by Ryan Graudin
No, they want what the prince can see now. The thing of fire and grace stitched into the form of a girl: speaking mortal languages, holding human memories. They want the diluted, pretty face I’ve been for a long time now. It’s the only side of me they might be able to understand. The side meant solely for their world.
“Don’t worry,” I say, checking my voice against its weariness. “I’ll be there.”
The night starts early. The molten sun is just diving behind the skyline, creating blackened silhouettes of Saint Paul’s Cathedral and the looming skyscrapers. Despite this, the pub is crowded. Tightly dressed women wobble like newborn colts in their stilettos as they make a path through the bodies, holding their glasses high above their heads. The men eye them with appreciation, taking long draws from their own pints and yelling across the room in booming, flustering syllables.
As soon as Richard steps in, his button-down Oxford shirt casually paired with jeans, a lull falls over the pub. He ignores the hushed attention, pulling me back through throngs of people. I feel their stares on me, following as close and relentless as Richard’s security guards. Every woman at the bar is picking me apart: each orange strand of hair, my oval face, my flowy turquoise dress. The attention is petrifying. I try not to think of how many people are looking at me. How many possible ways this appearance could get back to Breena or the others.
I want to pull my hand away, to sever the connection between us, but I can’t. Richard’s fingers are an anchor, the only thing to keep me going straight in this collection of machinery and tight bodies. As soon as we walked through the door, the sickness lurched back into a vengeful status—the same as it had during my first day in London. It’s all I can do not to double over onto the pub’s beer-stained floor. All of my energy, my entire concentration, goes into following the steady tug of the prince’s hand.
We go all the way to the back, where Edmund and several other guys sit at one of the few round tables. Some of the boys I recognize from the polo team. There’s the lad with the corkscrew brown curls and an extra lump on the bridge of his nose. And the redhead whose chin is so square it looks like you could whet a blade on it. I’ve never seen the other two boys before—but Richard knows them well enough. They leap up before he reaches the table, clapping hands and bumping chests with primal grunts.
Edmund stays in his chair, jaw tilted back in the most casual of greetings. It isn’t until his shined brown eyes fall on me that he comes to life.
“Damn, Rich. When you said you were bringing a friend, I thought . . .” He doesn’t bother finishing his sentence. I hate the way he’s looking at me, all slow and squinty, like he wants nothing more than to get his fingers on the zipper of my dress. “What runway did you get her off of? And where can I get one?”
Britain’s heir is a mess of emotions: his aura flickers between the relief of having my existence confirmed and a sudden bristling at his friend. Richard stiffens, shifting his body ever so slightly to come between me and Edmund. “Her name is Emrys. And you should treat her with a bit of respect.”
“Whoa, mate, take it easy. I’m just playing around.” Edmund winks it off, like it’s all a big joke. But the leer in his eyes—fed by the three drained pint glasses at his elbow and an ego the size of London Bridge—says otherwise.
He stands, balancing his weight on the table, and makes his way over to me. His hand is a dead thing, all cool and clammy as he picks up mine. There’s no spark or zap of nerves at his touch. Only an intense desire to pull away. “A pleasure to meet you, Emrys. I’m Edmund Williams the Fifth.”
I snatch my hand from his just before he can bring it to his lips. “Likewise, Edmund Williams the Fifth.”
The corner of Edmund’s mouth twitches up. Annoyance I think, from the soured curdle of his aura. Disguised as impishness.
“Another round then,” he says, and returns to his seat. “You’re late, Rich. Had to get started without you.”
I’m not the only female at the table. Corkscrew Curls has his arm around a girl with pin-straight, mousy hair cut in a rather severe bob. A wispy blonde sits evenly between Edmund and the ginger-haired polo player. Her chunky black eyeliner becomes almost a solid blob as she peers in my direction.
I try a faint smile at both of them as I take a seat on the far side of the table. Only Mousy Hair’s lips flicker in response. Eyeliner turns her attentions to Edmund, nudging in close to his shoulder and saying something I can’t hear over the muffled roar of the pub’s other patrons and the music that’s starting to pump through the sound system’s speakers.
