She squeezed the trigger and the world went white.