Pain starts its inevitable rise. In my stomach. Everywhere. My teeth grind together like millstones.
When Edmund doesn’t respond, Eyeliner aims her focus across the table, where Richard is sliding into the seat next to mine. “You were so good at the match today. So . . . fast.” The last word leaves her in a breathless giggle, so clearly rehearsed.
“Thanks.” Richard’s response is vague, unrooted. He scoots his chair a little closer to mine.
“So what’s the plan, mate?” Edmund asks. “A few more drinks here? Maybe we can meet up with Brick and his mates at The Green Fairy.”
The word sets Richard on the edge of his chair. He nearly knocks over the fresh round of pints the server is trying to balance close to his head.
The stench of so much alcohol and malty wheat swirls up and into my head. The smell of food and drink, the smell of anything at this point is enough to wake the deeper sickness in my bowels. I clutch the bottom of my chair, my fingers digging, digging into its wood. This helps takes some of the edge off.
“Whatever sounds good,” the prince says, recovering his composure.
The waiter sets a drink in front of me. Some kind of soft drink mixed with a sappy sweet liquor. I try my best to shove it away without anyone noticing.
The pub swarms around us like a hive, drones and worker bees shuffling and mingling on what soon becomes the dance floor. Drinks keep flowing. Somewhere between his third and fourth pint, Richard slides his arm around my chair. I don’t have the heart to push it away. Eyeliner shoots daggers from the other side of the table.
The rounds ordered to our table soon evolve from pints to straight whiskey. The prince’s breathing is already heavier and his movements a bit freer as he reaches for the glass.
Something magical, something other, smothers the air around us. The buzz of electronics in my head goes flat, dampened by whatever has walked into this pub. It’s a soul feeder.
My fingers close around Richard’s wrist just as the first douse of whiskey wets his lips.
“I think you’ve had enough,” I yell above the music, and pry the glass out of his hands. I scan the crowd, searching every designer dress and every inch of skin for signs of my enemy.
“Hey, now,” the prince starts to protest, groping for his lost drink.
I shove it far out of his reach.
“Buzzkill!” Edmund hollers across the table at me, and claims the condemned drink as his own. He finishes the entire thing in one swallow. “You’ve got to learn to loosen up, love! Live a little!”
“Careful, Ed! Emrys can blow your brain into bloody bits!” the prince bellows back, his words slurred and slightly sloppy.
There she is. A vision of raven hair and skin of porcelain white, ebbing and flowing through the crowd, searching for flesh. A dress of gray gauze floats around her—making her look ghastly and otherworldly even to mortal eyes.
A Banshee. Strange that she should be here, picking through such thriving nightlife. Their main draw is death: funerals, deathbeds, fresh graves. Someone must have died very recently in this pub, or somewhere nearby. Otherwise she wouldn’t be interested.
“We should go—” I try to tug Richard’s arm, but he isn’t paying attention. Like every other man at the table, he’s staring at the hauntingly beautiful, dark-haired woman approaching our table.
The woman who’s staring straight at me.
The Banshee presses her sl
im hips up against the table’s edge, cutting through the space between Edmund and a very flushed Eyeliner. “Hello, gentlemen. Ladies. Sister.” She says the last word very clearly and carefully at me. “Care if I take a seat?”
“This is your sister?” Edmund blinks at me, trying to reconcile our very different appearances.
“Don’t talk to her. She’ll eat you!” I snap, and then turn the bulk of my fury at the deadly spirit. “You. Leave. Now. We wouldn’t want things to get ugly.”
“Eat me?” Edmund looks back up at the Banshee, his eyebrow cocked in his signature fashion. “I like the sound of that.”
“Don’t worry, woodling. I’m not here for your precious prince. His friends are meaty enough.” Her fingers slide, thin and frail as spider legs, over Edmund’s shoulder. “You’re under no obligation there.”
“Oh no. Oh no, oh no, oh no.” Fear becomes everything on Richard’s face as he realizes exactly what’s unfolding in front of him. “Ed, you really don’t want to get involved with that . . .”
“Too proud to share, Your Majesty?” Edmund is all sneer in the pub’s dim lights. He takes hold of the Banshee’s hand and pulls her down to him. “Take a seat, doll.”
I keep my attention focused entirely on the Banshee. She’s hungry but not starving: average strength. As long as it’s just her, I think I can manage. “Back off, Bean-shìdh.”
The soul feeder assesses me as well, picking apart my strengths and weaknesses as I sit in the chair, gripping the arm of a tipsy monarch. His muscles are all hardness under my fingers, sculpted by adrenaline and fear.
The Banshee is right. I don’t have a responsibility to protect Edmund. The oath I swore under Queen Mab on the day of the treaty was to guard those with royal blood. I can leave now with Richard and pretend this never happened. The Banshee will slip away with Edmund into some dark corner, take him by the collar, pull him down, get her lips to his ear. Then she’ll scream. Tomorrow Edmund Williams V will be just another listing in the obituaries. Death by alcohol poisoning, his soul mortared and pestled to sate the Banshee’s hunger.
But, no matter how slimy and base he might be, Edmund is still a friend of Richard’s. His life has value. I should try my hardest to save it.
The soul feeder smiles at me, stepping back behind Edmund. Her hand is on his other shoulder now, prepared to fling him forward in case I aim any harmful spell her way.
“I’m serious, Ed.” The prince finds his voice again. “She’s a soul eater. . . . I mean, feeder. Thing!”
The Banshee’s blackened eyes spark with understanding. “He knows? You broke the Frithemaeg taboo?”
Now there’s no question. I have to take care of her.
Edmund is squirming out of her grasp, trying to get a closer look at the creature behind him. It’s in this moment, when she’s busy tightening her fingers into the socialite’s shoulders, that I strike.
Since she’s placed Edmund in front of her as a shield, I have to go up. I lunge to the top of the table in a single movement, ignoring the stress on my humanoid muscles and how much I want to vomit. My mind is bent on magic—only dimly aware of the scattering remains of beer glasses and sloshed whiskey.
My first spell misses, grazing only centimeters above Edmund’s hairline and ending in an explosion of light on the wood paneling behind him. Seeing that her human shield has no effect, the Banshee lets out a long, heart-crushing wail. It’s not a death scream . . . that fatal blow she administers to each of her victims. The empty pints at my feet shatter with the sound, carpeting the table in glass. The magic in her scream fills my eyes with sparks. My ears feel like they’ve been stuffed full of cotton, heavy and useless.
But that doesn’t mean I can’t speak. I braid the spell together with my tongue, sending it out into the bright, speckled dark of my vision. “Átemian!”
The wailing stops and my senses resurrect to their old, keen selves. The mortals are hunched over at my feet, their hands crumpled over their ears in agonized angles. Only Edmund and Richard are looking up, taking in the events with dazed eyes.
The Banshee clutches her throat, trying to coax back the voice I stole.
I leap again, over Edmund’s head and onto my opponent. We fall to the floor, a tangle of turquoise, red, and black. Up this close, her face looks like death—so white and chilled, like a body tucked away in a crypt. I see the knowledge playing out in her eyes. The realization that I’m stronger. That she’s lost.
My hands envelope hers, crush over her larynx. My energies are fading fast, sapped between the tangled electronics of the pub and our fight. I have to choose my next few spells carefully. Her silence is more important than her banishment. And I’ll have to take care of the humans’ memories as well.
“You’ll leave this pub,” I hiss. “You will speak of this to no one.”
Her eyes become little more than black lines. My fingers tighten.
“Cyspe.” The binding spell twists out of me, sliding through her tightly shut lips and dissolving on her tongue. She won’t breathe a word of what she’s seen here. She can’t.
Before I can let go of her throat, the Banshee shrinks into a taut, furry thing that slips and slides through my fingers. I crouch, my hands still curled, as I watch the weasel slink in and out of the grove of feet. In a flash, she’s gone.
Richard and his friends are recovering, along with the rest of the pub’s stunned patrons. Groans and curses rise behind me like a tidal wave, swelling and growing into full-blown panic. I have to take care of it fast.
“Forgietaþ.” My magic mists over the pub like rain, snatching memories of the last few minutes into irretrievable nothingness. Only Richard’s head is immune. He needs to remember this, to know the danger he’s in every time he hits the pubs.
I have no more fight left in me. Not with the sickness battering my gut. At least I don’t have to worry about Green Women. They give the Banshees a wide berth, out of mutual dislike. It’s the other Banshees and the Black Dogs I have to worry about. Their voices can reach so many dark places in the night.
I return to the table slowly, trying to reconcile the reeling in my head, my stomach. It wasn’t this bad last time, at the Darkroom. I thought Breena said it would get better. . . . This—the lightning lancing through my gut, tearing blades through my veins—this is agony.
I have to get out of here.
It’s as if Richard already knows. He’s out of his chair, waiting for me. The tabletop is all chaos in front of him, dripping alcohol and broken glass. His friends are taking it in—this loose end I don’t have the energy to fix.
“What the bloody hell happened?” Corkscrew Curls is the first to recover. His hands shake as he reaches out to pick up the largest piece of glass. It’s no bigger than his thumbnail.
The prince looks at his friends, their explicit surprise. The rest of the pub dances on to the same song that was rattling the speakers before the Banshee arrived.
“They don’t know?” he asks as soon as I get close to him.
I shake my head and almost fall into the chair.
Richard reaches out, bracing my shoulders with his hands. The touch steadies me, keeps my head from swirling like a leaf caught in crosswinds. “Are you . . . are you okay?”
I shake my head again. “Too much,” I manage, before the threat of vomiting forces me to close my lips.
He understands. The pub, the drinks, the mortals and their machines. All pressing down on me, threatening to crush.
“Let’s get out of here,” he says.
The tree is the first thing I see when I lurch out of the pub. It sits on the other side of the street, past a barricade of beetle-black cabs and Mini Coopers. From the gnarled lengths of its branches and the way it sits alone, I see it’s quite old. The city has grown around it, the sidewalk and curb parting to give it a rare patch of earth to feed from.
I only get halfway across the road before the sickness gets the better of me. Sparkling water and bile coat the asphalt under my fee
t. There’s the squeal of brakes and headlamps bright in my face. Someone yells, their anger punctuated by a car horn.
“Lay off it!” I hear the prince yelling, somewhere above me.
An arm loops around my shoulders, lifting and guiding me out of the vehicle’s path. We’re on the sidewalk again, only this time there’s something for me to cling to. The tree’s bark is rugged and rust red: relief under my fingers. I lean into it.
The change is instant. Energy, slow and hearty, pumps into my body. I no longer feel drained, beyond helpless, but I’m still a far cry from what I could be.
Richard stands close, hands shoved into his pockets. The way he looks at me now is different—it’s not fear, but close to it. Reverence maybe.
I close my eyes and breathe. Diesel and dust cling to the air in my nostrils. I focus on the tree, on its roots and the soil far beneath them.
For several minutes, it’s only the distant sounds of music and the cabs pulling in and out of their parking spaces. My breathing grows stronger, steadier. I no longer feel like I’m about to break.
“You just saved Edmund’s life, didn’t you?” the prince says when I open my eyes.
“Yeah.” I cough out the word. “Guess he owes me.”
“What was that thing? A soul feeder?” There’s just an edge of shakiness in his voice.
“A Banshee. They’ll suck out your soul with a scream. Not quite as painful as getting eaten alive by a Green Woman.” I think back to my shoulder and the long-gone bite of fire.
“But—but it turned into a ferret.”
“Weasel. She shifted into a weasel,” I correct him. “They like turning into stoats too. And hares. And hooded crows. Keep an eye out for those.”
Richard looks over his shoulder. Across the street I see his security guards, watching. They haven’t moved from their posts by the pub door. Richard must have asked them to stay.
“Don’t worry, she’s gone.” There’s nothing nearby either. No Black Dogs or fellow Banshees. This one was hunting alone.
The prince looks back at the tree, where my hands touch the bark. “What are you doing?”
